Her eyes burned and she blinked fiercely. She couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t endure that again. If this was love, she wanted nothing to do with it.
Not that she had anything to worry about.
He would never come back for her.
She would learn to live as before. Without him.
Spencer awoke in a cold sweat, his bare chest rising and falling with each gasping breath. A scream trapped in his throat, choking him. Dragging both hands through his hair, he pulled at the ends as if he would rip the strands out by the roots. After a moment, he managed to gulp down air and slow his breathing.
Flinging back the covers, he rose from the bed. It had not been the first nightmare of the war he’d endured. He’d dreamed of blood and death many times. During the war. Since the war.
Only less since Evie had entered his life. Somehow she had given him something else upon which to concentrate. Cursing, he paced a hard line in his vast bedchamber.
The nightmare had started out like so many others. The stinging smoke. Thick, suffocating. Ian was there, as he had been at the end, spitting out his final words, demanding Spencer’s pledge.
And there were the others. Faces Spencer knew, remembered. Others he did not. Anonymous soldiers whose eyes were always frozen with shock. Even among unremitting death, no one ever expected he would be the next to fall. They always looked shocked, cruelly surprised.
Then Ian vanished into the smoke.
In every dream Spencer climbed over the fallen, crawled over the dead, shouting for Ian, searching, scouring the razed field. Before, in the past, he always found Ian at the top of a hill, hidden in wildflowers that reached to Spencer’s knees. Buried in lush grasses and vibrant flowers, he always looked so peaceful, so calm. As if he weren’t dead but merely lost to slumber.
Of course, Ian never woke, never roused no matter how loud Spencer shouted his name, no matter how hard he shook him.
“Christ.” He pulled back the drapes and stared out at the night, his heart beating a wild tempo in his chest, his hand shaking against the wall.
But this time the dream had been different.
It had changed.
It wasn’t Ian on that hill waiting for him amid wildflowers.
The figure he found, still as death and lost to all his shouts, the body lifeless, unreachable, dead to all his pleas, had been Evie. His wife.
A shuddery breath tripped past his lips. He didn’t know what it meant, but he couldn’t stop shivering at the memory.
The sight of her narrow face, so still and lovely, pale as cream but marble to his touch, sent a pain deep and penetrating into his heart. Her gold-brown hair surrounded her like a spill of undulating honey.
That’s when he awoke, a scream silent on his lips.
The lawn glinted up at him, the snow winking, as if it had been dusted with diamonds. He looked over his shoulder at his great bed, the coverlet rumpled, the mattress a great barren stretch. Void of Evie.
He told himself she was fine. Alive and well miles away at The Harbour.
But she might as well be dead for all that you’ve chased her from your life, banished her from your heart, exorcised her from your presence.
Her father’s words played over and over in his head. As they had all day. Spencer flattened his hand against the cool glass of the mullioned window, pressing hard, as if he could break through the pane. As if truth awaited him on the other side. An answer, a cure for the feelings swimming like venom through his veins. Regret.
He’d fought it. Resisted acknowledging the reality of his feelings before.
He wished he could go back. He wished he could travel back weeks ago, to when he’d first walked into the parlor and overheard Evie’s stepmother flaunting the sordid truth so recklessly.
He wished he had reacted differently to her betrayal, perhaps seen it for more, tried to understand her reasons. If he could take back his words and actions, he would.
He had allowed rage to get in the way—a resurgence of the feelings he had suffered years ago, standing witness to his father’s deceit, watching as Adara and Cullen had merrily announced their engagement even when she had promised to elope with him. The familiar sense that he wasn’t worth enough to be told the truth, that he deserved lies and betrayal, had surged through him, a vitriolic burn in his blood that had blocked out anything else.
Linnie was dead. The very female around whom he had woven impossible dreams. But Evie was alive. His wife. He swallowed against the tightness in his throat. And suddenly, he knew.
He wanted no other.
Chapter 29
The day dawned bright and golden, warming the late winter nip in the air. The snow had begun to melt. It was a perfect day for the outdoors. Mr. Murdoch swept clean the small lakeside dock and double-layered it with blankets.
Evie felt as happy as she could given the numbness encasing her heart. Her friends worked hard to cheer her, distracting her with their conversation and antics, exclaiming delightedly over Mrs. Murdoch’s cucumber sandwiches spread out before them. Everyone in the world who mattered to her surrounded her. She steered her thoughts from Spencer, deliberately refusing to lump him into such a category. She would not think about him. Soon, he would fail to matter. Soon, she wouldn’t think of him at all.
She need only continue telling herself this for it to become true.
She had a full life. Plenty. Enough. People who loved her. Nicholas, the Murdochs, Amy, Fallon, Marguerite. Even Aunt Gertie, lucid and fairly good-spirited, had emerged from her room with the departure of Georgianna. Nicholas and Jillian chased each other over the lawn, Amy in close pursuit, warning them not to fall on the slushy ground.
It was a fine day.
Mr. Murdoch set up a target for the ladies. Given what had happened last time Aunt Gertie held a bow and arrow in her hands, she was not permitted to shoot. Marguerite took turns with Fallon.
At that moment, Mrs. Murdoch arrived with another tray of food.
