Page 13 of A Rogue at Stonecliffe

Noelle’s words could hardly begin to describe Annabeth’s feelings during those frantic hours by Nathan’s bedside, tears streaming down her face, fearing each breath would be his last. They didn’t touch on the awful guilt she had felt for refusing to marry him when she could have made the last few years of his life happy. The prayers tumbling from her mouth, the promises to do anything if only God would let Nathan live. The joy that had swept over her when he at last opened his eyes and murmured her name. She had felt so sure when she had held his hand to her face, laughing and crying and telling him to propose to her this one last time.

“No,” she told Noelle, though Annabeth wasn’t sure exactly what she was denying. “It woke me up. I realized how I was wasting his life and mine.”

“If you don’t love him—”

“But I do!” Annabeth insisted. “I do love Nathan. I’ve loved him for years and years.”

“But do you love him the right way?”

“Is there a wrong way to love someone?” Annabeth turned away, rubbing her arms; she felt suddenly cold. “If you’re asking if I love Nathan as I did Sloane, no, I don’t love him in that wild, all-consuming way. I was so young and brimming with emotions then. I still believed that life would turn out exactly as I wanted, that anything was possible if your love was great enough. It was stunning and exhilarating at the time. And awful afterward.”

“Great love doesn’t have to be painful.”

“Perhaps not, but I think it happens only once. As they say, it’s the love of your life...and you can’t expect to get another one just because that great love was a mistake. But I could still have a happy life. Even if it’s not exactly the same, I love Nathan so much—I think I didn’t realize how very dear he is to me until I almost lost him. He’s a wonderful man, kind and thoughtful, smart and funny. Everything about him is just so...right. No one could possibly be a better husband or a better father.”

“Yes, he will be a wonderful husband and father,” Noelle agreed.

“In the past, when I turned down Nathan’s proposals, I thought that he would find someone else, that my refusal would set him free to love another. But it didn’t. All I ever did was cause him pain. Now he is so happy that it makes me smile just to look at him. And he will continue to be happy. I will be a good wife to him. We can have a good marriage.”

“As long as you are happy, too. That’s all I want for you.”

“I am happy.” Annabeth put a little more iron into her voice. “I will be.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ANNABETH RETURNED TO the ballroom, her mind still on her conversation with Noelle. She looked around the room. There was no sign of Sloane, thank goodness. No doubt he’d left after visiting with Noelle’s son. A smile touched her lips as she remembered Sloane crouching down to talk to Gil, answering him with all the gravity he would use with an adult. More, probably.

Annabeth’s eyes fell on Lady Lockwood. Her grandmother and Russell Feringham were talking to Annabeth’s mother, Martha, and Lord Edgerton. Annabeth could barely stand to talk to her mother’s husband, but she couldn’t avoid her all night just because of Edgerton. Pasting a smile on her face, Annabeth started toward them, but at that moment, Nathan joined her.

“I hope that smile is for me,” he said lightly.

“Of course,” she said with a twinge of guilt. But one didn’t have to stand about thinking about one’s fiancé all the time, surely. Noelle was wrong. “I really do love you.”

Nathan looked somewhat taken aback but said only, “Um...as I do you.”

Annabeth realized that her statement had come out oddly, and she hurried to say, “I was just talking to Noelle about what a good man you are. How kind and thoughtful.”

“Kind and thoughtful.” He heaved a dramatic sigh. “Alas. I would have hoped it was dashing and charming.”

Annabeth laughed. “Well, dashing and charming are a given.”

He grinned back at her. “What about handsome?”

“It goes without saying.” It was so easy talking to Nathan. “Best of all, you are the man who is going to ask me to dance so I won’t have to chat with Edgerton.”

“Ah.” Nathan glanced over at the small knot of people.

“I know I must seem terrible, but I know that Edgerton will lecture me all over again about going to clear out the rental house with only my maid along. And that will make Uncle Russell alarmed, and he will tell me again that I shouldn’t overtax myself and he’d be glad to do the job for me.”

“As would I. You are loved by many people.”

“I know. And I appreciate that, I really do. But I enjoy going through Papa’s old trunks. I like being at the house and remembering when we lived there, before Papa died and we had to lease it out.”

Their home in London was held in trust for Annabeth, an arrangement set up by her grandfather. After her father died deeply in debt, she and her mother had been left so short of money that they had been forced to move in with her grandmother. The trustees then leased the place to provide Annabeth at least some small amount of income. However, the trust would end when she married, and she and Nathan planned to move into the house after the wedding.

“Still, perhaps I should go with you,” Nathan said.

“That’s very sweet of you, but I am the only one who can decide what to keep or throw away. And it would bore you.” The truth was, Annabeth enjoyed being alone in the house, on her own, with no one to fuss or tell her what to do. “Besides, you’d have to be around my maid the whole time.”