[ SNATCH ]: sender snatches receiver's wrist as they turn to go.
The road had given her to him as it gave everything else – without warning, without reason. One moment there had been only the pale stretch of track and the storm-broken heath. The next, a figure set wrong against it. Too fine, too still, for the moor.
He had looked at her, as any man must. Long enough to mark what did not sit easy with him.
She was slight, yet not fragile in the way of ordinary women. There was a poise to her that did not belong to wind or weather, but to something arranged – deliberate, unnatural, like a doll set upright by unseen hands. Her eyes were pale, wide, pebble-bright, catching what little light the sky gave and bending it strangely. There was no softness in them, though her face might have suggested it. They did not wander, nor plead. They fixed.
Hareton did not like that.
Still, it was not cruelty that moved him to go, nor even indifference, but a reluctance worn into the bone.
Hareton Earnshaw did not linger where he was not certain of his place and the moor, for all its harshness, had always made more sense to him than people did. A lost traveller might be pitied, perhaps guided a short distance, but beyond that he had no language for comfort, no easy grace to offer.
He shifted, turned away, his boot treads grinding against the slate-coloured track. He would have gone, but for her hand closing about his wrist.
The contact came quickly and, although there was no great strength in it, it arrested him at once. Hareton stiffened, the instinct to pull free flaring sharp and immediate, his body tensing as though he had been caught in a snare. He looked down, frowning, at the pale length of her fingers set against his skin.
Wind shoved past them, dragging at hair and coat alike, but that small, waxen grip held fast. It was a strange thing . Stranger still that it should come from a person who knew nothing of him – who could not know the roughness of his temper, or the clumsiness of his speech, or the long shadow that followed him like a black dog.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze. Up close, the strangeness did not lessen.
There was something in his dark eyes. A slow-dawning recognition of how empty the heathland truly was, how mercilessly it stretched in all directions. Out of all that breadth, she had fastened onto him, as though she had found in him the last sure point in a wild, mottled world.
Hareton’s jaw set. The first sharp urge to wrench himself free ebbed, leaving behind something heavier, less comfortable. His arm flexed once beneath her hand, testing the weight of it, the persistence.
Words would come poorly, he knew. Ever they turned blunt and blunderous before they ever left his mouth. Thus, he stood in silence, the space between them drawn tight by that single point of contact. Beneath their feet, the road lay uncertain. Above them, the sky hung in a low vault, bloated with the promise of rain.
At length, his other hand rose, slow and deliberate, and he gestured. Not back the way he had come, nor into the trackless spread, but slightly aside, towards a narrower path, half-hidden in the purple-eyed heather. Safer ground, ground known to him.
A choice, offered as plainly as he could manage without words.