“What, cariad?” he asked her.
“I wanted to,” she blurted, and she stiffened against his hands. “I don’t understand it, but I have to tell you the truth. I love you. I love you with all my heart, though even that seems absurd when I know so little about you. And I hate him with all my heart. And yet I wanted him. It horrifies me, yet it is true. So I was unfaithful, you see, for I was not only willing but even eager. I will walk down to Ty-Gwyn now and you can ride safely home. I will—perhaps I will not come out the next time we are called. In fact I definitely will not. Forgive me. I did not mean to—”
“Marged.” He pulled her hard against him. He did not believe it was possible to feel so elated and so wretched all at the same time. She had wanted him. And with Marged desire would never be just a physical thing. If she did not hate him so much, and with such good reason, she would love him again. And surely something in her subconscious mind was putting the two of them together—Geraint and Rebecca—and understanding the connection.
And yet there was wretchedness. She had been startlingly honest with him, and yet in his dealings with her as Rebecca he had been nothing but deceitful and dishonest. What he should do, he thought, was tell her the truth right now. He owed her the truth. And no matter what her reaction, he knew her well enough to know that she would not betray him.
“Marged,” he said, “there are things in all our lives that we are ashamed of. There are many in my life.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said quickly, looking up into his face again. “Don’t say any more. If you feel you must make confessions of your own just to make me feel better, don’t. I feel bruised and battered. All I have to believe in at the moment is you and my love for you. Don’t say any more tonight. Can you forgive me? If not, let me go home with no more said. If you can, then let us make love. I need you—if you will still have me.”
He gazed into her shadowed eyes. It was tempting. So tempting.
“Please,” she said. “Say yes or no. Nothing more than that. I could not stand more than that tonight.”
“Let us go inside, then,” he said. “I love you, Marged.”
He could see that she was smiling. “One day you will tell me everything,” she said, “all the sordid details of your life. But not tonight. This is the first night when I do not even want to know. I want to love. I want to prove to you and to myself that only you matter to me.”
“We will love,” he said, guiding her through the doorway and over to the dark corner where they had lain before. “I am on fire for you, cariad.”
He spread the blanket and lowered them both to it.
She lay relaxed and sated in his arms. He was asleep, something he rarely did during their encounters. She felt happy again. She knew that she was where she wanted to be, where she belonged. Whatever it was that had happened with Geraint two days ago, it was not love. She had confessed all to Rebecca, and he had accepted it. It had made no difference to his feelings. He was a man of incredible generosity, she thought.
She could have known by now who he was. She had sensed earlier that he was about to tell her everything. Why had she not wanted him to do so? Her reluctance had taken her by surprise. Was it that she was enjoying this fantasy? As long as she had never seen his face or heard his name, as long as she knew nothing of his life except what pertained to Rebecca, she could make him into any man she wanted him to be. Had she idealized him? Was he quite as wonderful in real life as she thought him?
Perhaps she did not want to know the reality. A real-life man was a complex person. If one lived closely with a real man, one had to adjust to his ways, learn to accept him as he was, with all his faults and annoying habits. The adjustment with Eurwyn had taken a year or more—perhaps all five years of their marriage. A close love relationship was something that had to be worked on every day of one’s life.
Maybe she was enjoying this fairy-tale romance into which real life had not yet intruded.
But she wondered if it must soon face the test of reality whether she wanted it to or not. She had just been doing mental calculations. She had been avoiding the same calculations for a few days. Her suspicions were quite correct. She was four days late. It was not a great deal of time and probably meant nothing at all. She remembered being five days late once fairly early in her marriage, but the sixth day had shattered her hopes with the indisputable evidence that she was not pregnant. This time she was only four days late.
For a moment she felt the dizziness of panic. But she would not give in to it. The chances were that she was only late. And even if it was not that, even if there was a child in her womb, he would not abandon her. He had told her that. And he had told her she could always communicate with him through Aled.
She believed him implicitly. If he had said he would not abandon her, then he would not, even though to do so would be very easy. How would she ever find him if he did not want to be found?
But she trusted him. He had withheld truths from her, but he had never lied to her. He loved her. He had told her so, and she believed him.
She rubbed her cheek against his bare chest and sighed with contentment. She allowed herself to relax into sleep.
Matthew Harley was cursing himself for a fool. It was almost dawn. He had spent most of the night out on the hill below Marged Evans’s farm, chilled to the bone, watching for something that even at the start he had been far from sure would happen.
He had just about impoverished himself lately, paying out bribes—two to the constables who had accompanied him in his pursuit of Ceris and knew the truth of that night’s events, and one to a footman at the house. The two had been paid because he had made a fool of himself over a mere tenant farmer’s daughter. The third had been paid because he desperately wanted to get revenge on someone for all the troubles that had come into his life lately. And who better to avenge himself on than the Earl of Wyvern himself?
He was sure that Wyvern was also Rebecca, incredible as the suspicion seemed.
And so he had a footman spying for him at Tegfan. And tonight Wyvern had slipped out without a word to anyone. It was impossible to know where he had gone, though Harley would bet his last penny that tomorrow would bring the news of another gate or two having been pulled down—by Rebecca and her children. Harley pinned all his hopes on witnessing Wyvern’s return and somehow seeing the evidence that Wyvern and Rebecca were one and the same person.
But where was he to wait? Outside Tegfan itself was not good enough. By the time he arrived home, doubtless all disguise and all evidence of Rebecca would have been shed. From which direction would he be likely to come? There were as many possibilities as there were directions.
But it was not difficult for Harley to decide which one he would gamble on. The last time he had seen Wyvern coming home in the early morning, he had been riding across the hill, coming from the direction of Ty-Gwyn. Harley had concluded at the time that he had been coming from a tryst with Marged Evans. It was very likely that Marged was a Rebeccaite. Her husband had been trouble, and the constable who had been stationed outside the Williams farm had seen her—or a lad Harley suspected had been her— going down the hill at a late hour.
It was very possible that Marged and Rebecca were lovers.
And so Harley stationed himself in such a position on the hill that he could see both Ty-Gwyn above and Tegfan below and yet was himself hidden from anyone who did not actually ride or walk right on top of him. And yet for all he knew, he was on a fool’s errand. There were hours and hours of chilly boredom to live through and probably would be nothing for his pains at the end of it except a sleepless night and increased anger.
It was time to return home, he decided at last. Probably Wyvern had been tucked up in his bed at Tegfan for hours already. But not so. Before he could move his cramped limbs and show himself to an empty hillside, something caught at the corner of his vision despite the fact that it was still dark. Something light.
