Free No Other Love by Candace Camp Page A

governess hustled her back inside. But that angry exchange scarcely resembled this intense battle. The two men rolled across the ground, punching and grappling, silent except for an occasional grunt or atavistic growl.
    “Stop it! Gil! Exmoor!” Nicola realized that she might as well have been speaking to herself for all the good it did.
    The men inched perilously close to the edge of the Falls, so close that the mist from the spewing water enveloped them. Nicola started toward them, shouting of the danger. At that instant, the edge of the cliff beside the Falls began to crumble. Nicola froze, a shriek tearing out of her lungs, watching in horror as the men’s feet were suddenly dangling in air. Realizing what was happening, Gil and Exmoor crawled toward safety. But the ground gave way beneath Gil’s legs, the rocks and earth flowing from beneath him almost like a river, and he slid backward, his hands scrabbling for purchase.
    “Gil!”
    Richard, who had reached stable ground, turned around as Gil slid slowly over the lip of the cliff, the spray from the Falls beside him rising around him like a cloud. Richard crawled over to the edge and peered over it.
    “Hold on, I’ll help you!” he shouted, reaching one arm over the side.
    Nicola prayed frantically as she watched. The muscles in the earl’s back bunched, and she could see his shoulder move. Then there was a brief cry, and Richard went limp, his arm still dangling over the side.
    Nicola’s stomach fell to her feet, and she sat down hard, her knees suddenly too watery to support her. She could not speak. Slowly Richard edged back from the cliff and rose to his feet, turning around.
    “I am sorry,” he told her. “He couldn’t hold on. I tried, but he slipped out of my grasp. He is gone.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    N ICOLA TURNED AWAY FROM THE F ALLS , her eyes blinded with tears. The memory of that day ten years ago was as clear as if it had happened yesterday. She could still remember the sick, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach as she sat there, staring numbly at the cliff’s edge. Shock and disbelief had swamped her. Her heart was already stricken with grief, but her mind could not yet grasp the facts. Gil couldn’t be dead!
    Then a new thought had entered her mind, and she had jumped to her feet, shaky but filled with hope. “Maybe he didn’t die! Maybe he’s down at the bottom of the gorge—hurt!”
    “Impossible. He could not have survived the fall. You know the rocks around there.”
    “But there is water, too! He could have fallen into the water.”
    “No. You must not go down there. It would be too horrible a sight.”
    But she had ignored Richard, running to her horse and clambering onto it to ride down and around to the entrance of the gorge. Once she reached the mouth of the gorge, she rode back up its length to Lady Falls. It was the only way to get to the area below them; the walls of the gorge were too precipitate beside the Falls. But it took an inordinately long time, and by the time she reached the spot below the cliff where Gil had fallen, it was late afternoon, and the high walls of the gorge cast deep shadows all around the pool where the waterfall emptied.
    There was no body on the rocks or ground, though she and Richard, who had insisted on accompanying her, had searched all over, clambering over rocks. Nor could she see Gil’s body in the pool, dug deep by years of erosion.
    “Nicola…let me take you home. This is fruitless. Surely you can see that. His body is either at the bottom of the pool or it was swept downriver. In either case, the boy is long since dead. If the fall didn’t kill him, he surely drowned. Please…”
    “He’s not dead!” she had shrieked. “He’s not! I know it! I would feel it if he were. He’s alive! He fell into the water and must have been swept down the river, but he could still be alive. He just got out farther downriver.”
    They rode back through the gorge at a much slower pace than they