Tessa Dare - [Spindle Cove 03.5] by Beautyand the Blacksmith Read Free Book Online Page B

overhang.
    After another slow, loving exhalation to nourish her small flames, she rose and dashed outside, gathering an armful of splits from the pile before hurrying back, all the while praying the fire wouldn’t die in her absence.
    She knelt before the hearth—no more care for her skirts this time—and placed the thinnest of the logs atop the burning tinder.
    The flames were immediately smothered, dying in a thin plume of white, elegiac smoke.
    “No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”
    She flattened herself to the hearthstones and huffed desperately, trying to rekindle the flame.
    She couldn’t go back to Aaron and ask for more coals. He would know she’d failed before she’d even begun, and that she couldn’t perform the most basic of household tasks. What use could she ever be to him? It wasn’t as though they’d talked about marriage, but she wasn’t ready to foreclose the possibility.
    “Please,” she begged. “Please, please. Don’t go out.”
    And as if some pagan god of fire heard her petition, a small flame caught a notch on the underside of the wood. The fire began to gnaw at it, dripping morsels of ash.
    Hosanna.
    She fed the fire carefully, not daring to stray a pace from the hearth until she had a tall, respectable blaze.
    When she felt it safe to rise, she gave the basin on the table a wary glance. She wasn’t ready for that fish just yet.
    Instead, she found a knife and set about paring vegetables and adding them to a kettle of salted water. She managed three potatoes, two carrots, and an onion with only one slice to her finger. She bound her wound with a strip of linen torn from her handkerchief. The onion made a useful scapegoat for her silly tears.
    After hanging the kettle on a hook and swiveling it over the fire to boil, she could no longer postpone the inevitable.
    Time to gut the fish.
    She went to the table and lifted the cover from the basin.
    “Ah!” With a muted shriek, she dropped the cover. It felt back with a bang.
    Oh Lord, oh Lord.
    Several moments passed before she could bear to lift the cover again and peer inside. She hoped to see something different this time. But no.
    There it was.
    It wasn’t a fish.
    It was an eel.
    And it was still alive . Just angrily alive and now agitated, weaving slick, dark-green figure eights in its basin of murky water.
    With a shudder, Diana covered it again. Then she drew out a chair and decided to sit and think for a while, about just how much she truly wanted this.
    She closed her eyes and thought of Aaron’s kiss. The strength of his arms around her. The heat of his body, and the tender mastery of his tongue coaxing hers. She remembered their driving lesson. The joy of racing down a country lane, as fast as the spring mud would allow, with the top of the curricle down.
    Then she pictured that eel, filling the basin with its writhing, slippery will to live.
    She just couldn’t. Could she?
    Diana opened her eyes and steeled her resolve. Some days, she decided, freedom meant the wind in your hair and the sun on your face and lips swollen with forbidden kisses.
    And other days, freedom meant killing an eel.
    She found the largest cleaver in the kitchen and gripped it in her right hand. With the left, she lifted the cover from the basin.
    “I have nothing against you,” she told the eel. “I’m sure you’re a perfectly fine creature. But Aaron and I have something. And I’m not going to let anything stand . . . or slither . . . in the way of it.”
    And just as she reached in to grab the thing . . .
    It jumped .
    It jumped clear out of the basin and—to Diana’s gasping horror—landed directly on her chest.

 
    C HAPTER 5
    O nce Diana disappeared into the cottage, Aaron quickly lost himself in his work. He needed to get this piece right. If the jeweler was satisfied, it would mean a tidy sum in Aaron’s pocket—and more commissions in the future.
    He did this finer work because he enjoyed it; the profit had always been