Oh, why must he say her name in precisely that way? Her heart softened despite her determination to keep it firm. He looked so intent, as though he were holding back a torrent of words.
“I apologize for misjudging you.” He bowed to her, the gesture as much an apology as his words. Surely she could be as gracious, but he was watching her with such intensity that she could barely think of what to say, much less speak. And while she struggled for a response he mistook her silence for disdain.
“I should have given you time to explain the last five years before rushing to a conclusion that embarrassed both of us.”
“Thank you.” She wanted to be generous, to accept his apology, but there was something about the way he stood guarded, but eager at the same time, that made her afraid he would want more than she could give. “You once knew me better than any other man in the world. But our lives are very different now. I can, I do accept your apology but nothing can be as it was.”
He did no more than run his hand through his hair in answer, but it conveyed his frustration. “Five years ago, I knew you so well that you had only to enter a room for me to know your mood.” He stepped closer to her. “I still do. You did not tell us everything. Tell me the rest.”
“I told you as Marguerite would have. I told you what she knew, what she experienced, so that you could treat her.”
“I want you to trust me enough to give me all the details.”
“You do not need my experience to treat the child.”
“I need them to understand you.”
She raised her hand to stop him and he took it in his. Could he feel the panic?
“Save me from my imagination, Caroline. I have already created one nightmare for you when the one you lived was quite bad enough.”
“Did you think I was nothing more than a genteel slut? That because you did not want me, I would give myself to the first man who did not have your remarkable self-control? Is that what you thought?”
“No, never.” He shook his head, then looked down. “Yes, yes, it was my worst fear.”
“And you thought you knew me better than any other man?” She wanted to be angry, but was only disappointed. “You knew me so well you thought I was capable of that?”
“No, no. I never thought that you were a loose woman. Never! But for me you have always been so desirable.”
His words came in a soft whisper that was seductive, even if it did sound like a confession wrung out by torture.
He turned from her. “I am hard-pressed to believe any other man could not view you in the same way.” He stood with his back to her as though confessing to the empty room in front of him. “I used to lie awake at night terrified that some man might mistake your openness and joy for flirtation. God knows you made it almost impossible for me to deny myself.” He turned back to face her again. “I am honest even if it does disgust you.”
Disgust? No, never, she thought. Amazement held her dumb. She stood silent, marveling at his frankness. Willing now to try a little of her own.
“You never told me.” She spoke the words with trite dismay, anger even. “You acted as though what I wanted was more than a woman could expect, that self-control was more admirable than unrestrained affection.”
“One of us had to be reasonable, Caroline, or at least I thought so then. I was older than you. Your parents might have been gone, but they had trusted me with you from our youngest years. But it was agony. You were as irresistible as a magnet. It was all I could do not to make you mine, not to take what you were so eager to give me.”
Her face lit with an amazed surprise. With two steps, she narrowed the distance between. She was close enough for him to take in his arms. “I can hardly credit this. You are saying that your growing coldness, your disinterest, was all a sham, a way to protect me from myself?”
He nodded.
“I cannot believe it. Your work was everything to you.”
“It was important to me. It still is. I needed to establish myself before marriage was a possibility.”
“And all along I thought that science was taking you from me, turning you into someone to whom books were more important than people.”
She looked away from him and then back despite the tears in her eyes. “If you are telling me the truth, if you truly were only hiding your feelings from me, then running away is the most foolish thing I ever did.”
He reached for her, but she held up her hands to hold him off. “It is too late, Reynie. I am not the woman who left. I am not the woman you loved. There is no joy in my life, only responsibility to an orphan child. She commands what little feeling I have left to give.”
She started to turn from him, but he stopped her. His restraint had worn thin. It gave way to passion. She could see it in his eyes, in the set of his chin, the flaring of his nostrils as he turned her to face him fully.
“You have nothing left to give?”
“Nothing.”
“I do not believe it and I can prove you are wrong.” He pulled her to him, whispering, “I have waited five years for this.”
With a movement he could never have learned in a sickroom, Reynie pressed her to him and took her mouth with his, in the middle of the nursery dayroom where anyone would feel free to walk in.
