He straightened, holding it to his nostrils, inhaling the faint scent of lavender. For a heart-stopping moment, his head buzzed with swirling emotions, and he felt a sudden tightening of his stomach, as if all the air had suddenly gone out of his lungs.
Nothing had ever felt so heavy. Trying to squelch the wild panic inside him, he gripped the scrap of fabric until his knuckles shone white as the linen.
Images enwrapped him. Sophy’s violet-gray eyes, large and direct. They were always the first things he saw when he looked at her. A shining warmth that stayed with him wherever he went. He let out a light, unconscious sigh.
Lightning flickered, and the thunder followed almost at once. Seth’s head snapped up, and he took a quick look around. That was it! The only doorway nearby was to the cellar. He tried the knob but the door was locked.
He assumed the worst.
Logic dictated he go search for the key, but Seth, for the first time in his life perhaps, did not heed logic. He stepped back and, using one booted foot, smashed at the lock. It gave somewhat but still held.
Crushing down the pain that shot through his leg like a steel spike hammered home, he kicked again, putting all his strength into it. The lock shattered with a crack like a rifle shot, and the door flew inward.
Recoiling, stumbling backward, Seth looked down the narrow flight of timber stairs leading to the cellar. There was no light. He stood perfectly still for some moments, though his heart was racing.
Wood creaked somewhere downstairs, a settling rather than a footstep. The cloying smell of aged yeast and fermentation was in the air. Fine dust particles, floating, caused a soft dry tickle at the base of his throat.
While lightning flashed and thunder rumbled farther off, here there was total silence, stretching itself, filling the dank void with an odd chill. But a kind of deafening noise pounded against his eardrums and Seth realized he was listening to the sound of his own pulse.
Struggling to control his breathing, the intense pounding of his blood in his veins, he scanned the darkened mass before him. His thoughts were chaotic.
“Sophy?” His voice was strange and thick, even to his own ears.
Within Seth now swirled many emotions. He recognized the fear for Sophy that dominated that other, more insidious sentiment, which was welling up inside him, threatening to overcome his hard-won control. He was not ready for that yet.
He felt torn, at odds with himself. Marriage with Sophy had changed his life. To feel. Not to feel. With Sophy, he wanted to do both. He was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, without reason or logic.
Seth shivered, remembering how one of Sophy’s hands had gripped his arm on the ferry. Under the cotton of his shirtsleeve, he could almost feel an afterglow from the contact.
Emotion welled up in him. So many memories. So many sensations. There were qualities about Sophy that had begun to affect him, to creep through him like a fever.
For one thing, she was fiercely loyal. She would try to bring the sun down from the sky for one of her family who was genuinely in need. For another, her blossoming friendship with his difficult mother was touching. Her abiding understanding of Abigail Lethbridge’s weakness was laudable. Even her outrageous attempt to provoke him was honest.
Suddenly Seth heard the soft rustle of silk, like reeds in the wind. Then he saw her, a figure blacker than the stygian night, her pale face rising like a waxen flower in the heart of the darkness.
His breath caught in his throat and his belly contracted painfully. He struggled to control his runaway pulse.
“Sophy?” The word stuck in his throat like a needle.
Sophy’s heart leaped as the door burst open. Disoriented, she sat, transfixed. Her vision was going in and out of focus and she couldn’t identify the tall silhouette framed in the square patch of dim light. A menacing figure, a demon or a rescuer?
Which was the illusion, which the reality?
“Sophy?”
There was an edge to the voice now, as if its owner had just woken up. The figure moved, all angles and black shadows, descending now into the labyrinth.
Small, chilled, miserable, Sophy huddled against the wall. She had an active imagination. Now, it had shut down entirely. Obviously, this was another illusion. She stirred slightly like a sapling in a sudden gust of wind, giving way minutely.
“Sophy?”
The huge featureless shadow had a deep voice. Seth’s voice, yet not Seth’s voice. Stealthy, yet full of passionate delight, as though he had found his love. The sensations touched her, beating like rain.
Sophy’s eyes, weeping silent tears down her high-boned cheeks, blinked, trying to calibrate the thick, black shape, all wavering and hazy. Thighs like water, unable to support her, she scrambled to her knees. Her heart contracted as the figure took another halting step closer to her.
It was him! This time there was no doubt. Sophy’s mind was jolted into recognition, and her body mobilized simultaneously. It was as if some obscure weight that had been crushing her had been lifted from her. The elation of relief seemed to fizz the blood in her veins. She came up from her knees and, heart exploding with joy, threw herself forward in one wild rush. Hurled herself into his arms with the force of fireworks.
Seth’s arms automatically encircled her, to embrace her or to stop them both from falling, he did not know. It was as if he had been dropped into the center of a whirlpool, in the grip of forces he could no longer hold in check. Her head immediately tucked into the hollow of his shoulder as her upper body melted against his. He held her quietly for a moment, marshaling his thoughts.
“Sophy, are you all right?”
He felt as if his vocal cords were in spasm. The whites of his eyes took on a slight sheen as they tried to decipher her indistinct features.
She sniffed heavily. “C-certainly I am.”
“You’re shivering. No wonder. It’s bloody freezing down here.”
“I’m not c-cold.”
Sophy couldn’t go on. She felt him around her, his arms coiling, a great masculine figure, hard and strong. Though she was safe now within the sanctuary of his beloved embrace, still a dark part of her mind hammered to be heard.
Her chest contracted, her heart full of an unnameable anguish, she could do nothing but nestle into his robust vitality. Suddenly, she was crying against his shoulder, great gulping sobs, as she clung to him, shoulders shaking.
