She raised her hand to knock, then paused in midair.
What was this folly that had overtaken her? What indeed was the purpose of this desperate measure?
She had travelled six exhausting hours through the unrelenting sleet merely to present herself at the door of a man who had not acknowledged her existence the past eight years. He had merely cast off their friendship without the slightest pretext or explanation as he transformed himself into precisely the heir his father had intended him to become, cold, proper, and altogether unapproachable.
But where else could she go?
Her aunt had been claimed by the same fever that had taken half of Bath last winter. Her situation as a governess was lostimmediately once she declined to accept the improper advances of the master of the house.
Soon she was forced t forfeit her lodgings as she could no longer afford to pay.
Soon all her possessions had been sold bit by bit until all she had left in her person were the clothes she was wearing and a journal she could not bear to part with…a journal with a pressed rose hidden in its pages.
She had nothing, nobody, and nowhere to go…except here, except him…except the fragile foolish ray of hope
Clara knocked.
The sound reverberated through the house like a peal of thunder, or, perhaps more accurately, like the very moment a young lady's reputation was utterly and irrevocably lost. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the sound of slow, unsteady footsteps could be heard coming towards the door.
Clara had prepared herself. She'd spent the past six hours preparing herself. She'd imagined this moment in every conceivable manner, scripted clever things to say, practiced the kind of smile that saidI'm perfectly quite well, even when one was decidedly not fine.
All of that preparation evaporated the moment she saw him.
He was taller than she remembered, and much broader with a body of a man who'd seen war rather than a boy who'd fallen out of trees. His dark hair was longer, unfashionably so as if thesimple task of attending to his person were quite beneath his notice. His clothes were expensive but worn carelessly, his shirt open at the throat, no cravat and waistcoat unbuttoned. He was the picture of a gentleman who'd given up on being gentle which was too soon for a young man at the age of five and twenty.
And the scar.
It was exactly as the papers had described and nothing like she'd imagined. A savage line that ran from his left temple down through his cheek to his jaw, pulling the skin tight, distorting what had once been a face that made debutantes write romantic poetry. It should have given his countenance a beastly and grotesque aspect, yet one found a haunting beauty in his features.
His eyes were the same. Dark, intense, currently widening in shock as they took in the muddy disaster on his doorstep.
"Clara?" Her name on his lips after eight years of silence. It sounded rusty, uncertain, as if he'd forgotten how to pronounce it.
She tried to smile. Tried to speak. She attempted to retain her composure, lest she appear entirely unsettled before the company.
"Hello, Gabriel. I'm sorry to... I didn't... I wouldn't have come, but..."
The world tilted. Or perhaps she tilted. Either way, the last thing she saw before darkness claimed her was Gabriel lunging forward, his arms reaching for her, his voice saying her nameagain with something that sounded almost like the boy she'd once known.
She fell, and he caught her, because that's what they'd always done…fallen and caught each other in turns.
Gabriel had been having a perfectly unexceptionable evening, which is to say, entirely odious.
He'd dismissed the staff at four on the hour, as was his custom, preferring to brood in privacy. Though he took up a book, he was soon obliged to lay it aside, for his thoughts were regrettably indisposed to concentrate on what he had been trying to read. He'd considered eating but decided against it; food had lost its appeal somewhere between Waterloo and the field hospital where they'd stitched his face back together. He'd definitely not been thinking about the date,January twentieth, the anniversary of nothing important, certainly not the last time he'd seen a particular physician's daughter before she'd disappeared to Bath and he'd gone to war.
He'd been not thinking about this so successfully that when the knock came, his first thought was that he'd finally lost his senses and was hallucinating. Nobody ever knocked at Ashbourne Hall. The gates were chained. The signs were clear. The locals had learned to leave him alone after he'd threatened to prosecute the vicar for trespassing, who had come to offer him spiritual comfort.
Nevertheless, the knock was real, and it spoke of an indiscretion that could not be simply ignored.
Gabriel contemplated to allow the incessant knocking on his door to go unheeded, but alas, curiosity would not allow him to settle back to his reading.
He opened the door with a great force, ready to unleash his anger upon the trespasser, when he saw her…
Clara Whitfield, though his mind couldn't quite reconcile the girl he'd known with this creature before him. She looked as if he'd been dragged through several hedges backward, then drowned for good measure. Mud covered her from head to toe. Her dress, if it could still be called that hung off her frame, which was far too thin. Her hair, which he remembered as honey-gold, was plastered to her head in dark, wet strings.
But her eyes. Mercy! Her eyes were exactly the same shade of blue-green that had haunted him through muddy trenches and morphine dreams. Looking at him as she saw through all his ducal pretensions to the boy who'd once grafted roses with her.
"Clara?" Her name sprang from his lips before he could prevent it. Eight years of practiced indifference crumbled at the sight of her swaying on his doorstep.
