There waseverythingto fret over.
But Christabella clamped her lips shut and turned her attention to the game. Lady Fawkesbury was in the midst of attempting to demonstrate something that rather resembled a swan. But the entertainment did not distract her sufficiently. Even when her spirits were not weighed down by worry, and on the best of days, Christabella found charades a tedious pastime indeed. She far preferred Snapdragon, which involved fishing raisins out of a bowl of burning brandy with one’s bare fingers.
Flames made things ever so much more interesting.
But that was neither here nor there.
Christabella tapped her foot. Then she fidgeted upon the settee. She plucked at the drapery of her gown. She bit her lip. She tried, once more, to remember that she had not wanted to marry Gill. She had turned down his proposal twice, after all. It was only her sisters who believed she had lost her heart to him, who had convinced her that perhaps she ought to marry him after all. Likely, they were all wrong. Their incorrect suppositions were a natural effect of having lost their hearts to their own respective future husbands.
“Pru,” she tried again, irritated with herself for speaking and yet unable to bite her tongue. “Has he mentioned me?”
Her sister sent her another look, this one markedly sympathetic. “If he did, Ash did not say so. But I am certain he holds you in highest esteem. Else why would he want you for his wife?”
Butdidhe want her for his wife? His proposals, even when he had offered them, had all been in the wake of intense sensual encounters between the two of them. Moreover, did she want him as her husband? Just when she had begun to consider the notion she had been wrong, all these years, about what she truly wanted, Gill had grown ill and disappeared.
Before she could think better of it, she blurted out her greatest fear, aside from her worries over his health. “What if he no longer wants me as his wife?”
“He would be a fool to change his mind,” Pru reassured her softly, giving her knee a gentle pat. “But there is only one person who can give you the answers you seek, my dear. And that is Coventry himself.”
Yes, it was Coventry alone who could tell her, was it not? Which meant there was only one means by which she could have the answers she sought. The answer to just how ill he was. And the answer to how he felt about her and how she felt about him.
She shot to her feet, ignoring the startled glances from the rest of the company. Ignoring, too, her sister’s protest.
Her mind was made up.
She was going to find Gill’s bedchamber.
And she was going to trespass.
She was going to force her way inside and see for herself what state he was in. One way or another.
Her feet started moving. And that quickly, she was gone from the drawing room. A world away from the revelers within. Charades was the last thing on her mind now. As was propriety.
She needed answers, and she needed them now.
Christabella was notgoing to come.
Gill stood at the window of his bedchamber, the one which overlooked the immense, snow-encrusted lawns of Abingdon Hall’s sprawling park, along with the serpentine lake that cut through it. The day was bright, thanks to the reflective nature of the snow. It was also cold. Icy air radiated from the glass panes, kissing his lips.
It was not the kiss he wanted, that much was certain. Nor was it the kiss he longed for, the kiss that kept him awake late at night.
That kiss, it was becoming more apparent, would never again be his. He leaned his forehead against the cool pane, relishing the chill, along with the draught of winter’s wind as a blustery gust sent snow rushing from the roof of the centuries’ old manor house.
It looked as if it were snowing all over again. Wisps of snow glistened in the sunlight, fleeting and elusive in its beauty. Making him think—as if his damned mind had ever strayed in the course of the last day—once more of her.
Devil take Ash and his stupid notions.
Feigning an illness and hiding himself away in his chamber had not done one whit of good. It had been an entire day.
A whole. Bloody. Day.
And whilst Gill did not mind hiding himself away from his fellow revelers and taking a much-needed respite from an endless barrage of faces, there was one face he missed. One face he longed for. One woman he was beginning to fear he may have lost forever.
If he had ever had her.
What would a bold, gorgeous lady like Christabella Winter want with a husk of a man who could not even manage to form coherent sentences in large gatherings of people? Nothing, as was blatantly apparent by her lack of attempt to seek him out.
Every time he had asked Ash if Christabella had inquired after him, Ash had been gentle in his reassurance that he had no doubt she would. At some point.
