The Splendour Falls by Unknown, Rosemary Clement-Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

‘The fresh air helped.’
    Paula would be waiting, but I couldn’t make myself hurry back. To my surprise, instead of insisting we go, Rhys lowered himself to sit beside me. Not close. Maybe an arm’s length away. It seemed a carefully chosen distance, though, and I wondered if he felt the same zing of awareness that I did.
    He certainly gave no clue, so I determined to do the same and distracted myself with a look around the site. The shadows of the trees were lengthening, falling like bars across the clearing. The breeze stirred the branches, so they seemed to move sinuously towards us as we sat on the eerie relic of raised earth.
    â€˜What was this place?’ I asked, my curiosity genuine. ‘Do you know?’
    Rhys squinted towards the top of the mound, then around the clearing. ‘A mound like this usually means a buried structure of some sort. Unexcavated ruins.’
    The authority in his answer surprised me, and it must have shown, because his mouth twisted sheepishly. ‘My father is a professor of anthropology at the University of Cardiff. On sabbatical at the moment.’
    â€˜Oh really.’ In my world, ‘on sabbatical’ meant that someone was in rehab or on a diet. ‘And he picked rural Alabama out of all the places in the world?’
    His grudging smile widened a fraction, acknowledging my point, my persistence. ‘He’s researching a book.’
    That reluctant curve of his lip was devastating. My heart tripped all over itself, and I told myself it was merely triumph at having elicited a smile that wasn’t at my expense. ‘So, you’re just here for grins,’ I prompted.
    He shrugged. ‘I’m sort of on a break too. So I’m helping Dad with his research.’
    I wondered what ‘sort of’ on a break meant, and whether that was another way of saying ‘out of university but haven’t found a job yet’. Not that I was one to throw stones at people who had their lives on hold.
    â€˜Are you in the same field?’ I asked.
    â€˜Not exactly.’ He rose to his feet and climbed a few steps higher so he could survey the clearing. ‘But I’m getting a grounding in the local history. I can tell you that these mounds baffled early Spanish and French explorers. They considered the natives here too uncivilized to construct anything like this.’
    â€˜Of course they did.’ Gigi had curled up in my lap, and I ran my fingers through the grass, letting the history draw my imagination down, wondering what lay beneath the surface.
    â€˜Is it something like the prehistoric barrows in Britain?’ I had the strangest sense, not just of being connected to the earth here, but connected to the past. ‘That’s what it feels like.’
    â€˜ Feels like?’
    His voice sharpened on the question, and, when Iglanced up, the keenness of his look snapped me back to my senses.
    â€˜I mean—’ What did I mean? The words had come out of my subconscious. The one that imagined historical reenactments when I got loaded. ‘You know. A vibe. ’ That wasn’t too weird, right? ‘Some places you just get a sense of them being really old.’
    â€˜You meanlikeStonehenge.’The curiosity vanished – provided I hadn’t imagined it – and he spoke with dismissive condescension. ‘Every American says that.’
    Good. That meant I wasn’t losing it. But also bad, because I didn’t appreciate his tone.
    â€˜I couldn’t see much of Stonehenge through the tourists,’ I said coolly. ‘I mean all the other stones and heaps of earth we saw on that trip. Dad must have dragged me over half of Britain looking for Iron Age relics. It’s like any time your ancestors had a rest stop, they stood a rock up in the ground.’
    He tilted his head, either ignoring my snippy tone or simply not thinking he owed me an apology. ‘Your dad was interested in