her.
Married people shared beds and houses and glasses of water, she ruminated, and the thought made her suddenly laugh. A strange strangled sound of neither mirth nor sadness. She imagined that if she could have seen the expression on her face she might look a little like the baffled angel in Charity’s drawings-a woman who found herself in a position that she could not quite fathom.
Unexpectedly a tear dropped down her cheek and Lucas moved forwards, his thumb tracing the path of wetness with warmth.
‘I know that this is all different for you and that the house is not as you may have hoped it to be, but-’
She shook her head. ‘It is not the house.’
‘Me, then?’
She nodded. ‘I do not really know you.’ She refused to look at him as she said it, and refused to just stop there. ‘And now this room with one bed between the two of us…’
‘Nay, it is yours. Tonight I shall sleep elsewhere.’
The relief of that sentence was all encompassing, and she swallowed back more tears. She never cried, she never blushed, she had never felt this groundless shifting ambivalence that left her at such a loss, but here, tonight, she did not even recognise herself, a quivering mannerless woman who had made little effort with anyone or anything for the whole of her wedding day and was now in a room that looked like something out of a child’s colourful fairytale.
And yet beneath everything she did not want her pale and ordered old life back, and it was that thought more than anything that kept her mute.
She looked as if she might crumple if he so much as touched her, looked like a woman at the very end of her tether and the fact that the water in the glass had stained the front of her cream bodice and gone unnoticed added further credence to his summations.
His new wife was beautiful, her cheeks flushed as he had never seen them before and her skirt pushed up at such an angle that he could glimpse her shins, the stockings that covered shapely ankles implying that the rest of her legs would be just as inviting.
The direction of his thoughts worried him and to take his mind off such considerations he took the wedding ring from his pocket and laid it in his hand.
‘I retrieved this from Lord Alfred.’
She remained silent.
‘Though I have had advice that the setting may not be quite to your taste?’
A look of sheer embarrassment covered her face. ‘No, it is perfectly all right.’
Manners again, he thought, and it was on the tip of his tongue to insist otherwise when she stood and put out her hand.
‘I am sorry for the careless way I treated your ring.’
She did not say that she liked it, he noticed, as he took her left hand into his own, the fingers cold and her nails surprisingly bitten down almost to the quick.
At the very end of her forefinger was a deep crescent-shaped scar, the sort of mark a knife would make, but he said nothing for fear of spoiling the moment as he slipped the band back upon her finger.
A sign that things could be good or a shackle that held her to him despite every other difference?
‘How old was your wife when she died?’ The question unsettled him, but he made himself answer.
‘Twenty-four. Her name was Elizabeth.’
‘And you met her in Virginia?’
‘She was the daughter of an army general who was stationed near Boston.’
‘Nathaniel said that she was killed in an accident?’
The anger in him was quick, spilling out even as he tried to take back the words. ‘No. I killed her by my own carelessness. It was a rain-filled night and the path too difficult for a carriage.’
‘Did you mean for her to die?’ Lilly’s voice was measured, the matter-of-factness within it beguiling.
‘No, of course I didn’t.’
‘Then in my opinion it was an accident.’
Light blue eyes watched him without pity. Just an accident. In her view. Perhaps she was correct? The hope of it snatched away his more usual all-encompassing guilt and he breathed out, loudly.
‘Are you always so certain of things?’ This was a side of her he had not seen before.
The answering puzzled light in her eyes reminded him so forcibly of the time that he had kissed her in London he had to jam his hands in his pockets just to stop himself from reaching out again.
Not now. Not yet. Not when she so plainly was frightened of him.
‘Certain? I used to think I was such, but lately…’ The shadows of the past week bruised her humour, and because of that he tried to explain even just a little of what lay unsaid between them.
‘When I left London the night of the ball I had no notion that anyone had seen us, and I should like to explain just what happened next-’ He stopped as she shook his words away.
‘My ruination was as much my fault as it was yours. More, perhaps, for at least you had the foresight to stop it at a touch.’
‘You wanted me to keep going?’
The very thought of it had the blood rushing to places that he knew would show and he turned. Lord, suddenly he wanted all the promise of a wedding night, all the whispers, soft words and touches, the burning pleasure of release and elation.
‘I do not know…perhaps…?’
Given as a gift of honesty. The squeeze of relief in his heart made him giddy. Not at all like Elizabeth then, he thought, for she had seldom been truthful when it suited her not to be.
A knock at the door allowed the entry of two young maids who efficiently set out steaming dinners on trays at the table. A bottle of water was added to the fare just before they left.
‘You do not drink wine?’ she asked as they sat down to the supper.
‘After the carriage accident I drank too much…’
‘And then you met my cousin, whom you seem to dislike?’
Luc felt himself tense up. Lord, how was he to tell her anything, a woman who had been cocooned by a genteel and refined upbringing? He could see it in her skin, in the softness of her hands, in the worry of her eyes and in the shake of her voice. Tonight was her wedding night, damn it, and she could not wish to hear anything so sordid. Forcing a smile, he raised his glass to her. ‘There is much in my life that has been more difficult than your own, and there are things that I have done that I am now sorry for.’
‘Things?’
He laughed, more out of sheer unease than anything else, and hated the way her smile was dashed from her eyes.
‘Things that I am not proud of now, but were at the time necessary.’
‘To survive?’
He nodded. ‘Survival here is a simpler process. Break the rules in England and you are banished. Break them in Virginia and you are left fighting for your life.’
‘As you have been?’ Her eyes deliberately ran across the scar on his neck. He saw the fear in them and his hand caught hers, his fingers running along the inside of her opened palm, stroking, asking.
For a chance, for a second chance, the softness of her skin against his just a small reminder of all that was different between them.
Lilly closed her eyes and felt. For this one moment in her wedding day she just felt what it was other brides might, the trail of his fingers evoking a thrall in her she had only ever known once before. With him.
Was this an answer?
An easy ending to everything that was different between them. A bride and groom thrown together not by love, but by ruin.
She knew nothing of his life or his beliefs, nothing of his family or his country or the things that he knew as right and wrong. If they made love here and now it would be just that, bodies touching where minds could never follow, a shallow knowledge of desire that had nothing to do with the heart.
When she pulled away he let her go and stood with his hands by his side, watching, a man of honour and
