A Love Worthy

Chapter Twenty-One

  

                The season grew colder with lingering nights and pale, gray skies. Leaves fell from their tangled limbs littering the roughened terrain in autumn hues of yellow, red and orange.

            Ginelle shivered as she rubbed her arms, sinking deeper into her cloak. She had been looking forward to taking Milly for a ride and now decided against it with the sudden cold draft sweeping from over the hills. She had not been feeling well as of late, plagued with backs pain and fatigue, so she thought better of it and returned to the manor.

            Mayhap a nap would ease her troubled mind and tired body. She paused half-way down the hall, her heart sinking in her chest as she pressed a hand flat against the mahogany door leading into Dorian’s study. 

            She sparred a glance sideways before entering the room and closing the door quietly behind her. She pressed her back flat against the door and felt a shudder quiver through her body. She closed her eyes as she inhaled his scent, drinking in his memory as troubling, subliminal thoughts rushed to mind.

            Her mind seemed to conjure every frightening threat likely to endanger Dorian’s life but she couldn’t seem to shake the notion that something dreadfully unimaginable had happened to him and the idea of another heart ache was all too catastrophic.

Lerwick, Shetland Islands: November, 1816.

 

 

            Time transpired without recollection and though he could not prevent the duration of time, he held strongly onto the vitality of his thoughts; they were all that kept him sane.

            He tasted the copper tang of blood along his tongue, felt every inch of the rusted shackles encased around the bone and flesh of his wrists. He could feel the sticky substance of his own blood seeping profusely from the inflicted wounds along his limbs, soaking his tattered clothing but none of that mattered for the remainder of his crew were alive and well on their way home.

            His temples throbbed, forcing his head forward, the pain doubling with every little movement of his beaten frame. He fought against waves of churning disorientation and the pain, growing spreading throughout his weakened body to burry deep into the recesses of his mind rendered him debilitated but through it all, he kept her in mind.

            Through his blackened haze, Dorian sought the only image of beauty that brought immediate comfort, the only lingering thread of sanity he could hold onto.

            She was like lemons and sunlight. The purity and beauty of Ginelle swept away all the sorrows of his predicament, allowing him to maintain some semblance of his sanity while buried in this blackened hell.

            Dorian clenched his eyes and imagined the sweet scent of heather, the softness of her doe-like eyes and the ivory complexion of her skin. He knew the moment she came to Ashford that she would be his. He had made a grave mistake in ignoring his feelings for her. He should have made Ginelle his long ago and vowed that if he ever escaped this blasted hole, he would see to making Ginelle his forever.