“Very definitely,” he said. “I am going to sleep too. I intend to give you another sleepless night tonight.”
“Mm,” she said.
“Does that express approval or disapproval?” he asked.
“Sh,” she said. “I am obeying orders.”
He kissed her nose again.
The tension of the evening before had disappeared. But a new tension had taken its place—a tension of some desperation. All they had left, Rosamund thought as they played a hand of cards after dinner, was this evening and the night ahead. Reeves and Justin’s coachman had already given it as their opinion that it would be possible to travel by late the following morning.
So little time. It was really just as well, of course. If she stayed much longer, he would grow tired of her . . . and she would fall in love with him. She had already conceded that it would be altogether possible to do so. But it was just because he was the first man to show her that physical love could be more—far more—than the wifely duty she had performed quite cheerfully for seven years.
She wondered fleetingly if Leonard had known. Perhaps he did but considered such behavior inappropriate with a wife. But he had had no mistresses. She knew because she had asked him after a few months of marriage and he had laughed at her and told her she should not talk of such things. But he had said that he would be a greedy man indeed if a lovely young wife like her did not satisfy him. No, he had told her, he had no mistress and never would have. She had believed him.
Perhaps Leonard had not known.
“Are you going to play a card, Rosamund, or are you going to continue staring through them?” the earl asked.
“What?” She looked up at him vacantly.
He smiled and laid down his cards, faceup. “I can see that I am going to win handily, anyway,” he said. “Why prolong the agony? Do you want to play?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s sit by the fire, then,” he said.
He took the chair he had sat in the evening before, but he caught her by the wrist when she made for the chair opposite, and drew her down to sit on his lap. She curled up gratefully there and laid her head on his shoulder.
And somehow—she did not know how the topic got started—she found herself telling him about that last painful year with Leonard, when she had watched him lose weight and hide his pain behind smiles. When she had sat on a stool at his feet many times and held his hand and talked and talked endlessly on any topic that came into her head. When she had lain beside him on top of the covers of his bed countless times, his head sometimes on her arm, very still because she had learned that even her hand smoothing over his head could cause him distress. And talking and talking.
“What did I ever do to deserve you, dearest?’’ he had asked her once. And he had told her that when he was dead he wanted her to marry again as soon as possible. “For love, dearest. And for children. I want you to think of having children and being happy.”
“I am happy with you,” she had told him. “I’m happy with you, Leonard.”
“Incredibly, I think you are,” he had said. “But you will find a greater happiness, dearest, and a greater love. A different kind of love. You will know one day.”
She believed, though she had never questioned him, that he and his first wife had shared a very special kind of love. Sometimes she had even felt a little jealous of the long-dead Dorothy.
“Sometimes,” he had told her once, only a week or so before his death, “I think you are the daughter we never had, dearest. You have been the delight of my life.” He had been very weak, lying with closed eyes, pale and gaunt against his pillows. He had mentioned his first wife by name for the only time in their eight-year relationship. She did not believe he had really known what he said. “Dorothy would have loved you, too.”
“He fell asleep,” she said, “and he never woke up. He died three days later. And during those days, I sat by him, willing him to wake up because there was so much I still wanted to say to him and had left too late.”
“He knew,” Lord Wetherby said. Somehow the pins had been removed from her hair and it was loose about her shoulders. “He knew, Rosamund. You loved him dearly, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think I loved even Papa more,” she said.
“He knew,” he said. “He was well-blessed, your husband. To have had his Dorothy first and then you. No, don’t hold back.”
“I feel so stupid,” she said. “It was more than a year ago.”
“But you were married to him for eight years,” he said, “and loved him dearly. Grief does not end when mourning is put off.”
And so she hid her face against his shoulder, took the handkerchief he put into her hand, and cried and cried as she had not done since the day of the funeral. She cried until her ribs hurt.
“He was a well-blessed man,” the earl said against the side of her face, “to have had a woman like you, Rosamund.”
"I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up on his lap and blowing her nose loudly and resolutely into his handkerchief, “to subject you to this.”
