“Thank you for your concern.” He turned his attention back to their son. “Shall we play with the horses some more, lad? What do you suppose?”
“Da-yun,” Robby said, clapping his hands with enthusiasm.
“Stallion. Yes, that is it, my boy.” Adrian grinned, pleased at Robby’s attention to his instructions.
Even Tilly had to admit it sounded as if Robby had said stallion. Quite a feat for a lad of his tender age. One who had only just recently begun walking. He was an intelligent child. Inquisitive and loving and wonderful.
Adrian gripped his walking stick and painstakingly made his way back across the carpets, their son in his arms. She watched father and son seat themselves on the Axminster once more and pick up their games and instruction where they had left off.
Tilly was forgotten.
She settled back into the chair she had so recently vacated and took up her embroidery with grim, renewed determination. Watching Adrian and Robby together never failed to warm her heart. As she resumed plying her needle, she reminded herself that there had been a prolonged period of her life—a painful, terrible stretch of interminable days—when watching Adrian and Robby together had been a fantasy rather than a possibility.
They were fortunate indeed that they were able to be together freely. That he had returned to her. That Longleigh was no longer alive to continue causing either of them further misery.
And yet, they still had so far to go in the journey they had unwittingly begun in Derbyshire. A lifetime ahead of them. If the day and their marriage thus far were any indication, they would require the full term.
For a time, she devoted herself to the roses, stitching them with singular purpose. They were dreadful looking. Nothing but purple lumps of frustration upon the handkerchief she had been intending as a gift for Pippa’s upcoming birthday. She’d thought she had green thread in her sewing basket, but the only color she required for the stems, thorns, and leaves was conspicuously absent. She chose brown instead.
A withered rose.
Some petals scattered about would help to bolster the effect.
Perhaps not a gift for her friend after all, then, but a handkerchief she would keep for herself. Pippa also dearly loved the soaps Tilly ordered from a Parisiansavonshop. Mayhap the lavender as a replacement for the roses she had savaged with her needle.
With a sigh of disgust for her lack of talent, she set the needle, thread, and unfinished handkerchief aside. She had grown weary of feigning interest in embroidery, a gentle art form she had never possessed the patience or skill to succeed at in the best of circumstances, let alone when she was a jumbled mess of confusion. Her irritability was instead taking precedence.
She longed to leave the room, to take a walk about the gardens, and yet here in this chamber were the people she loved most. One of them loved her in return, and she knew she must be grateful for that. The other, however…
Tilly busied herself with packing away her scissors and threads.
She supposed it was too much to hope that last night had meant something more to him, as it had to her. She had been so hopeful that their physical connection—the passion that had always burned so fierce and hot and which had not dimmed in the time they had spent apart—would transcend his misgivings.
And yet here they were, carrying on with their day as if they had not spent the night pressed skin to skin, sharing the same bed. As if last night had been as commonplace as the sky above. As if they had never loved, as if they had not spent months wrapped up in each other. She had not been prepared for her reaction tohisreaction, it seemed.
“Is it still paining you?”
She glanced up, startled to discover Adrian was addressing her instead of Robby, who was clutching a pale-brown horse in his hand and chewing relentlessly upon its front hooves. For a moment, she almost thought he was referring to her heart.
Until she recalled the prick of the needle, digging into her unsuspecting flesh. The crimson of the blood marring the snowy white of hismouchoir. She glanced down at her thumb. Scarcely even a dried dot of blood to show the damage which had been done. If only other wounded parts of her had fared as well.
“It is fine,” she told him. “Why do you ask?”
“You have been sighing a great deal.”
“Oh. Have I interrupted your playing horse? Forgive me.” It was impossible to keep the bitterness from creeping into her voice.
She knew it was wrong of her. He was spending time with their son. Robby deserved his father’s unfettered attention. And yet, the feelings which had been roiling through her since this morning were swelling to an uncontrollable, unpleasant high tide.
“You are cross with me.”
She took up the basket, drawing it over her arm, and glanced back at him, endeavoring to keep a polite smile pinned upon her lips. “I am tired.”
“And cross.”
She gritted her teeth. “Do you wish to make a row before Robby?”
“Why should we make a row?” He studied her.
