He ran a cake of lavender-scented soap along his arms and his legs. The water clouded, and the scent eased tension from his shoulders. His skin tingled as if new.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, taking another deep inhale.
Lavender.
He placed the faint sent that had lingered in Penelope’s hair, enhancing the scent his body remembered. He slid lower into the warmth of the tub.
His wife was remarkable in ways he’d never understood. Loyal. Inventive. Competent. Few men would have been able to create what she’d created out of Pensteague. And, if they had achieved such a feat, fewer still would have risked those accomplishments and taken leave to provide care to a man who had only ever caused her grief.
Where had she found her strength, her fortitude?
He wanted to learn by being by her side.
He wanted to begin, now.
Could he?
He stood up in the tub. Water ran down his sides in rivulets. Cool air, revitalized.
He grabbed the towel from the stand, lifted a leg up against the side of the tub, and began to wipe away the damp.
A knock sounded on the door.
“Yes?” he called.
“Lady Cheverley wished me to bring you clothes, Captain Smith,” Mrs. Renton replied.
He whipped the towel around his lower half. “Come in.”
Since he’d returned to Ithwick and Pensteague, he’d seen the woman who had served at Ithwick since before his birth, but never up close.
Strikingly, she’d changed little.
He skin may have thinned a bit, but she moved with the same brisk efficiency he remembered.
She kept her eyes lowered as she set the clothes on a chair. She turned, froze, and then gasped. Her face drained of color.
He followed her gaze to the ink on his ankle and then cursed silently under his breath.
“Lord Cheverley.” Tears sprang in the old woman’s eyes.
He grabbed a shirt from the pile and pulled the soft linen over his head, expelling a puff of air as the shirt slipped into place.
It wasn’t fashioned like his new shirt—this—this was a shirt from a long time ago.
Thirteen years, to be exact.
“Your lordship.” Mrs. Renton raised her gaze. “Iamsorry. I should have known you from the start.”
“I didn’t wish you to.” He hadn’t wished anyone at Ithwick or Pensteague to know him.Ever.
Hurtheven had been right.
He was an ass. An ass who’d been running from the people who loved him.
The people he loved.
Mrs. Renton sounded as if she were struggling to hold back a sob. He sighed and placed his arm about her shoulders.
