Page 108 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

“I am all right, sweet dog,” Tamsin said, reaching down to offer the dog a pat. “Merely thinking too much about his lordship.”

Athena rose and put her chin on her knee to make it easier to receive the reassuring affection. The dog’s large eyes gazed up at her with the deepest of sympathy.

“You would know if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” Tamsin leaned closer to the dog and whispered, “Or if something was wrong with your mate. Apollo keeps him company. I do not suppose the two of you have shared confidences about Roman?”

The idea of dogs somehow talking about the humans in their midst made her smile. If only there was someone who could talk to ask such things. It had been nearly two weeks, and she did not know how Roman felt about the loss of something which had mattered so deeply to him.

He had told her how the council voted. He had told her what would happen to the barbican. He had answered when she asked whether his friends had remained with him afterward.

He had never told her how he felt. And she had stopped herself from asking.

The realization was uncomfortable.

Tamsin had believed she was giving him room to think and recover himself. She had thought she was being patient. Roman was not a man who offered feelings easily, and she knew better than most that a person could be made miserable by having someone tug constantly at a part of oneself not prepared to be exposed.

So she must wait for him to come to her. And she had waited. And somewhere in the waiting, she had learned not to expect him.

Tamsin looked toward the door. She could go to his study; it was only down the corridor, perhaps twenty steps away.

The thought was so obvious she laughed. This was her house too. Roman was her husband. She required no invitation to knock upon his study door and ask whether he wanted company!

Yet she remained in her chair. If Roman wanted company, surely he would come to her. The thought seemed reasonable.

Reasonable thoughts often caused her to stumble. Tamsin had built her life from them. Her father was forgetful, so she remembered. Anne was overwhelmed, so Tamsin helped. Leopold did not think ahead, so Tamsin did his thinking. The children needed things, and there was no sense leaving children to fend for themselves.

There had always been a perfectly understandable reason why someone else could not and Tamsin could. She had become very good at needing nothing in return.

With a wince, she snapped the book in her lap closed. Athena snorted and pulled back, head tilted to the side.

“My apologies, Athena. I had a thought that is not quite true anymore.”

The realization had come quite abruptly. She wanted Roman. She needed him.

She wanted him to come into the drawing room because he had finished his work and wanted to tell her something. She wanted him beside her at night, taking up too much of the bed and warming the sheets. She wanted his absentminded hand at her waist when he passed her. She wanted to hear the little arguments he believed were the correct ways to arrange everything in existence.

She wanted to know whether he was still grieving Micklegate. She wanted him to know when she was unhappy. She wanted to be missed when she was not in the room.

Tamsin swallowed.

Wanting was an alarmingly different thing from being useful.

There was no task she could perform to make Roman want to sit beside her. No household difficulty she could solve that would make him open the connecting door at night. No amount of patience would transform his absence into intimacy.

She had thought patience was what he needed. Perhaps it was, for a time. But giving someone what they needed could not require making herself disappear. She had things she needed, too.

A husband.

The clock struck ten and she looked toward the door again.

One more evening of patience. She would give him that.

Roman did not come to the drawing room that night, or open the connecting door between their rooms. Tamsin barely slept. Her mind was too busy thinking of all the things she needed, and wanted, from the man she had married.

Chapter Twenty-Five

November 24th, 1822

The following evening, Tamsin found her husband where he so often was; in his study.