Waited to resolve what felt like the unresolvable.
He opened the chamber door and moved through the antechamber to his bedroom. Because he had given the order for the servants not to bother with their nightly rituals for his room, the fire had burned low and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. When they did, he caught his breath.
Esme lay tucked up on her side on the bed, her red hair splayed out on his pillows and her hands bunched around her throat. She was fast asleep and didn’t stir, even when he moved closer.
She looked younger in sleep, with all the troubles she’d carried lifted, at least in her dreams. He could almost see heracross a room at a ball just like the one he’d just hosted, laughing with her friends, dancing with her father. Dancing with him. Why hadn’t he ever asked her to dance all those years ago? Would things have been different for her if he had?
He shook his head at those wayward thoughts, but they wouldn’t leave his mind. They were stuck there, like a throbbing wound, pulsing with answers to those questions.
If he’d made an effort to get to know Esme back then, he would have found her to be as brave and interesting and wonderful as he found her now. He wouldn’t have been able to resist her, because she was irresistible. And in the ranks of Society where they had belonged, that would have led to only one conclusion.
He would have courted her. He would have fallen in love with her. He knew it because as he looked at her now, tucked into his bed, there was no doubt he had done the same in the weeks they’d been acquainted. Helovedher.
That staggered him and he sucked in a sharp breath and steadied himself lightly on the edge of the mattress. Love had never been a positive in his life. Finn had avoided it with intense focus. Truth be told, he’d feared it.
But now he…didn’t. He just felt it, warm and powerful and unyielding. It was part of him, just as she had become a part of him.
And yet she might never let him in. She might never accept what he felt because of what she’d gone through, what she’d lost, what she believed she could never have again. That realization hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced in his thirty years on this earth.
He put a knee into the mattress and reached out to touch her arm. She immediately put up her hands with a gasping burst of breath, on the edge of a fight that broke his already fragile heart. The things this woman had endured.
“Esme,” he said softly. “Esme, it’s me. I’m here. You’re safe.”
She stared at him, almost unknowing for a moment as dreams faded to reality and then she nodded and relaxed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep.”
“I’m glad you did. The party dragged on for a long time,” he said, and leaned his hip on the high edge of the bed.
“Was it successful?” she asked with a yawn, her hand coming out to trace his fingers gently.
He shivered at the touch. “Yes. It was lovely despite my anxiousness for it to end. My sister is very happy.”
She smiled up at him. “And that meansyouare happy. She’s so lucky to have you, Finn.”
“I’m the lucky one to have her. We went through so much together and lost so much.”
“Your mother, you mean?”
He looked at her. He’d told her a little about the loss of his mother. She had been supportive, but hadn’t pressed. Now he felt compelled to say the rest.
“Yes. It was hard on both of us. She’d longed for my father for years, exuberant with any attention. Brokenhearted with every slight. And there were many slights. At some point it destroyed her. She could talk of nothing else, think of nothing else but him. If we would try to help, she’d scream at us. Poor Marianne got the brunt of that, especially after I came of age and lived in my own home.”
“That’s terrible.”
“One night Marianne showed up, eyes rimmed black from no sleep and begged me to help her. She told me our mother had passed the edge of hysteria at last, despite my sister’s efforts to hold her together, and was in a full collapse. Of course I came at once.”
“You must have been devastated.”
He nodded. “I tried to intervene, tried to convince her to come back to us. But we watched her refuse to eat or drink, watched her wither away for days, weeks. My sister and I asked her to live for us, to live for her children.”
He stopped talking as pain closed his throat. Pain he had been pushing away for years now, trying not to feel that and the helplessness of those horrible days.
“She couldn’t,” Esme said softly, and her gentle voice brought him back to the present.
He drew a shaky breath. “She couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Or both. Instead she died for a man who wouldn’t even come see her when I finally found him holed up with whatever mistress had caught his eye and begged him to do so.”
“He wouldn’t see her?” Esme said, and sat up.
“No. He was a cruel bastard who didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.” He shook his head. “I’d always known it, but that day was proof. He laughed in my face and sent me away. It was horrible.”
