“You’re already leaving?” Amelia came up behind him, her face concerned. “I thought you would stay with Christine and me for a little longer.”
“It’s time that I visited Thornwyck,” he told her. “It won’t be for long, and then I’ll return.”
Amelia studied him for a moment, and then her hand closed over the doorknob to Katherine’s room. “May I go inside?”
He wanted to refuse, but then, what purpose was there in hiding what was now only an empty bedchamber? “If you want to.”
“Will you come with me?” She held out her hand, and he hesitated.
“I should speak with the servants and ensure that the coach is ready for my departure in the morning.”
“Please,” she said gently.
He took her hand, and when she opened the door, the trunk was still in the middle of the floor where he’d left it. Silk gowns and bonnets overflowed from the lid, but Amelia said nothing about it. Instead, she closed the door behind her.
“Do you want my help?” she asked, after a few minutes had passed. “If you tell me what you want removed from the room, I’ll see to it.”
“Leave it.” This was his task to bear, and he didn’t want her to intervene. “There’s no need for you to bother her belongings.”
Amelia moved forward and wrapped her arms around his waist. He knew he ought to embrace her, but in this room he found it all but impossible. “I bought some new clothes for Christine yesterday. She’s outgrown hers, and I heard that she was wearing Katherine’s old gowns.”
“She can have them if she wants them,” he said. “Though I imagine they’re too long for her.”
“David, if you must go to Thornwyck, take us with you,” Amelia pleaded. “Christine feels as if you abandon her all the time.”
He said nothing, for in all likelihood it was true. He knew very little about children, and though he loved his daughter, he had no idea what her needs were.
“She has you now,” he said. “You’ll be there for her when I can’t be.”
“She despises me,” Amelia countered. “She had the idea that you should have wed Miss Grant, her governess.”
“Miss Grant was past forty,” he countered. “She couldn’t have given me an heir for Castledon if she’d wanted to.”
“I could,” Amelia said softly.
He knew it, and the very mention of giving her a child distracted him with the way her lips were moving and the proximity of her body.
“Do you believe you’re expecting a child?” he asked. A slight sense of unrest gripped him at the thought. Pregnancy was always dangerous.
“Not yet.” Her voice was hesitant, and she admitted, “But I would like to keep trying. If you want to, that is.”
“Every time I’m near you, I want to.” He took her mouth, kissing her hard. Ignoring all caution, he pressed his fingers into her hair, pulling her hips to his so she would know what she’d done to him.
She returned the kiss, opening to him. Against his mouth she murmured, “Shall we go to my room?”
His body raged with him to say yes, to take her by the hand and love her for the next few hours. Instead, he broke away, gathering the shreds of his control. He couldn’t keep using her like this, as a means of forgetting about Katherine and the past. It wasn’t fair to Amelia, and it wasn’t right. Not when he could see the yearning on her face.
“Another time,” he promised. But when he left her, he didn’t miss the regret in her eyes.
BALLALOCH,SCOTLAND
“You can’t go on like this.”
Beatrice looked up at her husband, who was standing at the doorway to her bedroom. There was still no sign of Margaret, notafter all the weeks of searching. They had retraced all the major roads leading to Scotland and had hired runners to investigate. But her daughter had virtually disappeared with Cain Sinclair.
She didn’t know whether the man had hurt Margaret or rescued her. And it was the not knowing that tormented her most.
Henry came inside the room and stood beside her at the window. “We won’t stop searching. I promise you that. But when was the last time you ate a full meal?”
