Free Thief of Hearts by Patricia Gaffney Page B

since I left," Brodie said quietly, as though he hadn't noticed her withdrawal. "Llandudno's pretty, but someday you should see the valley of the Clwyd, with the hills of Flint rising up in the east and the gentle land all around you flecked with sheep and different-colored fields. I always meant to go back and see my mother's grave, but I never did." He left unspoken the thought that now he never would.
    He didn't need to speak it. Anna's fingers halted in the act of folding her papers. With a shock, she realized she was beginning to see Mr. Brodie as a man, someone separate from Nicholas, not just his mirror image or an impostor pretending to be him. The thought both relieved and disturbed her. Living for several weeks in close quarters with this man would be less painful if his every word and gesture didn't remind her with such agonizing vividness of his brother. Yet she shrank from the inevitable humanizing that would also occur as she learned to know him, even understand him. Something warned her it would be safer to remain strangers.
    "Lesson over?"
    She started at the sound of Aiden's voice, and looked up with a tiny, inexplicable twinge of guilt. But how absurd; what had she to feel guilty about? "Yes, we've just finished. We accomplished quite a lot, I think," she said as she busied her hands with putting the rest of her things away in her case. "For the first day."
    "Good timing. We seem to have arrived at our
pensione
."
    "Oh. So we have."
    So they had. With a small, appreciative smile for the irony of it, Anna watched Mr. Brodie shake his bodyguard awake. Aiden put the
diligence
step down and jumped out, turning back to help her, arms raised. She had to step past Brodie to get to the door. She gave Aiden her writing case, leaving him with only one hand to help her. There was an awkward moment when she felt gingerly for the step with her foot, one hand extended, the other clutching the door frame. All at once she felt Mr. Brodie's two big hands on either side of her waist, holding her steady. She found the step, took Aiden's arm, and made it to the ground without incident. The whole undertaking was over in seconds. And yet for long minutes afterward she was preoccupied with recollections of sensation, half-thoughts of how those ten fingers had felt, splayed wide against her ribcage, holding her still, pressing her tightly. With kindness, with consideration. And then she thought of something else, something that embittered the odd sweetness of the memory. She remembered that although she hadn't felt or heard it, between those two strong hands that had held her so securely was an ugly black chain.

Chapter 8

     
    At least it wasn't raining. Not pouring, anyway; not those black, nearly solid sheets of slanted water that had undermined the road and washed earth and stones down its steep face like coal down a chute. Rain fell almost gently now, and thunder was only a distant grumble beyond the farthest range of the Tuscan Apennines. But the damage was done: the rough track that had been the road was now a slick and dripping morass of churned-up mud and rocks, and the
diligence
was stuck in the middle of it.
    "Ho!" shouted the driver, cracking his whip over the rumps of the two enormous oxen he'd hired to pull them out. The farmer who owned the beasts strained in front, hauling on their harnesses, feet braced in the mud. At the rear, Brodie and Billy Flowers heaved and groaned and pushed at the coach with all their strength. And at the side of the road, safely out of the way on a clean patch of damp moss, Anna and Aiden O'Dunne stood and watched from under their umbrellas.
    Billy was a bigger man, a muscle-bound giant of a man, but Anna barely noticed him. Her attention was riveted on Brodie's leaner, neater physique. His hair was plastered to his head, his white shirt to his body. She responded to Aiden's comments in absent-minded monosyllables as she contemplated Brodie's long, handsome legs, the bunched muscles in his