Page 29 of Bane Bloom

I hugged myself to keep warm while I took a slower look around. It felt more spacious than it appeared from the outside, with room enough for a narrow bed along one wall and a table with two chairs against the opposite wall, the stove between them. A small chest of drawers rested to one side of the door. A potted plant shared one windowsill with a stack of books, while the other served as a shelf for mugs and a single glass fishing float. Battered tins of varying sizes lined the edge of the table pushed against the wall.

“Sit down,” Thomas said. “I’ll light the fire.”

He had returned to his brusque way of speaking, but I was so grateful to him that I hardly cared. I recalled how he’d bent protectively over me, his hand warming my back while we huddled in the bottom of the boat.

My hands trembled as I turned one of the chairs out from the table.

He knelt beside the stove, adding slivers of wood and dry moss.

“Are there often storms?” I asked, the quaver in my voice making it plain I had not fully recovered from the near drowning.

“More so in spring. You have to watch yourself if you’re up in the fells.”

I sniffled and brushed away water that dripped down my forehead from my hair. “Do you go up in the fells?”

He lit a spill and touched it to his kindling. “Sometimes.”

I glanced at the window above the bed, which showed the house, with the pyramidal peak rising on the other side. “I bet you can see forever from up there. What’s the name of that one closest to the house?”

“Fleetwith Pike.”

Smoke rose from the kindling, and he bent and blew on it. Then he sank back and watched the flames flicker. Once again I found myself studying his shoulders and broad back. One bared forearm rested on his bent leg, firelight burnishing the tawny hairs. The other arm hung at his side, fingers absently turning a small piece of wood.

Thunder clapped above us, and I started, my chair letting out a creak. A gust of wind lashed rain against the window.

“It’ll soon pass,” he murmured without turning.

Glancing again around the hut’s interior, I asked, “Do you know who built this?”

He fed a log carefully into the stove. “My grandfather. He stored garden tools here, and used it for a potting shed.”

I remembered the man in the bluebell waistcoat. “Is that his portrait in the bedroom across from mine?”

“Mmm.”

Thomas had never known his grandfather. He would have learned about him from his mother—and her diary. My conflicted feelings about the diary rose again to the surface.

It was a perfect moment to ask him about it, with a sort of truce between us, and the topic of his family already raised. My heart began to thump, and I knit my fingers together. My lips parted, and I took a deep breath.

A sort of truce between us. He hadn’t wanted me in his house, or his boat. Probably never imagined inviting me into this hut. Yet here we were. And now he’d saved my life.

Nay, lass. The fault is mine. Every rough surface he possessed had been smoothed by the way he’d spoken those words. I would almost have said he’d been like a different man, but that wasn’t really true. He was still Thomas the Viking, but without his shield.

And though I had never very seriously considered him capable of doing away with Mr. Carroll, any trace of a nagging doubt had vanished. I had carelessly made it very easy for him out on the lake, were he that sort of man. Certainly after Mr. Carroll’s disappearance it would have been suspicious, even had he simply let nature take its course. But I believed more than cold calculation had saved me. There was nothing murderous or even cruel in Thomas’s manner. He needn’t have taken responsibility for the accident. Or ushered me to safety when the storm began.

Or rubbed my back to stop me shivering.

I dreaded a return to the way things had been before.

Yet I didn’t believe he knew nothing about Carroll’s disappearance. He was far too observant, for one thing, not to have at least noticed the change in Carroll that Annie had.

Before falling into the lake, I had half uttered a fresh inquiry about Carroll.

Try again. See what he says. Then decide what to do about the diary.

“Thomas,” I began carefully, “I must confess to you that the disappearance of my predecessor, Mr. Carroll, has been much on my mind since I arrived.”

I watched his back tense, and he straightened slightly. My heart sank as some of the old hostility came into his voice. “Think I had something to do with that, do you?”