“You could save me from this, Mother!” Isobel’s words echoed off the stone walls of the small chapel.
Her mother remained placid, hands folded in her lap.
“Can you not help me this one time?” Isobel pleaded.
Her mother turned her head and her gaze grew unfocused. “I am sorry you must pay for my sins.”
What sins did her pious mother imagine she had committed?
“Isobel.” Stephen’s voice pierced through the veil of her memories. “Take this,” he said, pressing a kerchief into her hand.
Only now did she realize tears ran unchecked down her face.
“I should not have pressed you.” Stephen rubbed his hand up and down her back, soothing her as if she were a child.
But she was determined to finish it now. “Do you want to hear the last words my mother said to me in this world?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“She said, ‘We women are born to suffer.’ Then she went back to her prayers.”
Isobel remembered swallowing back the sobs that threatened to overtake her and turning her back on her mother. Her breath came in hiccups as she marched, stiff-legged, across the bailey yard. With each step, she willed herself to harden her heart.
“I did not have a choice, of course,” Isobel said to Stephen. “But I told myself I would do it for my brother—and not for that useless, pathetic woman who was my mother.”
Stephen enfolded her in his arms. After a time he asked, “The marriage was very hard?”
She nodded against his chest. He tightened his hold; his arms felt good around her.
“You did not forgive your father.”
“I refused even to see him.” In that, at least, her husband had indulged her. The only time she saw her father during the years of her marriage was at her mother’s funeral.
She should not let Stephen comfort her like this. But after the intimate story she shared with him, it seemed ridiculous to fret over his being too familiar. Even his smell—horses and leather and just Stephen—comforted her.
“You deserve to be happy,” he said.
“What if de Roche is horrid?” she blurted out. “He does not want me or this marriage, or he would have come by now.”
Why, after holding self-pity at bay for so long, should she suddenly give way to it now?
“The fool does not know the prize that awaits him,” Stephen said in a soft voice. “Once he meets you, he will regret every moment he wasted.”
She sighed and rested her head against his chest again. “My father told me not to believe in fairy tales.”
Stephen brushed a loose strand of hair from her face and kissed her forehead. “There is nothing wrong in hoping for something rare.”
She felt his breath in her hair as he held her.
Unleashed emotion swirled inside her. She heard the change in his breathing and felt the tension grow between them. She waited, expectant.
She nuzzled her head against his shoulder, hoping he would kiss her hair again. When he did, she sighed and lifted her face to him. His eyes locked on hers, but he made no move to kiss her. She slid her hands up his chest and rested them on the back of his neck.
He shook his head. “This is not wise, Isobel.”
Neither was it fair that she might spend the rest of her days married to a man whose kiss, whose every touch, was hateful to her. “ ’Tis just a kiss, Stephen.”
“I do not think just a kiss is possible between us.”
