Zavier found that he took against this younger sister Nicoline, that easily. It was something in the way Matylda spoke so carefully, as if she was trying to be respectful of Nicoline’s feelings. When it was Matylda sitting here, too many vertical miles out into the untamed frontier, not her sister. Matylda who’d lit up Zavier’s entire world no matter how he tried to pretend it was the coming summer. Matylda who had made him imagine . . .
But that was the point, he was forced to remind himself. None of this was real. Matylda most of all.
“She’s such a charming girl,” Matylda said, still talking about her sister. “And so pretty people stop to comment on it. A great beauty, some even say. There are a lot of pretty girls, of course. But Nicoline is also fertile. She began bleeding only this past year and is already pregnant.”
“I’m sure her lord holds her in high regard, then,” Zavier said. Perhaps a little too dismissively. “How do your sister’s looks or fertility lead to you out here on the frontier, married to a stranger?”
With me?
But he didn’t ask that last bit. He had some small shred of pride.
Matylda smiled. “She’s in love. She wants to marry the father of her baby. And because she’s in love and wants to marry the father of her baby, she also has a four-month tithing debt at the bell towers.”
Zavier didn’t like where this was going. He surged to his feet and found himself roaming over to stand in front of the fireplace. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep his damned hands to himself. But his gaze was still pinned to Matylda.
“I thought you had to go every week.”
“You do. If you don’t tithe twice a week, every week, the seneschal marks you down in the books and you have to make it up. Or face the consequences if you don’t.”
Zavier definitely did not want to picture Matylda “making it up.” Much less facing the sort of consequences he was sure he could imagine all too well on his own. Men who liked to control access to pussy always let their imaginations run wild when it came to punishments. Because that was when they could strip off their masks and stop pretending. He’d seen it a thousand times. He scowled, as much at his unexpected surge of possessiveness regarding his wife as at the images in his head.
“But your sister didn’t want to do that, I’m guessing.”
“Her debt is too large,” Matylda said. Quietly, he thought. As if she was sensing that he wouldn’t like this very much either. Or maybe because she didn’t like it all that much herself. “She’s freshly blooded and pregnant so quickly. Her fertility price is outrageous, of course. No common person could ever pay it.”
“But you can, can’t you?” Zavier gritted out, past that iron thing in him that felt too cold and too hard and entirely too much like a blow. “Let me guess. You thought you’d mail yourself off to the most difficult man on the frontier. What’s the going rate for that?”
But this was Matylda. She didn’t cringe away or bow her head in shame. Her eyes didn’t well up with tears. She faced him straight on, her gaze cool and her chin high.
“As you say, no women come all the way out here unless they have a great need of the frontier. And what it can give them. You already know this. I don’t know why you’re acting surprised that I have similar needs.”
“I’ll assume that means it costs a lot to come placate me.”
“My fertility price was set to match my sister’s,” Matylda said quietly.
Zavier had lived here long enough to know what that meant. The lord didn’t actually pay these women anything. He forgave presumed debt. That meant that he’d set Matylda’s debt astronomically high—and this on top of her sister’s existing price. Which meant it was all bullshit.
“How long do you have to suffer out here?” he gritted out. “Handling my egregious crap?”
Her chin rose higher and her green eyes flashed. “I am not suffering.”
“Answer the question.”
“For every year I stay out here, I earn a year of my sister’s life.”
Zavier laughed. It sounded to him like a death rattle. And he could tell from the look on Matylda’s face that she liked it about as much.
“What a martyr you are,” he managed to scrape out and throw at her. “It’s not even your own need that brought you here. It’s a vague threat to your sister’s life.” He spat that out like a curse. “That’s what sends you running straight to the worst monster on the whole of the frontier.”
Matylda shrugged. Helplessly, he would’ve said, if she was anyone else.
“I raised her. If I can help her, of course I will.”
And something in him broke.
“I knew it.” He dragged his hands through his hair, staring at her as if she’d stuck him in the chest with the sharpest of his blades. He wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t. “I knew you were too good to be true. And of course you are.”
“I love it here,” Matylda said fiercely. She shot to her feet, her hands in fists at her sides, though she was wise enough to stay where she was. Zavier didn’t know what he would do if she crossed to the fire and put her hands on him. Not right now, when for the first time in his life, he wasn’t entirely sure that he could control himself. He didn’t care for the sensation. “And I love you.”
That slammed into him. It made him ache, everywhere. It made him furious.
“Bullshit.” He threw that out the way he’d throw a knife across a room to bury it in an enemy’s neck. And she shook as if he done exactly that. “I don’t trust a single thing you say. All of this is a lie. Everything you’ve done. Everything you said. All to save your worthless sister who I doubt has thought of you at all since the day you left.”
Matylda jerked. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Nicoline loves me. I love her. We’re family.”
“Here’s what I know, baby,” he bit out. “Family doesn’t sell family to pay their debts. If your sister has a brain in her head—which I fucking doubt, given the fact she sold her only family member into a mail-order marriage that everyone knows is a last resort—she’ll ditch the lover and please the lord.”
