He had lost one woman he loved. To lose another would have killed him. He knew that. He felt it to the very bones in his body, and he crushed her closer out of pure protective instinct.
They stood there a moment and then he pulled away. “You are exhausted. Come sit by the fire.”
She followed silently and settled onto the settee, resting her head on his shoulder as he smoothed his hands along her side. She let out a long, shuddering sigh. “You were kind not to report my uncle to the authorities,” she said. “Kinder than perhaps he deserves.”
He pressed his lips together hard. “I did it for you,” he said. “And for her.”
“Angelica,” she whispered.
He nodded and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Where will they take him?”
She sat up and turned toward him. “They are distant cousins, but they were eager to help him. He’ll go to the country for a while. It will be good for him to be away from his shrines. Perhaps he’ll be able to sit through his grief at last and come out the other side to the man I once knew.”
“I will ask for reports regularly,” Matthew said, setting his jaw. “To be certain he never threatens you again.”
She touched his face. “He was threatening you, Matthew. Not me.”
“Hard to recall when the barrel of the gun was pressed into your chest,” he said, his tone sharper than he’d meant it to be. It was hard to meter it when the terror flared up again. “I should have listened to you when you warned me of his intentions. When I think of what could have happened. How I could have lost you…”
He trailed off, for he wasn’t ready to voice those words out loud yet. They had too much power in his head.
“It must have brought back terrible memories,” she said gently. “Of losing her.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t memories that troubled me, Isabel. It was thinking about my future without you that drove me mad. It had nothing to do with Angelica.”
Her lips parted and she stared at him, her face bright with disbelief. He hated to see it there, but why wouldn’t it be? He hadn’t let her in over the weeks they’d been thrown together. He hadn’t trusted her or allowed the growing connection he felt toward her to flourish.
The love that he had realized almost too late.
He took her hand, smoothing his thumb over it as he tried to find the words to explain. He had to say those first, before he spent the rest of his life performing actions to prove himself to her. “You said something to me on our wedding night. Something that has weighed on my mind ever since.”
She tilted her head. “What did I say?”
“You asked me what the chances were that we would find each other at the Donville Masquerade.”
She shrugged. “It was an offhand comment, though.”
“Whatwerethe odds, Isabel?”
She jolted at his insistence and shook her head. “One in a hundred, perhaps?”
“Perhaps one in a thousand,” he offered. “There were dozens of steps that had to be taken by each of us so that we would both be taken to that place that night. The path was almost impossible.”
“I don’t understand, so it was chance, what about it?”
“It wasn’t chance,” he whispered.
She drew back, and her utter confusion was adorable and heartbreaking all at once. “What else would it have been, Matthew? You said you believed I didn’t plan the encounter, I know you didn’t. So how could it be anything but chance?”
“Angelica,” he said.
She tensed and tugged at her hand, but he held fast. She couldn’t run now, he couldn’t let her. Not until she understood that he wasn’t comparing her to the woman he’d lost.
“She loved me,” he said. “And she loved you. Is it so hard to believe that she might look at us from the beyond and want us to find each other?”
Her bottom lip had begun to tremble again. “Why? For what purpose?”
“Because she knew we could love each other,” he suggested.
