“I saw it once,” Eleanor said, putting her hand over his again. The one that wasn’t holding the ring. “I was terrified for her.”
He shuddered. “You couldn’t not be. Sometimes I wouldn’t go home at night, simply because I couldn’t bear it. It looked so painful, though she said it wasn’t. She was appallingly brave.”
Eleanor murmured something.
“I used to wish that she would just scream at me, or at fate, or someone. But she never did.” His hands clenched and then he opened his right hand and looked down at the ring as if surprised to find it there.
“No,” Eleanor said quickly. “No.”
“It’s the only solution,” he said. “I love you, and you love me. I always loved you, even before you noticed me.”
“You did?”
“You can’t have been more than thirteen when I came home with your brother the first time. But you were already yourself.” He ran a finger along her eyebrow. “You were already laughing in that way you have.”
Eleanor couldn’t stop herself. “What do you mean?”
“Other women smile. Or when they laugh, it comes out a pinched sound. Your mouth is so wide.”
He fell silent, to Eleanor’s relief. She’d never thought of her mouth as wide, and it wasn’t an image she particularly cared to dwell on.
But then he started talking again. “I brought this ring with me because it’s the ring I should have given you years ago. It was my mother’s. I never gave it to Ada.”
“I don’t think we should have this conversation now,” Eleanor said.
His eyes were burning again. His skin seemed drawn too tightly over his bones, and yet he was still Gideon. The same dear Gideon whom she had watched so hungrily at fourteen, had smiled at shyly—and then not so shyly—at fifteen, the boy she had lured to kiss her at sixteen…
“You miss her,” she said.
“No!” he said, almost violently. “I hardly knew her. We lived in the house like a brother and sister.”
She touched him on the shoulder and it was the way it used to be, finally. She met his eyes and she knew what he was feeling, just the way she used to, when she thought they were two hearts beating as one. She held out her arms. “It’s all right to miss her,” she said.
He fell forward, head on her shoulder, still protesting that he didn’t miss his wife at all. That he hardly knew her.
Until he began weeping.
Chapter Twenty-one
Eleanor didn’t manage to escape to her bedchamber until very late that night. By then her nerves felt like the strings of a violin, pulled too tight and vibrating helplessly. She had a bath, dismissed Willa, put on her nightgown, and wrapped herself in a dressing gown.
But she couldn’t settle down. She tried lying on the bed. She tried sitting before the fire. She tried writing a letter to a friend, and tore up three different drafts.
Finally she remembered that there were armchairs on the balcony. Villiers wouldn’t be there, waiting to see if he had a companion in stargazing. He had hardly met her eyes all day, just smiled at her coolly and offered his felicitations. She had done the same, of course.
Lisette had swanned around the house talking about her marriage to dearest Leopold. He was probably in his betrothed’s bedchamber that very moment. God knows, Lisette wouldn’t bar the door.
She pushed open the tall doors and walked into the velvety darkness. The chairs were positioned on Villiers’s side of the balcony, so she walked forward until she bumped into one. Then she rounded the arm and dropped straight down.
Only to land on a pair of muscular legs.
“Oof,” said a male voice. “You look like a featherweight, but you’re not.”
“I should bounce on you for that,” she snapped.
There was a moment of silence while they both contemplated the possibilities that comment brought to mind.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said finally.
She rose as he spoke. “I shall leave you to the stars, Your Grace.”
“You—”
Eleanor waited, though she knew she shouldn’t.
“You turn me into a lecher,” he stated.
She smiled, although she knew he couldn’t see her expression. “I feel quite certain that I’m not the first woman to have succeeded in that respect.”
“Oddly enough, I think that you are.”
“Says the father of six children.”
“Oh, I have felt lust. And I’ve indulged lust. But no other woman has turned me into another person. It’s unreasonable.”
She kept her voice light. “I thought that men enjoyed lechery.”
With one swift, savage moment he stood before her. “Enjoyment has little to do with the way I feel about you.” His voice was low and dark. “I could—I could eat you, drink you. I want to lick you, suck you, own you.”
For a moment she sank into the mesmerizing sound of his voice, and then she shook free. “You can’t own me, Leopold. You are marrying Lisette.”
“And you—”
“Gideon came back for me, after all.”
“Very romantic,” Villiers said flatly.
She heard a faint sound from her bedchamber.
“Someone is knocking on your door,” Villiers said. “I suspect it is not your maid.”
She looked up at him in the dim light, a well of desperation in her heart. “Leopold—”
“You’ll have to go,” he said, composed as ever. “Obviously I am not the only man turned lecher by your beauty, Eleanor.”
“I’m not beautiful,” she whispered.
He said something but she couldn’t hear it. The knocking sounded again.
“What did you say?” she asked.
His lips slid down her forehead, her nose, and he said it against her mouth. “Only the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”
Chapter Twenty-two
“Gideon,” Eleanor said, opening the door.
He wasn’t so young anymore. His eyes were tired and little lines flared from the corners. And yet he had the same bone-deep beauty he’d had as a boy. “I had to apologize for my behavior this afternoon.”
“You need not excuse yourself,” she said, holding out her hand. The day had passed in such a fury of emotion that she hadn’t taken a breath, hadn’t thought. Everything that she’d ever dreamed of—no, not Ada’s death, but the rest—had come true in one moment.
Gideon walked in, and they sat by the fireplace as if they’d been married for over a decade, as if young love had faded and turned to something stronger.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said after a moment.
“In my bedchamber, or in Kent?” She smiled, trying to ease the tension in his face.
“In Kent,” he said, not smiling. “I must leave at dawn tomorrow; all my people think I merely stopped here on the way to visit Ada’s great-aunt. She had no other relatives.”
The ton would certainly discover where he was, given the kiss with which he’d greeted her. But she didn’t say anything. She kept searching his face, looking for that indescribable thing that had made him the man she loved above everyone and everything else.