“Why should I wait? Your rudeness was unthinkable,” she complained. “I know you’re hurt, Gabriel, but as I’ve explained, I was forced into an impossible situation. It has been a decade. Can we not move past the follies of youth?”
He groaned inwardly. There was no time to dally. “Never mind. I mistook you for someone else.”
He took flight again, ignoring Miss Bourne’s muffled protests. A laugh escaped him as he ran. He had pictured their reunion often, but never thought he’d be so dismissive.
The drive curved ahead, the imposing gates visible in the distance. Then he saw her, the woman who could make a suave man run like an errant schoolboy. She stood beneath an ancient oak, leaning against the trunk as she shook a stone from her shoe.
Relief came first, then a pulse of excitement, an attraction born of her love of poetry and their shared disappointment with the world.
“Do you make a habit of midnight rambles, Miss Woolf?” He stopped before her, resisting the urge to brace his hands on his knees and steady his breath. “Or do you delight in watching me race down the drive like an escaped bedlamite?”
“I take no pleasure in watching you lose your dignity.” She slipped her foot into her shoe and gave a satisfied nod. “You’ve had a dreadful shock. Should you even be outdoors?”
“No, I should be sipping brandy in the study, but you’ve forced me to play the errant knight twice today.”
“Forced you?” Her teasing tone proved all was not lost. “You were born to play the role. Poor Hector has probably been in training since the day he stood on four legs.”
“Were you not grateful I was there to whisk you away on my charger?” Though he jested, the memory chilled him to the bone. He had saved her life—of that there could be no doubt.
“No words could ever express my gratitude.”
His mind ran amok then, likely due to exertion, and he conjured a host of scandalous images, all the wild, wicked ways she might thank him. But friends did not make love on a desk, nor in the stables, nor in the great marble bath in the west wing.
“Come back to the house.” He made it sound like a suggestion, not a command or plea.
She glanced at the sprawling facade as if it were as hellish as Newgate. “There’s something you should know about me.”
“Yes?” At last, an answer to the hundred questions that plagued him daily.
“I am no one’s charity case. No one’s pet. No one’s pawn in a scheme to wound an old flame. You used me to make your point with Miss Bourne. But some of us have real problems to?—”
“So that’s what you think of me? A man who plays games with women’s lives?” It said more about her dealings with other men than her knowledge of him. “If I wished to make a point with Miss Bourne, I would not use you to do it.”
“It’s of no consequence now.” She drew her wrapper close about her throat, as though arming herself for departure. “I hope you get the answers you seek, my lord. Again, I shall bid you goodnight.”
She turned, and his heart dropped to his stomach.
He had endured Miss Bourne’s rejection. He could endure this as well. But despite his better judgement, he could not watch Miss Woolf walk out of his life.
“Don’t go.” He was at her side in a second, closing his hand gently around her arm. “Miss Bourne answered my questions. That’s the end of the matter.” A decade of uncertainty laid to rest in the crypt.
Miss Woolf’s eyes met his. “She’s exceptionally beautiful. I see why you’ve carried her in your heart all these years. She’s not someone one easily forgets.”
It was not her beauty he remembered, nor her touch, nor her laughter. It was her treachery, the wound that had hollowed him and left only bitterness in its place.
“My heart is barren, Miss Woolf. Betrayal stripped it bare. First by the friend I respected, then by the father I loved, and finally by the woman I planned to marry. What remains is resentment, nothing more.”
She closed her eyes. Something he said had touched her, whether a nerve, her heart, or some old wound, he could not tell.
When she opened them, he saw the same crippling sadness that plagued his own soul. “No good can come of this. Surely you can see that. Let me leave, my lord, before it’s too late.”
Let me? Did she feel this inexplicable connection, too?
“Come back to the house,” he said again, firmer now. “Nothing has changed. We will discuss this marriage of friendship, and you may trust I would die before I saw youharmed.” He paused before issuing a fact she could not deny. “You cannot deal with this alone.”
He watched the fight leave her with a resigned breath. “I will return with you tonight, in the hope that sleep restores our clarity. But there are things I cannot tell you, and it would be unfair to let you believe otherwise.”
He had won the moment, not the war. Her words left a lingering uncertainty, yet one truth was clear: Miss Bourne no longer held dominion over him. That ghost was laid to rest. Whatever secrets Miss Woolf kept, she was willing to compromise. And for now, that was enough.
