The River of No Return

panic. “Oh, God!”
    Nick grabbed her hand and held it again, clearly not caring who might see. “Look at me!”
    She met his gaze with caution.
    “What do you know about your grandfather?”
    She pulled back. “Let me go!”
    He dropped her hand, but his voice gained in urgency. “You can trust me, Julia. I won’t betray you. I am . . . oh, bloody hell, just give me your hand again! I need to touch you.”
    She held it out, feeling somewhat unreal, and he took and placed her palm firmly against his chest. “I consider myself bound to you. And I am also free. Do you understand? I told you I was not free, that day in the rain. But I rescind those words. Remember the poem, Julia. ‘To enter in these bonds, is to be free.’ Doyou understand?”
    “I think so.” She could feel his heart beating, and her panic sank again. “I . . . I don’t know why you would ask me about Grandfather.”
    Nick searched her face. “You really don’t know? You don’t know anything?”
    “I don’t know what I know. He told me nothing!” She shook her head, to dispel the rushing of blood in her head, the terrible loneliness and fear. “I know nothing!”
    “We must talk,” he said, letting her hand go. “Privately. And soon.”
    She whispered, “I can’t tell you anything.”
    Nick frowned, his eyes bleak. Then he glanced up. His sisters were looking back at them. “We must keep walking.”
    He took her arm once more and they walked in tense silence, her elbow tucked so tightly against his side that she could feel the way his body moved beneath his coat.
    “What is Count Lebedev to you?” she asked, once Bella and Clare seemed distracted again by Solvig’s antics.
    Nick puffed up his cheeks and blew the air out slowly as he searched for words. “In a way, Arkady is a fellow soldier. But I don’t know if we are comrades in arms or enemies. It is very hard—impossible—to explain.”
    “Count Lebedev has power over you,” she said slowly. “But not, perhaps, as much as he thinks? Is that it?”
    Nick nodded. “In a way, I am bound to him. He doesn’t think I am free. He thinks me his lackey. For the time being I must pretend. I must seem to do as he says. But I am determined to be free, Julia, and I would never betray you to him. Do you understand me now?”
    So they were both pretending. “Yes,” Julia said with more certainty. “You are not free, but you want to be. Arkady is your friend, but he is also your enemy. You are searching for a pathway through, a pathway that will lead you to . . .” She paused, letting herself really look at him, not as Lord Blackdown but as Nick Davenant, a man who had forgotten all his ancient prejudices and manners, and discovered now that he was happy to have lost them.“A pathway that will lead you to yourself,” she said.
    His serious expression didn’t change. “Not just to myself. To you, too.”
    In the time it took for her take a step, she knew that she loved him. “Yes,” she agreed. “To me, too.”
    Clare, Bella, and the dog had stopped up ahead and were playing with a stick. Nothing could have been more prosaic. Three siblings and their friend walk in the park, not even at the fashionable hour. But Julia felt changed, through and through. The air filling her lungs felt different. And every time she chanced to look up at Nick, he was looking down at her.
    “How do you do that?” he asked.
    “Do what?”
    “Every time I try to steal a look at you, you catch me at it. You are a witch.”
    “Perhaps you are able to tell when I am stealing a look at you .”
    She recognized that look—it made her skin tingle. But Solvig, in spite of her bandaged paw, had loped up and was gamboling in a heavy circle around her idol and therefore also around Julia. Solvig’s face was upturned, love radiating from her goggling eyes. Julia gestured at the dog. “There’s a lady who wants nothing more in the world than to look at you.”
    “Heel, Solvig.” Nick brought the dog to his other side. “Now, Julia. You will have to compete for my attentions.”
    Julia disengaged her arm. “Oh, no. I yield.” In spite of Nick’s protests, she walked ahead to join Bella, and Clare fell back to walk with Nick.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
    T hree days later, and no sharing of secrets had occurred. Julia had seen Nick only twice, both times at breakfast, in the company of servants and the dowager marchioness. Each day Bella bragged about how late her brother had been out