‘Careful to never choose again?’
‘Careful to make sure that the choices are my own.’ She frowned. ‘I am amazed I am speaking of this, given that you might be a man who likes to gossip.’
‘How little you know of me,’ he returned and looked her in the eye. ‘The Elmsworth name has always been on the sharp edge of scandal and it makes one cautious in any conversation. For years I never went near the city because of rumours that were loudly stated.’
‘The stories about your family?’
‘It seems you have heard them.’
‘I should imagine if I’d listened to the gossip about my marriage it would have been equally damning.’
‘But you didn’t listen?’
‘I didn’t.’
Phillip was thrown off centre, spiralling to a place he hadn’t found himself in before. He had been so long out of Society he felt…discomforted.
When he failed to speak her left hand moved to cup her chin as she leaned forward. There was no ring on her fourth finger, which was both telling and appropriate. He almost wished he might strip his own off just for now, but such an action seemed disloyal.
Gretel.Her face was faded and blurred in the heat of a different need. He felt like another man, a freer one, a man who might step outside duty and memory for one moment and live.
‘What do your friends call you, Mrs St Claire?’
‘Willa.’
Her hand bumped across his on the table as she resettled herself at the kitchen bench, though she was careful to move it away. Touch was a beguiling thing, he thought next. It had been two and a half years since he had felt another’s skin against his own and Wilhelmina St Claire was warm. Gretel’s fingers hadalways been cold, some affliction of circulation she had had since childhood. His own shook slightly and he swore under his breath as he tried to still them.
‘Which hand do you write with, my lord?’
Another unexpected question? He could barely keep up.
‘My right.’
‘Then I shall read your left one. Cup it slightly like this near the candle. Good.’ He felt her glance upon him.
‘This is your head line and it tells me that you mull over things for a long time.’ Her finger hovered above his palm. ‘Your heart line has a cross on it.’ She stopped.
‘Which means?’
‘You have experienced a deep and personal betrayal…’
He jerked back abruptly before she could say more but she only smiled, holding out her own left hand.
‘Mine is the same but with even more crosses. Lionel is one of those, to be sure, and my parents are probably another, but these ones… I don’t know about their meaning and perhaps I never will. The truth is these things are only a pathway to what we don’t want to be.’
The light of the candle on her face made her skin glow.
‘You are saying, then, that the lines of the body have their own stories?’ Even as he phrased this question he wondered where it had come from. He had always been so rational and practical but he felt as if he had been transported inside the Garden of Eden and to the beginning of the world.
She did not do what he expected. She did not adhere to rules. She was nothing like Gretel. Worry thundered in his head and he swallowed.
‘It has been a long time since…’ He could not finish, could not put into words exactly what he was thinking as he touched the gold ring encircling his fourth finger.
Such actions left him vulnerable, for Willa St Claire would be able to see the effect she had on him and it was right that she should. He had never strayed, not once in all the years of his marriage, not even after Gretel was gone. He had never had a mistress or used the services of a courtesan while he had been married to her either here in England or in the Americas, and so it had been a long time since such physical closeness had been his.
‘I have never been disloyal even to the memory of my wife.’
His words were honest, for this rush of lust was an unquiet thing.
