She tightened her hand around his. “You can still teach him something else.”
His eyes moved over her face, searching, wounded. “You say that as if people are easily remade.”
“No,” she whispered. “I say it because I saw you sit on a library rug this morning.”
His face shifted.
“And because Aaron smiled when you touched his hair.”
Rowan looked away, but not before she saw what it did to him.
After a long while, he said, “My marriage to Catherine became a harrowing thing. Not because she meant harm. Perhaps she loved him too much and had nowhere sane to put it.” His voice roughened. “But I cannot repeat it.”
Emmeline felt her heart falter before he finished. She knew, before he said the rest.
“I struggle with the child I have,” Rowan said. “You see that. Everyone sees that. I do not know how to be what Aaron needs half the time. I will not make more children only to fail them in new ways.”
The words broke something.
Emmeline looked down at their joined hands, at the way her fingers rested over his, pale against the darker strength of him. She had wanted children so simply once. A family had always seemed to her like a room she would one day enter and fill with warmth. Now that room stood before her with its door partly closed.
“I understand,” she said. Her voice was steady.
Rowan looked at her. “Do you?”
“Yes.” She lifted her gaze to his and tried to smile, though it hurt. “I understand why you are afraid.”
“I am not?—”
“Rowan.”
He stopped.
The corner of his mouth almost moved. “I am afraid.”
She understood, even though understanding did not make the loss smaller.
“I did not say I was happy,” she whispered.
His eyes dropped to her mouth first, and Emmeline felt her lips part before she could stop them. Then his gaze moved over the open hollow of her throat, the fragile ribbon at her sleeve, the thin white cotton resting against her breasts. Her skin seemed to wake beneath each place his eyes lingered, warmth spreading under the fabric.
The grief between them grew quieter as her breath shortened and his did the same.
“I know,” he said.
His voice had roughened and Emmeline felt her body answer immediately.
He lifted one hand and touched the ribbon at her sleeve. “I cannot give you everything.”
The words hurt. Then his fingers brushed her wrist, and her breath faltered.
“But I can give you this,” he said, lower now. “If you want it. I can come to you. Touch you. Taste you. Make you forget, for a little while, every cruel thing I have been too cowardly to say properly.”
Heat rushed through her. “Rowan.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “I thought of you all day. In my bed. In this room. I thought of the way you sounded when I had my mouth on you, and I nearly lost my mind in my own study because you smiled at me.”
A blush tore through her so violently that she looked down.
