Lucy did not miss the gesture. “What will you do?”
Her first instinct was to deny it, but really, there was no point, not with Lucy. “I do not know yet.” Although she had only a few months more before the truth would become obvious to all and sundry.
“You’ve not told him, have you?”
“I have not,” she replied.
“Will you? You love him.” The second was not a question.
“I do,” she said softly.
“And yet you’ve not told him?” Lucy had laid her knitting on her lap, her eyes sharp.
“We’ve never spoken of the future. He came here with his life at loose ends after France. He didn’t come intending to stay.”
Lucytsked exasperatedly. “He came at loose ends, as you say,monthsago.”
It was indisputably true, but... “I do not wish to ask anything of him he doesn’t want for himself, regardless of my own feelings. His life has not really been his own, ever, till recently. And he has never said anything at all about his future, let alone if he might envision it here.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “The man says very little at all when not drawn directly into conversation or provoked into response. A wall of solitude unto himself, that one would be... if he wished it. I do not think he wishes it.”
When she didn’t respond, Lucy looked at her so intently that she dropped her gaze, unable to meet her sister’s eyes.
“He could have gone anywhere in the wide world this spring,”Lucy said, “after concluding his work. He came here, to you. And here he has stayed, for months now.”
When she still didn’t reply, Lucy sighed. “He came here for you, Issy,” she reiterated. “Whether he has said it explicitly or not.” She picked her knitting up again. “Do you want his child?”
She was very near tears; that happened easily now. “Yes.” Envisioning his child held in her arms squeezed her heart and brought an ache to her throat. She had at times pictured young Nathaniel as he must have been, a quiet, solemn-eyed, dark-haired boy. Would their child resemble him?
“Wanting the child is one burden less, then. You have decisions ahead of you. And only a few months in which to make them, I think.” Lucy’s gaze was fully directed on her knitting again. “But you should tell him.”
“And how have you come to be such a devil’s advocate to your elder sister?” She allowed humor to warm her voice. It was a transparent attempt to redirect the conversation, and they both knew it.
Lucy smiled, shaking her head slightly. Her needles began clicking again. “Someone needs to ask you questions if you will not ask them of yourself.”
Even prior to Lucy’s blunt probing, hope had already been tentatively unfurling in her heart, sweet and fragile as an early spring blossom.
Nathaniel had never said that he loved her, but his every action towards her, every word he did speak, was tender and precious. She couldn’t—no,wouldn’t—keep from him much longer that she carried his child. Even so, she still couldn’t find the words to tell him that she loved him—or perhaps it was that she lacked the courage to speak it aloud.
He was, despite his background and the tasks to which he’d been put based on skills he’d acquired, gentle at heart. She had the impression he did not see himself that way, but it was true. It was in his touch, in the care he took with her person, in his contemplative nature, and in the quiet contentment when he laid his head on her breast, relaxed in her arms before he slept. He’d been used for war from a young age, had been set to tasks she could not even imagine in the years after Badajoz, but it had not defined him, nor had it stripped from him his true nature.
She did not want him to stay only because of their child, although he would. She wanted him to stay for her, if he did, and for himself as well. She wanted— Well, it was not within a person’s power to confer peace to another. It was something one must find from within. But she wished to create peace for him, should he care to accept it. A place to find his peace.
And an as-yet unwritten future, together.
It had been raining since sometime during the night, not a violent gale but no light drizzle either. It was not a chill rain; Nate had left the window open, allowing the freshness and soothing patter of millions of droplets to permeate the cottage. Inside, he and Isobel were warm and snug, tangled up with one another in the bed. She slept curled in his arms; she’d fallen asleep shortly after they finished making love.
He hadn’t. He was ordering what he wanted to say to her when she woke. Where to start.
It was everything that he loved. Her warmth, her kindness, her deep compassion. Her intelligence. Her quiet, sometimes mischievous, humor. Her laugh and her dimple and the way she delighted in teasing him. The way she understood him,knewhim, even as he was relearning himself.
It wasn’t only the intense sexual chemistry, although there was that too, from the very start in France: the way she fit against him like their bodies were meant expressly for one another, and the way that moving with her, in her, was solace and rapture both. He wanted to lie with her and sleep beside her every night. Hold her as she slept and wake beside her early in the morning just for the pleasure of watching the first dawn light touch her face.
He wanted, too, the gift of years to watch silver strands thread the black of her hair. He’d never before envisioned himself living to old age or having reason to want it. Now he wanted it so intensely it had the power to stop his breath.
All this he wanted to tell her when she woke, but for all his facility for learning and speaking languages, he’d never been adept at verbally expressing emotion.
He found no elegant words, but in the end, he didn’t need them. Isobel woke and stretched within his arms before sleepily setting a hand along his jaw.
