“I have a younger brother, Lewis, but he’s not so bad. He’s a boy, so I suppose it makes it easier. I don’t think I would know what to do with a little sister.” His puzzled face made her giggle.
“Sisters aren’t that much different from brothers, I shouldn’t think. I rather imagine the challenge is the number, not the gender.”
“You could be right there,” Nathan said, and then he crowed as he started to pull the line on the fishing pole. “We’ve got one! Here!” He pressed the pole into her hands, and when the fish gave a surprisingly sharp tug, she stumbled forward. Nathan’s hands caught her waist, holding her firm.
“That’s it, Thea, now use the reel to bring it in. No need to worry—I’ve got you.”
His hands upon her waist and the feel of him holding her set something in motion that she knew she was perhaps a little too young to understand fully, but she knew enough—enough to know she was going to fall in love with this handsome boy.
The fish came flopping out of the water into the shallows, and they rushed to catch it in a net.
“Oh, must we take it back? Couldn’t we let it go?” she suddenly asked Nathan as he removed the hook from its mouth. For some reason, she needed this moment to be forever remembered by life, not death.
He raised his gaze to hers, studying her. “Let it live another day? Yes, I agree.” He lifted the fish up and carried it deeper into the water and set it with infinite gentleness back into the river. It splashed and shot away beneath the rushing waves.
The days passed in a blinding blur, the way time speeds up quicker and quicker during the best moments of one’s life. It was a thought that Thea would have every so often over the next few years as she and Nathan grew closer and closer, their secret meetings in the woods, at the stream, and eventually her family’s orchards becoming so common that she spent more time with him than with her own family.
On one such afternoon when she was seventeen, she’d snuck away from her house and lay beneath the spreading branches of the cherry blossom trees. Nathan lay beside her, his body propped up against the trunk. Her head lay in his lap, and she gazed up at the blossoming branches, admiring the bright pinks and pale whites of the petals against the deep-blue summer sky.
“Thea . . . ,” Nathan began uncertainly.
“Yes?”
“May I kiss you?” he asked with such sweet uncertainty that she knew she would never deny him anything. She just never imagined that someday the cost of one of his requests would be to break her own heart.
“Kiss me?” She slowly sat up, her face close to his.
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “It is what people do when they are in love.”
“Are we . . . in love?” Her breath quivered in her lungs as she held herself very still.
“I am in love with you. Do you love me?” He cupped her cheek, his gaze searching hers, and she was lost in his eyes, thinking of that first day she’d seen him by the river. She had loved him every moment, waking and asleep, since that day.
“I do.”
He waited for no other words, but leaned in and claimed her lips sweetly, passionately. She had never been kissed before, but she seemed to know what to do, moving her mouth with his, and soon the kiss built to something bright and wonderful that became in that moment a memory that extended into the infinite space around them.
She desperately tried to burn everything about this kiss into her memory—the feel of his warm, insistent mouth, the feel of his hand as he held her face, the way the wind blew his hair across her fingers as she dug her hands into the strands, and the dizzy bliss of knowing that he loved her.
When their mouths finally parted, they continued to stay in each other’s arms, his forehead touching hers as they both sought to regain their breath.
“Thea, would you . . . wait for me?” he asked.
“Wait for you?”
“Yes. I cannot yet offer marriage, but I believe when I am twenty that I shall be able to. I don’t wish for you to miss your coming out, but I fear any other decent man out there will wish to court you, and you belong to me.”
“Just as you belong to me,” she reminded him with an impish grin.
“Yes,” he laughed. “I do, my heart, I do. More than I shall ever belong to anyone.” He studied her face. “So will you . . . wait for me? Give me one year of a secret engagement so that I might propose to you properly next year?”
“Yes.” There was simply no other answer she could have wished to give. She didn’t want to wait even a year, but if they tried to marry now, her father probably wouldn’t allow it. Eighteen was much better. As always, Nathan had carefully thought this out.
“Good,” he murmured before capturing her mouth again. This time his kisses were more urgent, as though some part of him seemed to sense the doom that was coming for them both, not that she or Nathan could have known the heartache that yet lay in store for them.
Thea suddenly shivered.
“Do you wish to return to the house?” he asked in concern.
“No, no, stay and hold me a minute longer.” She wanted to tuck herself away in this single instant, to bury herself in this moment and never move forward.
Her heart warned her that if she let time continue its inevitable march that something, someday, would make her wish with all her heart that she’d never moved beyond this moment. But that was life, wasn’t it? Life’s best moments were never permanent, and the only way not to long for the past was to pray and search for those future moments that might rival the past in all its golden glory.
5
Christmas Eve 1821
A dream. Thea was stuck in a dream, one she’d had so often over the last eight years. The room was always full of people, moving and dancing. She and Nathan were at opposite ends, standing still, waiting, always too far to reach for each other or to speak. Had she fallen asleep on the coach ride to Pemberton Hall? Surely this wasn’t real.
It felt too vivid to be anything but a dream. Her heart pitched straight down into her stomach. Eight years. Had it been that long? She hadn’t forgotten one moment of their past. She hadn’t forgotten his kisses, the tender way he’d looked at her, the softness of his smile, his hands rough and insistent on her skin as they’d melted into each other. She hadn’t forgotten their conversations, the wit and intelligence of their shared thoughts or the way they could speak without words. Yet covering it all was the gray, all-consuming despair of her life when he’d left it.
Seeing him now, after all these years, the pain came rushing back to the surface, threatening to drown her. She bit her bottom lip, eyes burning with unshed tears. Instantly, she was back in the orchard, Nathan reaching for her but then drawing back before his hands could touch her. Nothing could undo the pain of his severing their connection. His father hadn’t approved of her. She wasn’t suitable. It didn’t matter that her father was a well-liked country gentleman, or that she had a sizeable dowry. Nothing had pleased the old duke. Especially not her.
In the end, Nathan had listened to his father’s threats against her family. She could not fault him for that—her family never knew that Nathan’s noble heart had saved them that day. It would have been possible to run away with him and marry in secret, but it would have destroyed her father’s life and ruined her mother’s and sisters’ lives as well.