Free A Passionate Magic by Flora Speer Page B

breast.
    Emma could not tell if what she saw was male
or female, but she experienced the oddest sensation that the
creature was looking directly at her. As if to prove the accuracy
of her instinct, the figure on the cliff lifted one slender arm in
a gesture.
    Emma did not stay to discover what the
gesture meant. A wave rushed shoreward, swirling around her knees,
filling her boots with icy seawater. Shocked back to her full
senses and to her precarious situation by the sudden chill, she
turned and ran from the hungry sea, splashing through the receding
water, through the next incoming wave, and the next one, running
for the cliff path and the safety of Penruan.
    Emma reached the top of the cliff in a
breathless state, with her gaze directed toward the place where she
had seen the mysterious figure in white. There was no one on the
cliffs. Not a single person. No one in all the wide vista that
stretched upward toward the high spine of Cornwall until the
moorland met a horizon broken only by the rocky projection of Rough
Tor. With Penruan Castle at her back, Emma scanned the landscape
until her ears detected a soft footstep on the grass behind
her.
    “Oh!” She spun around, and when she saw who
it was she took so hasty a step backward that she nearly fell over
the cliff. Some of the precious samphire tumbled out of her basket
and bounced down the face of the rock. Before her loomed a tall,
decidedly masculine figure in a blue tunic.
    “Have care, my lady,” Dain said, catching her
arm. “Come away. You are too near the edge.”
    “You startled me. I didn’t know you were
home.” His eyes were the same marvelous blue-green shade as the
sunlit sea below them. The wind lifted a lock of his close-cropped
hair, the sun on it turning it to silver. Emma clutched her basket
tightly while she fought against the urge to lay her head on his
broad chest. She wasn’t sure whether the sudden weakness in her
knees was the result of her mad rush through seawater and up the
face of the cliff, or whether it was caused by the unexpected
presence of her husband standing so close and looking so
formidable.
    “What is it?” Dain asked. Her face was
remarkably pale, devoid of the soft bloom of color he recalled
seeing in her cheeks, and her eyes were wide with alarm, the brown
irises heavily flecked with purple. Something unfamiliar and
painfully sweet twisted in Dain’s chest as he searched the
expression in Emma’s long-lashed eyes. He seized on the first
reason that came to mind for the fear he saw in those eyes. “If you
are afraid of heights, my lady, then you ought not to try the cliff
path again.”
    “It’s not the height. I foolishly stayed on
the beach too long and, as you can see, the tide is coming in fast.
I got wet.”
    “The water only reaches to the lower section
of the cliff path when there is a bad storm,” he said, wanting to
put her mind at ease. “Otherwise, there is always dry sand at the
bottom of the path. You were in no danger.”
    “I will remember that in the future. I’ve
been gathering plants.”
    “So I see.” He spared only a quick glance for
the wilted greenery in her basket. He couldn’t imagine what she
thought she was going to do with the sandy things, but if they kept
her occupied in the stillroom, so she had no time to meddle in the
running of Penruan, then let her drag in all the plants she wanted
and let her stay in the stillroom all the time.
    Dain had no intention of permitting himself
to become a judge in a domestic struggle between his wife and his
mother. He did not doubt for a moment that there would be war when
Lady Richenda returned from visiting her sister. She had made her
opinion of Dain’s marriage, and of his submission to King Henry’s
will, very clear before her departure to the convent at Tawton
where her sister was the abbess.
    However placid and gentle Emma’s disposition
might prove to be, and from the way she had faced him down on
several occasions, he doubted she