Fallon patted her stomach. “I’ll need to let my dresses out.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” the housekeeper replied, grinning her apple cheeks. “Find myself doing the same once a year or so. Mr. Murdoch simply claims I give him a bit more to love that way.”
“Your Mr. Murdoch sounds a splendid man.” Smiling, Fallon reached for another sandwich. “I can hear Dominic saying the same thing.” The two women shared a knowing glance, the kind only two women completely confident in the love of their men could share. It made Evie feel a little lonely. She dropped her gaze and played with the hem of her dress.
“What’s he doing here?” Evie’s gaze snapped up at the sound of Mrs. Murdoch’s biting voice. “Oh, the absolute cheek!”
Evie followed her housekeeper’s gaze across the lawn.
Spencer strode in her direction with long, purposeful strides, Mr. Murdoch close on his heels, his face red with anger.
Evie rose unsteadily to her feet, her pulse spiking against her throat at the sight of him. Even from this distance, those green eyes of his looked brighter, more vivid than she remembered within his handsome face. His hair blew about his head as he walked. He looked haggard, severe. Lips hard and unsmiling. Still, her heart beat faster as he cut a swift path down the incline to where they picnicked.
Fallon swept to her feet and thrust Evie behind her towering person. “Spencer, I presume? I shall handle this, Evie.”
“Fallon, that’s not necessary—”
“You’ve no business here,” Fallon announced as he drew near.
He blinked, eyeing her Amazon of a friend. The Murdochs joined Fallon, standing on either side of her, forming a wall before Evie. She peered over Fallon’s shoulder, her heart thundering loudly in her ears.
Fallon waved a hand, gesturing for him to leave in the direction he’d come from. “You can’t break her heart and then stroll back in here like nothing happened.”
He stared hard at Evie where she peered over Fallon’s shoulder, his green eyes startlingly intent. “Did I break your heart?”
The deep sound of his voice—the question he asked—sent a ripple through her.
Fallon and the Murdochs glanced back at her, waiting for her to respond.
Tension weighed the air. She stared back at Spencer, unnerved by his stare.
“Evie?” he pressed, pushing for her answer.
She wet her lips. “Go home, Spencer.”
He said nothing; he merely stared. And stared.
“Stop looking at me that way,” she snapped.
“What way?”
“As if what I feel . . . what I say . . . suddenly matters to you,” she choked.
“It does matter,” he declared.
Fallon snorted.
Evie crossed her arms tightly, defiantly over her chest and looked away, unable to bear the earnest expression on his face.
“I have to know,” he demanded, his voice desperate in a way that made her tremble. “Did you love me?”
The question jolted her. Why did he care?
She shook her head, unable to answer.
“Do you love me, Evie?” he repeated, spacing each word.
“That’s a fine thing for you to ask now,” Marguerite called indignantly from where she stood close to Aunt Gertie.
“The better question is how you feel about her,” Fallon inserted.
Heat crawled over her cheeks. “I can speak for myself. You two don’t need to protect me.”
“What are you doing here?” Aunt Gertie demanded, stalking forward to stand beside Marguerite. “You’re not welcome here.”
Amy and the children joined the growing crowd, too. Voices ran over each other, irate and indignant on her behalf, flogging Spencer as effectively as a whip.
Evie’s head began to spin. She longed to simply run away. Disappear from a situation that was quickly spiraling out of her control.
Spencer scanned the small army before him before settling his glittering gaze back on her. “Evie.”
She couldn’t hear him above the din, but she read her name on his lips and her heart lurched. The pale green of his gaze searched her face. “Please. I need to talk to you,” he said.
She shook her head and inched back a step, unwilling to let herself melt, to soften at the mere sight of him. He’d destroyed her when he’d left. She had just begun to believe she would survive losing him. She couldn’t risk letting him back in again.
“Just go, Spencer,” she pleaded.
He stared hard at her before shaking his head. He lifted his voice above the others’. “You don’t want that, Evie. You want me to stay.”
She closed her eyes in a pained blink.
I do. I do.
“You heard her,” Aunt Gertie growled, one reed-thin arm waving. “She wants you to go. Now off with you.”
Eyes still locked on Evie, his jaw hardened as he announced, “I’m not leaving until I’ve said what I came to say.”
“You’re not lord of the manor here,” Mr. Murdoch proclaimed as he began pushing him back toward the house. Spencer struggled to break past the burly man, his face tight with frustration.
Something twisted inside her at the sight.
After several yards, he broke free.
It all happened very quickly then, descending from bad to worse.
“Off with you now, or I’ll shoot!” Aunt Gertie threatened, snatching the bow from Marguerite’s hand and hastening forward.
“Gertie, no!” Evie gasped, struggling past the barricade of bodies. “Don’t!”
“Go ahead,” Spencer flung out, still advancing, his glittering eyes locked and hungry on Evie. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Marguerite lunged after Aunt Gertie, reaching her the precise moment she let her arrow fly.
Helpless, Evie watched, her heart a wild bird fluttering in her chest as the arrow curved in a whistling arc through the air toward Spencer.
The arrow struck him—grazed his arm and then skipped across the lawn until it landed, imbedding itself weakly in the earth.