He couldn’t imagine what that had done to her, spending days waiting alone for a man who would never return. Smoothing her tangled hair away from her face, he asked, “What happened? How did you get home?”
“After…after three days, I had to leave. I had no money of my own, and you had only paid for the week. So I packed up our things—there weren’t so very many of them; just enough to fill my valise—and I walked home.”
“Walked?” It had been raining when he had left, the sort of April rain that clogged the air and stuck around for a week or more, washing out roads and creating pockets of mud and muck. “Two miles? In the rain?”
She shrugged, and he had the odd notion that she was trying to make nothing of it, to allay his guilt. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “The road was mostly clear.”
Not so clear, if, as his father had said, she had arrived at Newsom Manor soaking wet and covered in mud. “You came to the manor,” he prompted.
A brief nod. “It was clear that nobody was expecting me,” she said. “The butler thought I was a servant seeking employment.”
“Carstairs,” Gabriel said. “I’ve never liked him. He’s always been a condescending arse.”
An odd, brittle-sounding flutter of laughter escaped her. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so small and insignificant,” she said. “At least, until your father arrived. He was worse—he sneered at me as if I were an insect that had dared to invade the sanctity of his home. He said you were off gallivanting around London, and it was only my fault if I had been fooled into thinking you had married me.” She sniffled. “I shouldn’t have believed him.”
But what else could she have done? What else should she have thought but that she had been abandoned? He had left her at the inn for three days, worried and alone, and when she had come to Newsom Manor for answers, she had been jeered at.
“I took the bank draft,” she said, “because I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t going to use it. I wasn’t going to be bought off like—like I was only a dirty little secret to be concealed at all costs. But then—”
“But then you discovered you were with child.” How foolish she must have felt, how ashamed.
“Havenwood is such a small village,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t stay with Anne forever. She had her own little ones, and I couldn’t raise Matthew in a village where everyone would know the circumstances of his birth. I couldn’t go home to my father—he would have tossed me out on my ear. So I took the bank draft up to London and leased a little house in Cheapside. No one knew me in London, no one questioned me when I told them I was a widow. But the funds from your father lasted just a little over a year, and I knew I would have to find work. By that time, work in Havenwood had dried up and Anne and her family had moved to Spitalfields, where her husband found work at a textile mill. It was a lucky situation for both of us—I found work as governess, and Anne’s family benefited from the wages I was able to earn. I don’t know what I would have done without her,” she sniffed. “I couldn’t have hoped to support Matthew on my own.”
For all that his last interaction with Claire’s sister had been contentious, Gabriel felt fiercely thankful to the woman. She had likely saved Claire and Matthew both from a workhouse or worse. He owed her something for her pains—an annuity, perhaps.
“Another woman in similar circumstances,” he said carefully, “might have considered an orphanage.”
She shook her head, and he felt her damp lashes flutter against his throat. “I could never have done such a thing,” she said. “I loved him so much, even before he was born. He was all I had of you.”
His heart gave a vicious pulse in his chest as her voice broke on the words, and he pressed his palm to the small of her back, rubbing in soothing circles in an attempt to offer comfort. He hadn’t had altogether much experience with it, but he murmured consoling nonsense to her until at last she pulled away and swiped her hands across her eyes.
“Claire, my darling girl—”
“Don’t.” Her voice was sharp, pained.
The rebuff stung. “You’re my wife,” he said, and this time the words felt more thanright, they felttrue. He’d been fed a steady stream of lies, and now that the truth had revealed itself, hefeltit in his heart.
“But I’m not, and I haven’t been in so many years. A few days of marriage hardly makes me a wife,” she said, choking on the words. She drew a short breath that sounded agonized, and flung herself at him. Her lips landed somewhat shy of the mark, and her fingers trembled as she slid them through his hair, grabbing hold of him like a drowning woman struggling for survival, and he thought perhaps she was seeking the same thing he had been—connection. To seek solace in reminiscence, to cling to the memory of the last time they had been happy together, when last they had truly felt alive.
He doubted it would change anything between them. The obstacles that existed would still be there in the morning. But she was his Claire, his wife, his darling girl, and all he had ever wanted was to make her happy.
She made a furious protest when he pulled away, her fingers grasping handfuls of his hair, but he pried them free and clasped them in his. “You’ll be here in the morning,” he said. “You’re not going to sneak out like a thief in the night.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t stay with you through the night. Everyone will know.”
“You had your way last time—tonight is on my terms. Tonight, you are my wife.” Her fingers flexed in his, and for an instant he thought she might shake them loose and retreat, that perhaps he might’ve asked too much of her.
Then she gave a soft sob, and her fingers curled around his, and she murmured, “Yes.” Shedidshake her fingers free, but it was only to pry loose his shirt and drag it over his head, and there in the darkness he could have sworn that years had peeled away from them in layers until they were both young and full of hope and love.
That bright future to which they had once looked forward so ardently had been snatched away from them. Tomorrow their tenuous truce would dissolve—what lived in cover of darkness could never withstand the light of day. But tonight was a gift they gave to one another.
When they slept at last, it was with her legs entangled with his own, her palm splayed over his heart, his arm banded around her, his chin resting atop her head. And when he woke in the morning, her face was the first thing he saw.
∞∞∞
Claire woke with the full weight and measure of the sun on her face, which was an unusual occurrence. She was accustomed to rising with the dawn, when the light had barely breached her window, but it seemed that just a few days of convalescence had made her a slugabed. Rather hypocritical of her, since she’d have chewed the ears off of any maid who had been similarly lazy.
“Good morning.”
