The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

if they were grabbing at her very soul, were now stabilizing her like a scaffold. She felt her heartbeat. Slowing. Her breath. Slowing. She felt the pull from the other room weaken. Then, like water falling away as the swimmer climbs up from the river, it left her altogether.

She raised her face to Leo’s, and he stepped away from the embrace, smiling at her. He held a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he whispered. “You’re all right now. You’re fine.”

“Yes.” Julia was whispering too. “I was in his feelings!”

Leo shook his head. “And I felt you entering mine.”

“Is that part of the talent?” she asked.

“No. It isn’t part of the talent.”

“But . . . I can put my feelings into people. I’ve done it once to Count Lebedev and once to Jemison. I can make them feel what I feel. You can’t do that?”

“No.” Leo frowned. “No one can. Except . . .” He stopped, his lips folded.

“Except who? You must tell me.”

“Mr. Mibbs.”

“But . . . ,” Julia whispered. “What does that mean?”

Leo looked at the ground, then up again at Julia. He took her hand and squeezed it. “That is what we will have to find out.”

* * *

It was raining. Leo and Bertrand were playing hazard, and Bertrand was winning. Leo was talking, a steady stream of nonsense. Hazard was such an interesting game. So complex . . . and yet it could be more complex, didn’t Bertrand think so? It rather reminded Leo of a Pocumtuk gambling game that took a lifetime to master. Perhaps Bertrand would like to learn? It was played with stones instead of dice, but if you just imagined that you had a stone in your hand . . .

Bertrand told him in a dry tone to shut up.

Julia sat staring out of the window, her spirits low. It had been a full day since Arkady had left, and Nick and Julia hadn’t had a moment alone together. And now it was raining.

But then Nick was standing up, stretching, and announcing he was going to walk over to Castle Dar, the rain be damned, and would anyone like to join him? He looked directly at Julia.

“I will,” Leo said from the card table. “I’m losing anyway.”

“You will not.” Bertrand handed him the dice. “You will continue to gamble away your fortune.”

“But I want to get out of the house.”

“Roll the dice.”

Leo glanced at Nick and then at Julia. “Oh,” he said. “I see. Yes. All right, then. I’ll raise you ten, you evil Frenchman.” He rolled the dice with a practiced flick of the wrist.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

They had walked up to this spot together without exchanging a word. Now they stood in the cold rain, at the edge of the woods, at the exact spot where they had met on the day of the Seventh Marquess’s funeral. Where they had met again not so long ago. And then a third time, for that searing kiss up against a tree . . . Nick felt for the acorn in his pocket. He turned to look at Julia, and she was smiling up at him. She reached up, put her hands behind his neck, and drew him down for a kiss. Her lips were wet again with rain, cool and perfect. He put his arms around her waist and drew her to him, slowly, feeling the way her body fitted against his so exactly, even through their rain-soaked clothes. He ran his hand up her back until he cradled her head, and then he broke the kiss and stared down into her smiling dark eyes.

“You know now that I have no mistress,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And when I said I loved you, that day in the cupola, I meant it.”

“I think I always knew that,” she said.

“But in the cupola, you lay with me—and all the while you thought that Alva was my lover.” He searched her face. It was serious and yet there was a laugh lurking there, too, as if she found him comical, somehow.

“Hush.” She put a finger up to his mouth, then dropped her hand to his chest.

She was right. Words were pointless. He lifted her toward him, helping her reach his kisses.

When they eased out of the embrace, Nick took both of Julia’s hands in his, and her fingers closed around the object he’d been holding. “What is this? I’ve seen you with it before.”

“It’s an acorn.” He glanced up at the trees. “From one of these oaks. I picked it up that day, after we first kissed. I’ve carried it with me ever since.” He handed it to her.

She rolled it between her fingers. Her eyes were deep and dark, like the woods behind her. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “May I have it?”

“Yes.” He spoke without thinking, but then, when he saw her toss it from her, out into the open field, he gasped. “Wait!”

“No.” She held his hand and kept him from going after it. “I want you to do this with me.”

“What?”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” She smiled. “Because I want my first time to be with you.” She kissed him quickly and gripped his hand. Then, without another word of warning, she jumped, and dragged him along with her.

* * *

It was nothing like the time he jumped from the battlefield, or the time he jumped with Arkady. This felt like falling into a featherbed, or rather, falling out into an ocean of feathers, falling forward and up into a glowing softness.

Then the world resolved itself again around them, and they stood together in bright evening light, on the same hillside, under the spreading limbs of a magnificent oak tree. The forest that had been at their back was gone, and the single tree dominated the hill, a glorious monument to time itself. Nick dropped Julia’s hand and turned in a slow circle. Down across the fields was Falcott House, and away in the other direction he could see Castle Dar. Castle Dar, which hadn’t been there in the future he had known, when he had driven across Devon with Arkady. In its