At least as a spinster, I had the respect of Uncle Reggie and his colleagues,Henri reflected bitterly.As Gabriel’s wife, I am apparently an accessory to be deployed when needed and ignored when not.
Henri had reached the main hall when she heard footsteps behind her, and for a moment her heart leaped with the hope that Gabriel had followed her, that perhaps her ultimatum had finally penetrated his self-absorbed focus and prompted him to address the fundamental problems in their relationship.
“Gabriel?” she called out, turning toward the sound.
But the figure that emerged from the shadows was not her husband. Henri found herself face-to-face with a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man whose pale eyes held a kind of fevered intensity that made her blood run cold. She recognized him immediately. The same man who had threatened her in Danbury’s library,the menacing stranger willing to use violence to obtain the manuscript she had been examining.
Henri opened her mouth to scream, but the man moved with shocking speed, clamping a gloved hand over her mouth while his other arm wrapped around her waist with iron strength. Henri struggled desperately, trying to break free from his grip, but years of sedentary work as a secretary had not prepared her for combat against someone clearly experienced in violence.
“Quietly now, Miss Bigsby,” the man whispered against her ear with the same cold menace she remembered from their first encounter. “Or rather, I should say Lady Trenwith, shouldn’t I? Congratulations on your recent marriage, though I’m afraid the celebration may be rather short-lived.”
Henri continued to fight against his hold, but the man was already dragging her toward what appeared to be a side entrance, moving in a determined manner that suggested he was accustomed to this sort of nefarious activity. Henri’s mind raced with desperate thoughts of Gabriel somewhere in the basement chambers, completely unaware that the danger that had brought him into her life was now literally carrying her away from any hope of rescue.
He will never even know what happened to me,Henri realized with terrifying clarity as her captor maneuvered her through the doorway and into the bitter wind that swept across the clifftop.He is so absorbed in his investigation that he probably will not notice I am gone until he needs me to discuss something.
The irony was almost unbearable. After all her anger about Gabriel’s failure to value her properly, Henri was about to disappear from his life entirely, taken by the very forces that had driven their quest from the beginning. As her captor dragged her away from Grimsfell Hall and toward whatever fate he had planned for her, Henri could only hope that Gabriel’s guiltover losing her might finally prompt him to reveal the secrets that had remained locked in his heart throughout their brief, troubled marriage. Not to her, it would seem, but mayhap to some other future bride.
CHAPTER 20
“Wit you well, I loved you, and never other.”
Sir Thomas Malory,Le Morte d’Arthur
Gabriel stood alone in the servants’ corridor for several long minutes after Henri’s footsteps had faded, staring at the spot where she had delivered her devastating ultimatum. The echo of her words reverberated in the confined space, each syllable cutting deeper than the last.
“I find myself thinking I might … not.”
For the first time in his adult life, Gabriel found himself completely paralyzed by emotion. The careful control that had defined his diplomatic career, the barriers he had constructed so meticulously over the years, crumbled in an instant as the full implications of Henri’s declaration crashed over him like a winter storm.
She is leaving me.
A bolt of pure panic shot through his chest that was unlike anything he had experienced since childhood. All the rational arguments he might have marshaled about their marriage being a practical arrangement, about emotional attachments being dangerous liabilities, about the wisdom of maintaining professional distance—all of it evaporated in the face of one terrible truth.
I am in love with Henri.
Desperately, completely, irrevocably in love with the brilliant, stubborn, infuriating woman who had just walked out of his life because he had been too much of a coward to let her into his heart.
Gabriel sank against the stone wall, his legs suddenly unable to support him as waves of realization washed over him. Every moment of their journey together played through his memory with devastating clarity. Henri’s excitement when they deciphered their first clue, her courage during their dangerous descent at Tintagel, her patient attempts to draw him out of his self-imposed isolation. She had been trying to build a real partnership, a genuine marriage, while he had been treating her like a colleague to be managed and controlled.
My grandfather was wrong,Gabriel thought with sudden, blazing clarity.Uncle James was wrong. They shaped me into someone who cannot connect with another human being, someone so terrified of rejection that I reject others first.
The old viscount’s repulsion had haunted Gabriel’s dreams for decades, those cutting words about weakness and unseemly emotion that had driven a five-year-old boy to lock away his heart and never let anyone close enough to hurt him again. But Henri had been different. Henri had seen past his fortified walls, had recognized the man behind them, and had been willing to fight for him.
And he had squandered it because he was too frightened to take the chance that someone might actually care for him despite his flaws.
Gabriel forced himself to his feet, his mind racing with desperate plans. He had to find Henri, had to explain everything. He had to tell her that she was worth more to him than all the ancient mysteries in the world, that solving Horace’s murder meant nothing if he lost her in the process.
Gabriel rushed through the manor’s corridors, calling Henri’s name and checking every room where she might have gone to calm herself after their argument. The main hall, the library, the morning room. All empty. As the minutes passed without any sign of her, Gabriel’s panic began to transform into terror.
Where could she have gone?
Gabriel burst through the main entrance of Grimsfell Hall, his eyes scanning the courtyard for any sign of Henri’s blue cloak or honey-brown hair. Their coachman looked up from tending the horses with mild surprise at Gabriel’s obvious distress.
“M’lord? Something amiss?”
“My wife,” Gabriel said breathlessly. “Have you seen Lady Trenwith leave the hall?”
The coachman shook his head with certainty. “No, m’lord. I’ve been here with the horses the whole while. Ain’t seen her ladyship since the two of you went inside.”
