Richardspentmostofthat morning stalking the steamer’s upper decks. Ladies and young children scattered from his path, usually with awe-stricken glances at his forbidding eye patch. That was the first good to come of this cursed infirmity—he terrorised anyone who would importune him.
Elizabeth had never spoken of it. Did it horrify her, as well?
He shoved his hands in his pockets and stretched his strides to their fullest as he paced like one driven. He was a fool to think she could still care for him.Still… as if she had ever loved him in the first place! To be fair, he had been no more in love with her, but therewasrespect. Admiration. Attraction. All the things that led to love, if given the chance.
That chance, however, had fallen to Darcy. The man who had to brush women off his sleeve like flies from honey. The man with a fortune worthy of an earldom, without the bother of court politics. The man with a face he had heard likened to Michelangelo’s David and eyes that would make any woman’s stomach turn to water and her toes curl in her pointed shoes. And Elizabeth, the girl who had grown to womanhood branding calves and laughing at the bumbling efforts of males to win her notice, had lost her heart to the prize of London and Derbyshire.
What did he have to offer her after that?
Richard leaned over the stern railing and watched the sea boiling behind. It was too late for anything else, wasn’t it? He and Elizabeth were well and truly stuck together. He gripped the railing until his fingers ached, then with a brief sigh, stepped back, resolved to do the only thing he could.
Elizabeth answered the knock on her cabin door instantly, as if she had been waiting for him. She offered a tear-streaked smile and stood back to allow him to enter, one hand crossed over her middle and gripping her opposite elbow.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked.
The cabin was too small to do much else, so he nodded uncomfortably and extended his hand to the bed, indicating that she should sit first. She cleared her throat twice and sat on the far edge, her eyes fastened on his shoes.
“I came to apologise,” he began.
She looked up. “No… I should. I did not mean to make you feel…”
“Cast off?”
“Forgotten,” she finished. “I want you to know; it was never like that.”
He allowed her words to settle for a moment. “I should say,” he ventured, “that I have no right to challenge you over it. Darcy, yes. I would call him to face me and tell me everything in his own words. He said, that first day…” His cheek flinched, and he squinted at the wall. “He said you would have been better off if I had remained dead.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “That… was horrible of him.”
“I am under no illusions that any of us are perfect, but I am afraid that remark has left a rather painful thorn. So, if I appear slow to forgive him, I hope you will be patient with me.”
She drew her lip between her teeth and looked down, blinking. “I am sure he did not truly mean it.”
“Oh, he did. And part of me, you know, part of me cannot entirely blame him.” He waited for her to meet his eyes again. “No man in his senses could know you and not try to keep you in his life. How could I condemn him for doing precisely what I did?”
“Richard…” She hesitated, then reached for his hand. “I do count myself lucky. Many women never find one decent man to love, while I have known two.”
“What of this?” he asked, gesturing towards his eye. “And trite compliments are beneath you, so do not try to pass it off that I look like some swashbuckler, or that it makes me appear dangerous or heroic.”
She chuckled—the first approximation of a real laugh he had heard from her since Wyoming. “Then I shall quote the Bard:Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
“Do you love me, Elizabeth? No—the better question is,canyou love me? I will confess that this was never my notion of how my life would play out, but I am willing to make this, makeuswork, if you are.”
He watched her throat tremble, her lashes flutter, and her free hand nervously twist in the bed covering. “Yes,” she whispered at last.
“I will give you all the time you need,” he promised. “I’ll not ask you to share a bed or even kiss me.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “That is thoughtful of you, but…”
“But?”
She drew a shaking sigh. “I have always thought that once committed to a course, one ought to carry on as though there is no turning back. That… hesitation is more likely to lead to failure than otherwise.”
He sucked a breath between his teeth. “You are not, ah… not about to tell me that my first son will have blue eyes and a cleft chin, are you?”
Mortification flashed over her face. “No! How could you even think—no!”
“I am sorry, it is just that you have seemed ill, and… forget I said that. You see, I think we ought to take our time and get reacquainted. Let us keep separate cabins, at least until we reach New York, right? I will take care to always call you ‘my dear,’ and to think of your needs before my own. I’ve no doubt our hearts will shortly follow our heads.”
