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.

They would win any fight. She had no doubt about that. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t draw a little blood before she surrendered.

Quick, she told herself as she rushed out of the bedroom, armed. She refused to panic. Or not yet, anyway. Not while she still had things to do. Quick, quick.

She could hear the vehicle pulling up in the yard outside and the voices of the men, loud and dangerous in that way she’d only heard from a muffled distance before, on that long, scary trip from the coast to the city ten years ago. Brigands had stopped the bus she was on to extort payment from the passengers and had made it clear they had no trouble resorting to violence. She’d held ten-year-old Nicoline tight and hidden them both beneath a merchant’s smelly tarps, and somehow they’d emerged unscathed.

Matylda recognized the same kind of rough laughter she’d heard a decade ago. She knew that she had very little time left, because she doubted she’d be quite so lucky as to avoid trouble twice.

She ran for the bell tower. She threw open the narrow door and she reached for the ropes, remembering the day she’d gotten here and Zavier had taken her on a tour of her new home. He’d thrown open the door exactly the way she just had, and had promised her that she could ring those bells and he would hear them wherever he was in the valley. But then he invited her to try, and had laughed when she’d barely been able to move one of the thick, heavy ropes. The bell had clanked faintly up above, but hadn’t rung at all.

Matylda was determined that she would ring that damn bell today if it was the last thing she did on this earth. Which, she thought darkly as she heard the men’s voices from outside, it very well might be.

She began tugging, using her whole body.

And a miracle happened, because she was stronger than she’d been when she got here. She’d been doing farm labor from before dawn until after dark for almost three months, to say nothing of the exercise she got with Zavier. She hauled heavy tubs around the house. She fetched buckets of water from the well. If she needed heavy things moved during the day there was no one to do it but her, so she figured it out. She even helped with the work out on the land, like mending fences, when Zavier needed a second hand.

She wasn’t the helpless creature who’d come here. That woman didn’t exist any longer.

It was one more thing to love about this place—and this marriage.

And Matylda had never wanted anything so badly in all her life as she wanted to live through whatever was happening here today.

She wanted the coming summer. She wanted to see what grew in her garden. She wanted more than the seeds she’d planted—she wanted to see them grow. Flower into plants and vegetables, grow green and stretch high. She wanted to see them settle down into the following winter, then bloom anew.

Over and over again, season after season, year after year.

So she pulled and she pulled, the rope making her palms feel scalded, red and hot, but she didn’t care about that. Because the bells were ringing, and they sang out the way Zavier had said they would. Filling the June sky and the valley beyond.

Telling him she loved him, she hoped. Because she did, and she might not get another chance to convince him.

But more than that, telling him that she needed him home.

Now.