“The lady is my wife!” Brodie responded in a tone that left no doubt or room for argument.
All things considered I was as surprised as Mr. Darby. Since our that first meeting the day before after my return to London, he had been remote, almost indifferent, refusing to engage in anything more than professional conversation necessary to the case.
“Wife?” Mr. Darby replied in a somewhat drunken slur. Then he laughed.
“No bother,” he said then with hands raised. “But a lucky man, you be with such a fair one.”
He chuckled and then left, bracing himself against another table as he made his way back to the bar.
Brodie watched him leave, then took the chair opposite at the table. That dark gaze met mine, briefly.
“The girl will bring supper.”
And that was the total of our supper conversation. Afterward, we climbed the stairs to the second floor over the tavern.
We found the room and Brodie inserted the large iron key into the lock.
The room was small but clean, with what passed for an overstuffed chair, a small table, wash stand, and a narrow bed against the far wall that was hardly meant for two people.
“I’ll stay in the common room below,” he commented with a look at the bed.
“That’s not necessary…”
It certainly had never been an issue in the past when we were working together or...when not working together. The bed in the adjacent room at the office on the Strand was hardly larger.
But this was different. And I had to admit I felt a tightness deep inside that made it hard to breathe with this difficulty between us.
“You will hardly be able to get any sleep with the tavern full of customers,” I pointed out. “Heaven knows if any of them will go home for the night.”
“Mikaela…”
I heard something in his voice. He hesitated, then finally agreed.
“I’ll take the chair.”
So, there we were, in a tavern in Norfolk, with that narrow bed and an overstuffed chair, which the description defied as there appeared to be little stuffing in it.
I had not seriously considered that we might need to stay over. However, it was not the first time and I undressed down to my chemise and petticoat then crawled under the blankets.
I wakened sometime later to the sounds of Brodie shifting about in the chair, followed by silence.
I had given him a blanket from the bed earlier, however there was no coal stove and the room had grown quite cold through the night. I removed a blanket from the bed, the table and that chair dark shadows, as I crossed the room.
I was careful not to waken him if he should have gone back to sleep as I laid the second blanket over him. He had not, that dark gaze meeting mine in the half-light that spilled through the window.
I saw so many things there. Memories perhaps from the past when we had shared a room? And a bed? Or perhaps only weariness from tossing about in an attempt to get comfortable?
I wanted very much to ease whatever it was I saw there—questions, words left unspoken? Anger? Was it still there?
Then, I felt the brush of his hand on mine.
The things I thought I saw were still there in that dark gaze, along with something else. Something that might have been sadness? Or regret?
Whatever it was, I felt it as well.
“Caileag,” that Scots accent wrapped around the word.
I had no way of knowing what it meant, my Gaelic limited to a few words and phrases. But there was something in the way he said it, a softness what wrapped around it, far different from the anger that had sent me from him months before.