That was the last coherent thought she had. He became the whole focus of her being. His mouth as it branded her, consumed her, and filled her whole self with a wanting that she had only ever imagined, if she had allowed herself that. His mouth held her and she gave in to its tasting, tempting demand and opened herself to him; not just her lips but her whole body warmed to his, pressed to him, invited.
They ended the kiss by some unspoken intimately shared agreement.
He looked at her with kind eyes but without a smile. “That tells us everything, does it not? An everything that we both already knew. It might have been five years, but it is still not over.”
She tried to ease from his arms. “It is attraction, pure physical attraction. Lust.” She used the coarsest word she could think of. “You do not know the Caroline Morton who has come back. The body is familiar, the lips may taste the same, but you do not know what five years has made me.”
He let her go and she edged away from him.
“I will wait until you tell me, Caroline. I can be patient. You deserve at least that much penance from me. Even before you left for France your joy was wounded. I took it from you as surely as the war in France did. I want to be the one who gives it to you again.”
She hardly knew how to answer him. Hardly knew this man whom she had known forever. Where had this compassion come from? Where in his books had he discovered this sympathy? Had he changed as much as she had?
“You cannot understand, can you, Reynie? You have changed for the better.” She had moved a step closer to him, but now she backed away again. “You have changed for the better, but I have not.”
Then they both heard the sound of heel-clad feet clicking along the marble-floored hallway. Caroline whirled away from him, hurrying to the bedroom and Marguerite.
The little girl lay in the bed, cuddling the doll, and looked up at her governess with marked irritation. “I told him to take you to the garden, Miss Morton. No one would disturb you there.”
Caroline ignored this too-adult advice and went to the window to close the drapes halfway. Her hands were shaking as she reached for the cord. With some concentration she steadied them as if closing the curtains smoothly would attest to her self-control. She stood in the narrow length of window that remained and stared, unseeing, at the garden, rain-drenched, the color of the myriad flowers dimmed by the mist.
She could still see his eyes, feel his hands on her arms. Feel, she thought. How long since she had allowed herself to feel anything? Had it shown in her face, in her eyes? When he had pulled her into his arms had he seen how much she wanted his touch? She drew in a deep breath, sighed out her anxiety, and turned to Marguerite, who was talking quietly to her doll.
Caroline walked over to the chair nearest the bed and sat down. This kind of love was so much easier to understand, to give. Marguerite smiled at her and placed the doll in her lap. It was so much easier to accept as well.
In a few moments they were deeply into the adventures of Avenant, his dog Frisky, and the demanding Goldenlocks. By the time Avenant had met the third of her challenges and been crowned King to her Queen, Caroline was calm, the familiar routine restoring her usual composure. She stood up and walked to the bookshelf, intent on finding something new to read.
At the same moment, Susan came into the room, bearing a tray.
“My maid waits for you in your room, Caroline. I will stay with Marguerite awhile.”
Without waiting for an answer, Susan settled the tray on the table and herself in the nearest chair.
Ignoring Caroline, Susan leaned toward Marguerite. “I have a fairy tale I made all my own, Marguerite. Once upon a time there was a magic mushroom that upon eating would bless you with all you longed for but in looking for it there was always the danger that you could eat a poison mushroom instead of the magic one.”
Marguerite brightened at the thought of a new tale and Caroline slipped from the room.
The dayroom was as it had been before the fashion parade. Even the mirror had been removed. Reynie was gone and all their untidy emotions had evaporated as well.
How long before she could banish them from her heart? His presence still spoke to her senses in a way no other man’s ever had.
How was she to make her body accept what her mind knew? She had left home still a girl but had come back a woman, hardened by war. How could anyone here, in the quiet goodness of Yorkshire, accept her choices when she herself was overwhelmed by them?
She would build a new life for herself, but it would be as far away from the old one as she could make it. As far away from the memories of what she had been and could have been.
Caroline heard humming and followed the sound of it into her room, where Susan’s maid was carefully arranging the clothes so they would be at hand for the necessary alterations.
Reynie had said she must accept the burden of Susan’s generosity. The thought made her laugh, just a little. Hardly a burden. She picked up one of the dresses and began to shake out the wrinkles. “Miss Landry tells me that you have brought your scissors with you.”