“What do you mean?” Matylda shook her head. “She loves Fernando.”
“Only a fool wastes away in a poor, common marriage when she has the option to be a great lady instead,” Zavier growled. “Is your sister a fool?”
“No, but—”
“She’s newly blooded and newly pregnant. You said she’s pretty besides. Let me guess, the lord graciously offered to let the would-be husband work off the debt somewhere.”
“Yes, but Fernando is just as happy to help as—”
“So the husband he sent off to some work camp forever, and the only remaining family member he sent to the meanest fucking frontiersmen out here. Because don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. Your lord knows exactly what I am. He knows where I came from and he knows what I can do. He expects me to break you.”
Matylda blew out a breath. “To what end?”
“Don’t be so naive.” And Zavier didn’t know who he was angrier at. The asshole lord or the faithless sister or Matylda herself, for believing this crap. “He wants your very pretty, very fertile sister for himself. This way he can claim her and make good on the debt she owes him, all without lifting a finger. That’s what lords do. They’re dicks.”
Matylda looked a little pale. She had her hair up the way she liked to do, so he could enjoy taking it down again, and that meant he could gauge her moods by the red flushes that gave her away, up and down the soft skin of her neck. But he couldn’t even enjoy that tonight. There was nothing left to enjoy, because all of this was bullshit. All of this was a game she was playing. Of course she’d taken to him and his life faster than anyone else ever had. She had no escape route. She had to make this work.
He couldn’t believe he’d fallen for it.
“I didn’t know any of that,” Matylda was whispering. “I don’t even know if what you’re saying is true and even if it is, I don’t think Nicoline would
go for it. But this is true, Zavier.” And she opened up her hands to take in the old, restored church. The valley all around them, stretching from the highest peak in the region down to the bitch sea he could hear laughing at him, all this way, for imagining he could escape the things he’d done and what it had earned him. “Everything that happened here is real. Especially between you and me.”
“Between you and me?” He laughed again. “There’s a whole lot of fucking between you and me, Matylda. And nothing else.”
“That’s a lie.” She threw it out like a serious accusation. Like she was calling him out for a fight and expected him to answer her on a field of battle. She had no idea how much he wished he could. “You know it’s a lie.”
“The only lie here is you.” And he didn’t question that wild, raw thing inside of him. Where iron met pain and made him a stranger to himself all over again, the way he’d been when he’d washed up on Esteban’s shore in the first place. He didn’t question it. He only knew that she was the reason he felt this shit. And she had to go. “I’m not going to wait for the solstice, Matylda. I’m taking you back now. Tomorrow.”
He saw her sway on her feet. And every part of him wanted to go to her, but he refused to let himself do it. She didn’t care that he was getting rid of her. She cared that her precious sister might be at risk.
He told himself he might give her another chance if she’d admit that. Just once.
“Zavier . . . I’m not lying to you,” she whispered. She lifted one of her hands as if she wanted to touch him, but didn’t dare. Then she dropped it back to her side. “I love you.”
But he knew that was the biggest lie of all. Because he knew it was impossible.
And he hated her for making him imagine otherwise.
Even for a second.
“Go to bed, Matylda,” he ordered her. In the voice he used when he needed her to obey. Instantly.
She shuddered.
And it still took her a minute. A wealth of emotion crossed her face. He could read it right there in her wide green eyes, glazed with a pain he didn’t want to recognize. He didn’t want to recognize any of it. But finally, she went.
And for the first time since he’d met her bus, Zavier didn’t follow.
7.
Matylda slept alone and didn’t like it.
She woke again and again throughout the night, sneaking out a foot across the wide mattress to see if Zavier had come in while she slept fitfully, but she only ever found the cold of the bed instead of his always too-hot body.
She expected to wake up to find Zavier standing there over her, the bag she’d come with packed and ready to go. Maybe she’d dreamed that over the course of the night, one anxiety-racked scenario after the next, making her sleep anything but restful. But when she opened her eyes to see the hint of pink stretching over the sky outside that told her it was much later than usual, Zavier wasn’t there.
Matylda couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept until dawn. It was disorienting to crawl out of bed and pull on her clothes without having to light the lantern, and then make her way out into the living room to find the fire was still banked from the night before. Normally Zavier stoked it when he got up, so that when she came out to make breakfast it was already blazing again and the kitchen was warm.
Everything was wrong. But she couldn’t bring herself to truly believe that he was sending her home. Back down to the city, where she would have to pick up her life again as if she’d never left it—
Where Nicoline will have to pay for this, she reminded herself sharply.
This wasn’t about her. This wasn’t about her feelings or the heart in her chest that felt a whole lot like broken. This is about the very real damage her inability to stay here would do to her sister.
She’d been warned.
Matylda set about her morning chores, because she couldn’t think what else to do. And she couldn’t bring herself to let what she love suffer just because she was. But the morning ticked on by and there was no sign of Zavier. The livestock was tended to and the usual milk waited in buckets by the back door, indicating that he’d been here. And not long before she’d woken up. His preferred truck was gone from in front of the house. That was all.
