Just as he was.
His scar ached, as it always did in the cold. She hadn't reacted to it, he realised. Hadn't flinched or stared or reacted the way people usually did when faced with his ruined face. But then, she'd been too busy collapsing to be properly horrified.
That would come later, no doubt. When she woke. When she realised where she was, who he'd become. She'd look at him with pity or disgust or that careful politeness that was worse than either, and he'd have to watch the last person who'd known him before turn away.
But for now, she was here. Breathing. Warming slowly in his arms. Alive.
"Clara," he said quietly, not expecting a response. "What happened to you?"
She stirred slightly, burrowing deeper into the warmth he offered. Her fingers, poking out from the blankets, twitched toward his hand. Without thinking, he took them, wrapping her small, cold fingers in his larger, warmer ones.
They stayed like that as the fire burned lower, as the storm raged outside, as eight years of silence stretched between them like scar tissue. Gabriel held her and tried not to think about how familiar this felt, how fitting it was and how absolutely catastrophic for his carefully maintained isolation.
She'd come back. After everything ,after his letters had grown cold, after he'd ignored her, after he'd allowed is father to convince him she was beneath him, after he'd gone to war and come back less than whole…she'd come back.
The first, unavoidable question was simply, why? Then a weightier question followed… what course of action was he to pursue?
It was not proper that she should remain under his roof. He was not fit company for anyone, let alone someone he'd once... cared for. He was scarred, bitter, and half-mad with guilt and nightmares. The boy she'd known was long gone, killed somewhere between Eton and Waterloo, and all that was left was this shadow that bore his name and title.
Clara's consciousness returned in pieces, like fragments of a broken mirror reflecting increasingly unpleasant truths. First, warmth, blessed and unexpected after so many nights of cold. Then there was pain, everywhere, a symphony of aches from her frozen feet to her empty stomach. Finally, the deeply unsettling realization that she was being held by someone who smelled of brandy and bitter herbs and…
"Finally awake, or are you going to continue pretending?"
The voice cut through her foggy mind like ice water. Cold. Harsh. Unmistakably Gabriel, but not the Gabriel she remembered. This voice had edges that could draw blood.
Clara kept her eyes closed, needing a moment to gather herself before facing whatever he'd become. She could feel him behind her, around her as they were wrapped togetherin blankets, his arms encircling her with a possessiveness that would have been tender if not for the rigidity of his body, it was as if he was holding a venomous snake he couldn't quite bring himself to drop.
"I know you're conscious," he continued, his breath against her ear making her shiver despite herself. "Your breathing changed. Rather dramatically, actually. Never could lie properly, could you?"
She opened her eyes, finding herself in what appeared to be a library, firelight flickering over leather spines. "Gabriel?"
"Your Grace," he corrected sharply. "We're not children anymore, Miss Whitfield. Or is it Mrs. Something-or-other now? Wedded some merchant in Bath to save yourself from governessing?"
The cruelty of it stung more than the cold had. Clara tried to turn to face him, but his arms tightened, holding her in place.
"Don't," he said. "Unless you want to discover just how thoroughly your dignity has already been compromised. Your dress, what remained of it, is currently drying by the fire. You've been pressed against me for hours wearing nothing but your undergarments and my apparent lack of judgment."
Heat flooded her face. "You…"
“Divested you of your garments? Yes. Fascinating how circumstances force one to abandon propriety. You were on the brink of expiring. I was the only one here to attend to you.” His tone was conversational, almost bored, but she could feelthe tension in his body, wound tight as a clock spring. "Though I suppose I should thank you for the entertainment. It's been rather dull here. Nothing quite like a poor, undone creature falling through one's door to liven up an evening."
"The door was locked," Clara managed through gritted teeth. "As was the gate. One might almost believe you didn't want visitors."
"One would be correct. Yet here you are, like a particularly persistent weed that refuses to wither no matter how many times it's plucked out.”
She flinched, and she felt him notice, a slight shift in his breathing, a fractional loosening of his grip.
"Why?" he asked, and for a moment, just a moment, she heard something else beneath the cruelty. "Eight years of silence, and you appear on my doorstep looking like death's rejected mistress. Why?"
Clara closed her eyes. She'd known this would be humiliating. She hadn't expected it to hurt quite so much. "Because I had nowhere else to go."
"Ah." The word was soft, satisfied, like a cat finding a wounded bird. "How the mighty have fallen. The physician's educated daughter, reduced to begging at the door of someone she couldn't be bothered to…" He stopped abruptly.
"To what?" Clara asked quietly. "To write to? You ceased writing first, if you recall. Your letters grew shorter and shorteruntil they were nothing but your initials on paper. Then nothing at all."
"Ancient history," he said dismissively. "And irrelevant. The question is what to do with you now."
"I can leave," Clara said immediately, pride flaring despite everything. "Just return my dress, such as it is, and I'll…"