Seth touched her face gently with his fingertips. He could not help himself. Her eyes were half-shut, her lips partly open. He could feel her warm breath on him, and trace the moisture on her cool flesh as twin rivers gushed from beneath her quivering lids.
“Sophy...”
Her name was torn from his heart like a tattered battle pennant. His mind was working furiously, considering the improbabilities. He did not know how she came to be locked in the cellar, but he promised himself he would soon find out.
And when he did...
He felt her smaller body trembling uncontrollably against him, and his arms secured her to him like steel manacles.
“It’s all right, Sophy. It’s all right.” It sounded like another’s voice but he knew it was his.
Sophy just held him, needing to feel his warmth, the stir of his breath against her neck, the substantial masculine strength of him reassuring her that he was real rather than an illusion born out of her fear, a fear that had been part of her for so long that she had taken its existence for granted.
Slow, careful, patient as a man winning the trust of a wild creature, Seth eased one arm away and raised a hand. His long fingers caressed the nape of her neck and the base of her skull.
Sophy stirred against him, her chest heaving. A lump in her throat made it difficult to get the words out. She sniffed heavily.
“Ever since I was a child the dark has terrified me. It is an uncontrollable fear.” Her voice had the quality of chalk rasping along a slate board.
“It’s all right, Sophy. It’s all right,” Seth said again, his tone soothing. His chest moved up and down slowly with his breath as his body absorbed the deep racking shudders of hers, his soft incoherent murmurs calming her anguished sobs.
Sophy hung there against his chest, absorbing his strength as she tried to regain her own. She could no more disentangle herself from him than she could still her pulse. All sense of reality had slipped from her mind. All coherent thought was an effort.
“In the dark, I feel so alone, adrift, absolutely cut off from everything and everyone,” she said, the words sounding foolish to her own ears.
Seth thought about that for a moment. His head bent until his lips brushed her ear. “Even a soldier must feel fear.” His deep, rumbling voice filled Sophy’s ear. It sounded odd and muffled. “A soldier must have his nemesis just as he must do battle.”
He felt her soft and yielding against him, and his arms closed more tightly about her, as protectively as a mother’s around a small child. Using the wall behind him as a bolster, he began to ease himself back up the stairs.
In the confined space, Seth’s now-damp jacket gave off a clean, earthy smell. The solid arm around her shoulders felt heavy, warm and protective. Sophy hugged this core of comfort to the center of her being. It had the ability to make her feel safe enough to divulge her fears.
“In darkness there is betrayal and death.” She gave a little hiccup.
Seth felt a spasm grip him. Not for him. Not for Sophy. She needed his protection. She was his in the most fundamental way. She had given herself to him. He would keep her safe.
There were words he longed to say, words that would free him, perhaps, from his own inner torment, but that would also certainly make him vulnerable to her. And words sometimes had no meaning at all.
“The enemy may come in many forms, in many guises, but always unseen and, therefore, the more terrifying. Fear has many eyes and can see things underground,” he said softly, his face in her hair.
There was a minute trembling in his arms, and Sophy detected the slight vibration in his frame. Her head lifted. She peered at him through the shadows. Couldn’t keep herself from asking in a voice that throbbed with emotion and uncertainty, “You have felt it?”
Seth thought about Gettysburg then. Something had changed. Abruptly, he realized that the sense of bitter guilt that always stung him whenever the war entered his thoughts was missing. Recognized that the unmitigated disaster of carnage and death was no longer so cruelly fresh in his heart, in his mind. Rejoiced that that particular chapter of his life was closed, forever.
It was as if a great weight had been taken off his chest. He became vividly aware of Sophy nestling deep in his arms, clinging to him. He breathed into her hair. He dragged her lightly back into his warmth and swung her up another step.
“Honor rules me. It is my weapon and my weakness.” His voice was deliberately light, bantering and more full of truth than he thought it was. He had not meant to make any such admission, and immediately felt as if he had lost a battle.
Sophy could feel the nearness of his body, the tension that pulled at every muscle and sinew. A wave of love welled up within her, banishing her fear.
“Honor is but another name for love,” she whispered in a voice that vibrated with the intensity of her emotions. Her words stirred the hair at the base of his neck.
Seth felt her lips open against the exposed cords at the side of his neck as she spoke. Then an extraordinary, wonderful sensation, the licking of her tongue, inquisitive and naive as a child’s, licking the salty skin. All the more erotic for its simplicity.
“Sophy?”
He said it as if tasting a new flavor, testing out its sound on his tongue. His mind was numb with disbelief at her action, even as he felt the heavy pulse of his blood through his veins... a delicious dissolving of defenses. He lowered his head, his mouth unerringly locating hers in that well of darkness.
Sophy was quivering with the strength of the sensations running rampant through her. She couldn’t give him an answer, not in words. His lips held hers while his arms walled her in, pressing her body to his. Her mouth opened under his like a flower to the sun.
Their breaths mingled. She felt his hand on her hair, stroking down it to her shoulders, his fingertips delicately exploring her neck, her jaw, her ear.
Sweetly paralyzed, her body went limp with pleasure. She melted inside at the gentle drift of his fingers against her skin and the warmth of his mouth tracing moist kisses along her jaw. He kissed her ears, her nose, the corners of her eyes where moisture still lingered soft as early-morning dew on a petal.
Wherever he touched a little fire darted through her, melting her further. When she arched lovingly against him, he buried his lips in the hollow of her throat.
Sophy felt his hands kneading the curves of her body through her gown. His fingers slid over the silky material of her bodice, followed the pearl buttons to her waist, caressed her hip, and trailed down the little angle between her belly and her hip.