And that could mean anything. It could mean that he’d thought better of last night. It could mean that he planned to settle the cattle somewhere before he took her back down to the village where he could throw her on the next bus out. It could mean a thousand things, but she didn’t know which way he was leaning, because he wasn’t here.
That meant she was left with nothing but his words in her head. And a view of her little sister she really didn’t want.
As much as she wanted to tell herself otherwise, she didn’t actually know what Nicoline would do if given the choice of a life with the lord instead of an impoverished marriage to Fernando. All Nicoline had done since her debt had been uncovered—and along with it, her pregnancy—was weep. Weep and make excuses. She hadn’t apologized. Not to the majordomo when she’d had the chance, in his role as the lord’s proxy, and certainly not to Matylda at any other time.
She’d just . . . wept.
Even when Matylda had packed up her bag and pointed out that she had no idea if the sisters would ever meet again—which she’d tried her hardest to keep from sounding unduly dramatic, because it was a simple truth—Nicoline hadn’t taken the opportunity to apologize. Or thank her sister for her sacrifice—or any of her sacrifices over the years. She’d only wiped at her eyes, offered a tremulous smile, and wished Matylda a safe journey.
As if Matylda was abandoning her to go on some fantastic adventure, instead of heading off into the great wilderness of the frontier to pay off Nicoline’s debts.
She’d excused it, of course. Matylda loved her sister.
But now she couldn’t help wondering if Zavier was right. Was Matylda just being naïve? Or was it simply another example of what she’d always imagined it was—that Nicoline didn’t view her as a sister, but as a kind of parent. That cut both ways. It never occurred to Nicoline to worry about Matylda, especially when Matylda was so busy worrying about her. She was so much younger that it must have seemed impossible to her that Matylda could need that from her. Or so Matylda had always told herself.
But she couldn’t get past the expression that had been on Zavier’s face when she’d told him why she was here. She would have called it hurt if he’d been another man.
Maybe it wasn’t fair, but Matylda found she certainly had it in her to blame Nicoline for that.
“You can forgive the rest,” she chided herself out loud as she cycled through her usual morning chores. “You can chalk it up to your odd, almost-parental relationship. But not when Zavier might be hurt as a result of it. That is a step too far.”
If she hadn’t already known that she was in love with the man, that would have clued her in. And she still had no idea what on earth she would do if he sent her away.
Matylda was sweeping the kitchen floor, lost in thought and muttering to herself as she attacked what little dirt and dust had accumulated since yesterday, when a strange sensation snaked down the length of her spine.
She stopped sweeping, aware that she hadn’t been paying attention to anything around her for some time. She’d been too lost in all the arguments she was having inside her head. And then she was aware in the next moment that it was a particularly strange thing to notice—the absence of paying attention—way out here where there was nothing to notice but the wind and the sun and the antics of the chickens out in the yard.
That was when she heard it. The sound of a vehicle—and not Zavier’s truck. She knew the sound of that truck as well as she knew the feel of his hand against her skin. She could identify it from a long way off, the rattle of his engine that told her he was coming home to her at the end of a long day. It was likely she’d heard this vehicle too, but had been too busy fretting over her sister’s debt and the indisputable fact that she would have come here—had
she known what waited for her out in these mountains, in all his blue-eyed glory—for free.
Though she had no idea how she would ever convince Zavier of that.
She shook off the thing she couldn’t change, at least not right now, and moved out of the kitchen to the large windows at the front of the church.
And then froze.
Because she had never seen a vehicle like the one that was roaring down the side of the hill toward her. It looked stripped-down, as if it was missing half of a truck. It was wide open to the June sunshine.
And it was filled with men.
Matylda knew two things instantly. These men were not invited guests. And this was not good.
She realized she was holding her breath and let it out while her mind spun around and around. It was well on to midmorning. There was nothing out here, up and down this valley as far as she could see and then much further than that, except Zavier’s land. Farmland. Crops here and grazing pastures there. Cows and sheep and pigs.
Clearly this was cultivated, claimed land, which meant someone had to work it. If these men wanted to speak to Zavier, they would not expect to find him tucked up in his house at midday when there was work to be done in all directions and gorgeous almost-summer weather in which to do it.
They expected to take the house. And her with it, she imagined.
It didn’t matter if they knew she was here or didn’t. Either way, it wouldn’t end well for her.
The vehicle kept coming, not slowing down at all as it bounced down the steep side of the mountain. And Matylda knew she had to stop thinking this through and act—or she’d run out of chances to do anything.
She raced for the doors first, throwing the heavy locks. She didn’t expect that to do much more than hold them off for a little while, but it was something. Then she hurried into the bedroom. She set down the blade she’d taken to carrying with her and went straight to one of Zavier’s harnesses that hung there on the wall. This one was made of leather, old and a bit stiff, but she shrugged it on anyway. It reminded her of the corset she didn’t miss at all, and she cinched it up quickly. Then she made a few selections from the wall around her.