“Adelaide! You’re—”

“—perfectly respectable, I swear.”

“Is that a creative definition of respectable?” But he dared a peek back, looking relieved that I was mostly submerged.

“Come in here,” I said again. “You could use a bath too. Besides, didn’t you see all this that day in the conservatory? Look, I’ll even turn around.” I did and waited until I heard the sound of splashing as he too entered the water.

“You know,” he said, “you keep bringing that up, but I actually didn’t see anything that day. I was so terrified that I pretty much looked everywhere but at you.”

I turned around and grinned, seeing him just a couple of feet from me. “And here I thought I’d been feeding your imagination for months.”

“Oh, it’s had plenty to feed on, don’t you worry.” He dunked his head too and then brought it back up, scrubbing at his hair with his hands.

“For my last bath back at Wisteria Hollow, I used lavender cream soap from Lorandy. If I’d had any idea what I’d be facing here, I would’ve smuggled it with me.”

“I’ll be sure and pick some up for you the next time I’m in White Rock,” Cedric said. “I think they sell it between the jerky stand and the ammunition tent.” I moved toward him, and he took a step back. “Adelaide . . .”

“We can’t kiss? I thought we established you can’t see anything.”

“I can feel plenty.”

I stepped toward him again, and this time he didn’t retreat. “I thought you were the dark, wild rebel who leads maidens into unspeakable acts in moonlit groves.”

“That sounds like me,” he agreed. “But only if one of the aforementioned maidens is my wife.”

Mira’s words came back to me. “The Alanzans do have morals.”

“Of course. Some do. Some don’t. That, and I want to maintain something honorable and . . . I don’t know . . . exalted with you.”

“I want that too.” I moved closer again. “But I also want to kiss you now.”

Cedric shook his head. “You don’t make it easy. But then, you never have.”

He leaned down and cupped my face, kissing me without any more fear or hesitation. There was only the scantest breath of distance between us, a distance I knew we were both acutely aware of and struggling to maintain. Despite my bold words, I found myself shaking. I no longer felt cold in the water. I had that sense I always did with him, that the two of us were standing on some kind of precipice, always on the verge of some drastic outcome. I knew if I closed the space between us and wrapped myself in him, all his honorable and exalted intentions would fall away—probably landing right beside my fine words about going to my wedding bed a virgin.

But we didn’t close that distance. When we finally managed to part, we were both breathless and aching, starving for something we couldn’t have.

Long, tension-filled moments hung between us as our gazes locked, and we both tried to gain some control of ourselves. “I think,” said Cedric, tucking a wet lock of hair behind my ear, “we should get married sooner rather than later.”

“I agree.” I was still reeling, still heady from how tantalizingly close he was. I took a few steps back, just to be safe, and then gestured around us. “But in the meantime, if we don’t have anything better to do . . . well, do you want to go pan some gold and strike it rich?”

Chapter 24

We did not, as it turned out, strike it rich that day. Or the next day.

And soon, one day merged into another as we settled into a routine. Cedric was up at sunrise each morning to make the two-hour trip to the Marshalls’. He’d bring me back to his claim, and I’d help him until late afternoon. Then, it was another ride back to have dinner with the family. Cedric would return to his claim, and I’d tutor the children until we went to bed. I had no trouble falling asleep anymore.

I felt especially bad for Cedric. He spent half his day bringing me back and forth. But he said he liked having me around, and a lot of tasks went more smoothly with two sets of hands. Every little bit helped.

And really, we were just dealing with “little bits.” Panning for gold wasn’t that difficult once I got the knack of it. The river was wide and shallow in some places, and it was a simple matter to wade out and sit on a rock. I could pan all day and end up with a handful of tiny, glittering gold pieces. Dust, really. A handful each day wasn’t going to pay out what we owed Warren, certainly not in a month.

“It adds up,” Cedric told me near the end of one day.

I eyed our carefully protected hoard of gold dust. “Will it be enough?”

“It’s worth more than you think. I mean, I’m sure back in Osfro, your servants swept up and threw out this much gold dust every day from your house. But in the real world, this is a lot of money.”

It was enough money, in fact, that Cedric announced he was going to take a trip into White Rock and spend it on something called a sluice.

“You’re going to spend what little we have?” I asked. “Or are you using credit?” That would have been worse. I didn’t want to owe Warren any more than we did.

Cedric shook his head. He didn’t shave very often these days, and an auburn shadow covered his lower face. I didn’t mind it, though it made for itchy kissing. “We’ve got enough in the gold we’ve panned so far to get what I need.”

“All that work gone.” The very thought made me weary, considering how many hours I’d spent standing in the river. Both of us had toughened up considerably in the last couple of weeks. I had calluses on my hands, and when I’d finally found a mirror, I’d discovered the hat had done only so much to keep the sun off me, as I’d feared.

“It’ll be worth it to get what I need,” Cedric said. “Sluices sit in the river and essentially pan for us. We can get more gold in less time.”

“That’s promising,” I admitted. “But sometimes, I feel like this claim has just enough gold to give us false hope but not enough to pay out. And I think Warren knew that.”

“There’s a very real possibility of that.” Cedric’s face started to fall, but then his optimism quickly returned. “But we’re not going to make that call until we’ve exhausted all our options. If he expects us to give up at the first sign of trouble, he’s in for a surprise.”

So, I spent the next day helping around the homestead. There was never any end to the chores needing to be done, something I thought about quite a bit. If Cedric and I were able to settle in Westhaven, life wouldn’t be very different than in Hadisen. We’d be living on the frontier in modest accommodations. There’d be no servants to help. When I’d come to Blue Spring Manor, I’d been naïve about the labor ordinary people did. Now, I was rapidly becoming proficient in all sorts of tasks I’d never imagined.

I also found that all of my fancy education meant little to my students. These were children who’d grown up without a school of any kind and had been sent to work early. The things I taught them were basic: reading and simple arithmetic. It gave me a new understanding of the world and the variety of people who lived within it.