Accidentally, Love

Audrey smiled, whispering back, ‘Not at all. But Lady Allingham really is entirely awful, is she not?’

‘Utterly dreadful!’

The front door closed heavily and two sets of footsteps approached. A lone traveller then, Audrey thought, looking towards the door expectantly. Unless it was a local, as Mama had suggested. Then surely they would head towards the taproom? But no, the parlor door opened and there was the landlord once again, smiling broadly.

‘Well now,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Reckon it’s a bad day on the road all around. And here I was, thinking that we’d have a quiet few days till the snow cleared. Seems this poor gentleman has also gone and found himself in trouble as well. None of you good people mind if he takes a mite of your fire to warm himself, now do you? Tis perishing cold out there!’

They all looked with interest at the figure that was no more than a dark shape behind the landlord’s shoulder, the lighting in the hallway being no better than anywhere else in the i

For a long, incredulous moment Audrey thought she might be hallucinating, that her thoughts of him, never far away, had made this moment come about. But then his dark eyes met hers and the blood seemed to turn to ice in her veins.

Kirkwood…

She vaguely heard Allingham’s exclamation of shocked surprise. There seemed to be several voices that were speaking at once but Audrey could not hear them properly thanks to the strange buzzing sound in her ears. Her eyes were fixed on Kirkwood, who seemed to somehow make the room shrink into a much smaller space. In fact, his tall figure seemed to dominate her vision. Audrey stared at him, the sum of all of her mad reflections for the past four months making her wonder if this was some crazed trick her mind was playing on her, or if her eyes were truly telling her the truth; that Kirkwood was standing in the doorway, dark eyes boring into her.

The buzzing in her ears seemed to grow louder while the room grew a great deal smaller, shrinking in on itself, edges blurring away into ever growing shadows. She felt hot and cold and then she felt nothing at all as the shadows overtook all else.

Audrey slipped quietly from the room, or it slipped away from her, everything spi

And then all went still.

Darius had been pleased to see the small i

The soft glow of the light that had appeared up ahead was precisely what he needed, for his horse’s sake if nothing else. As soon as he drew closer he could see it was not one of the more prestigious i

The light of the i

Horus whickered a reply that Darius suspected might be along the lines of, ‘About time!’ Under the circumstances he could hardly blame him.

It was a decent sized place, at least and he might reasonably expect a stall for Horus for the evening. He had considered knocking to see if there was a lad to assist him with his mount but instead, had discovered the stable himself, set back from the main building and already occupied by several horses. A young giant appeared from within the gloomy interior and stared at him as if he were an apparition, astonishment writ large upon his face.

‘Good evening,’ Darius observed easily. ‘I am after a stall and some fodder for my horse for the evening. Am I in luck? I can make it worth your while.’

The giant continued to stare at him for so long that Darius was begi

‘He’ll need rubbing down and a nosebag of oats, if you have them,’ Darius said, eyeing the boy. ‘Will you do that for him?’

‘Aye, we got oats, right enough,’ the young giant allowed, coming forward, his enormous feet kicking up small clouds of snow with every step. In his jacket and boots he looked like an ungainly colossus but he reached out to run his hand down Horus’ nose without any noticeable hesitation, which reassured Darius that the lad was far better with horses than he was with people, as was often the way of things with lads who chose such work. ‘Allus sort it.’

Undoing several buttons on his greatcoat, Darius reached into an i

The boy reached out a free hand and took it, squinting at the dull glint of copper for a moment, then carefully stowed it into an i

He was not in the best of tempers and it had little to do with the miserable weather. His current circumstances and the thoughts that brought him to this sorry state of affairs only compounded a growing suspicion that he had lost his wits. He had grappled with this journey for weeks, calling himself all kinds of a fool before yielding to a compulsion he did not want even wish to acknowledge, never mind give in to. Suddenly, standing before the unprepossessing door of The Drunken Maiden, the whole situation seemed utterly absurd. What the devil was he doing, ru