“You wanted to speak with me,” Lucien reminded her. “Alone.”
She flushed deeply. “Yes, of course.”
But once they were strolling among the trees, she was at a loss how to begin. Lucien adjusted his long stride to hers, apparently in no hurry to break the silence between them. Mist wreathed the trunks. Above the bare black branches, the sky was cloudless, hazy, tinged with blue. The only sounds were their footsteps and Julia’s fading laughter. The hush, the solitude, the stark beauty of the snowy forest wrapped them in intimacy.
Aimée cleared her throat. “Did you play in the woods when you were a child?”
“No.” His tone did not invite further questions.
He was the illegitimate son of an English nobleman, she reminded herself. She had no notion who his mother might have been. Perhaps his memories of childhood were not happy ones. “How old were you when you went to live with . . .” Your father. “The Earl of Amherst?”
“Seventeen.” A pause. “I think.”
He did not even know his age? Poor boy.
“And before that?” she persisted.
He turned his head, his eyes hooded. “I don’t remember.”
Or else, she thought, his memories were too painful to recall.
She squeezed his arm. They both had been forced to start over. And at almost the same time, it seemed. “I was thirteen when I came to Moulton.”
“Yes, I know.”
She blinked. How could he know? But of course he had been talking with Julia. “I did not want to be here,” she confessed. “For a long time, I resented the . . . the circumstances that brought me. I missed my life in France. My home. My family.”
For weeks and months, the gray wet English weather had seemed to overshadow her very soul. She had succumbed to clouds of grief, storms of tears, and homesickness.
“You escaped the Terror,” Lucien said, his voice flat. “If you hadn’t, you would have died.”
“Bien sûr.” The French slipped out, as it did sometimes when she talked about her childhood. She smiled up at him in apology. “At thirteen I did not always think very clearly, you understand. Now I am wiser. And grateful.”
“Grateful.” His face was unreadable, as it often was, with the marble austerity of a disillusioned saint.
She wished she could make him smile.
“To be alive,” she explained. She gestured around them at the winter wood, the dormant trees, the wisps of frost, the forest floor sleeping under a blanket of bracken, leaves and snow. “All this—life—is a gift. What you make of it is up to you.”
His words.
Lucien stared down at Aimée’s bright face.
His words, wrested from the dark prison of memory on what must have been the worst night of her life, offered to comfort and encourage him. The irony cut him like a knife.
He had saved her life and ruined it, and she was bloody grateful.
She smiled at him, her eyes shining with sympathy, her fingers light and warm upon his arm. Their gazes locked.
He felt it. The snap of connection, like a key in a lock, like a piece in a puzzle, like two halves sliding together to make one whole. It’s you.
Behind her blue, translucent eyes, recognition wavered. Doubt bloomed.
Tension thrummed along his nerves.
If she knew the role he had played in her life, would she still feel grateful? Or would she hate him?
It didn’t matter. She could never know. The threat of demons, the unpredictability of humankind, compelled the Nephilim to live secretly.