Page 31 of The Earl She Once Saved

Rafe stopped. He stared at what he had drawn.

Verity.

He swore softly. The paper was pushed aside. Another lay beneath it. He looked down. It was Verity again, from yesterday, perhaps. The pencil caught her face turned toward Hartley’s bed, with all its usual hardness gone.

Rafe pushed that sheet away, too. Another captured Verity on horseback, hair tugged loose by wind. Another Verity was a woman standing beside the flooded meadow with mud on her skirt.

He went very still. He had no idea he had drawn her so many times.

How many? He knew the answer.

Too many.

Years of them.

They were not always complete portraits. Sometimes, they were only the turn of a head, a hand, the remembered line of a mouth. He had drawn her before he knew she was Verity Calder, long before he knew she had become Lady Edgeworth, long before he knew Roland had found her first.

The papers went back through Spain, Portugal, London, back beyond peace, back to a night beneath canvas.

At the bottom lay a sheet softened at the edges by years of folding. Rafe drew it out. He had made it weeks after leaving the hospital. The girl sat beside a narrow cot, bent beneath lamplight. Her sleeves were rolled. Her hair had escaped its pins.

One hand rested upon the bed near the wounded man’s. The face was not perfect. Memory had already been failing him when he drew it. But it was hers. It was younger and unarmored, looking down upon a dying stranger as if his life mattered.

Rafe’s thumb rested near the edge of the paper. He remembered waking and finding her there every time, no matter how far into fever he had gone, she had been there when he came back.

He had thought of that face in every country since … and she had married Roland.

His hand tightened. The paper bent slightly beneath his fingers. Rafe straightened it at once. Then he gathered the sketches together, returned them to the portfolio and closed it. The clasp snapped shut. He placed it in the bottom drawer of the desk.

Out of sight.

That ought to have been enough.

It was not.

***

By eleven the following morning, Celestine Marchmont had arrived.

Rafe knew before entering the drawing room that her call was not accidental. News moved through a county more quickly than cavalry. His return must have reached every breakfast table within twenty miles before his first night at Edgeworth was over.

Celestine rose when he entered. “Rafe.”

There had always been something particularly effective about the way she said his name. It was warmth without impropriety, familiarity just short of possession.

“Miss Marchmont.”

“Oh.” She waved a dismissive hand at him. “You cannot mean to begin with that.”

She held out both hands. Rafe took them. Celestine had changed very little. She was still fair, still elegant and still possessing the kind of beauty that came from knowing exactly how one appeared from every side of a room.

“You have been gone far too long,” she chirped melodiously.

He nodded once. “So I am repeatedly told.”

“And you look exactly the same.”

“That is demonstrably false.”