“Zach?” She looked up at him with luminous eyes. “Yes. I thought I could not live when he went away. And I thought I would surely die when I knew he was dead. It did not seem possible for this world to go on without Zach in it. He was so full of life and laughter. But of course the world did go on and I lived on. I had no choice. I had Zachary.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “If only we had lived through different times, perhaps there would have been no wars to take so many young men and to widow so many young women.”
“I was not married to him,” she said, lowering her eyes to her hands in her lap.
“Oh, yes, you were,” he said. “In your heart you were. Unfortunately you also had your family’s censure to live with, since they appear not to have seen that. But it is true, Barbara. Have you been grieving for him tonight?”
So that was why he had come. Out of kindness. She might have guessed it. He had thought that she would be grieving for Zach, and he had come to offer company and perhaps some comfort. She loved him for his kindness. If there had been nothing else, she would have loved him just for that.
“I think I have been trying,” she said. “There is a locket. An empty locket, since he never had a chance to have his miniature painted to put inside. The sight of that emptiness always used to be able to bring on the pain. It no longer does so. Too much time has passed. “
Her tone was regretful. He knew exactly what she meant.
“And you have been crying over the fact that you can no longer cry?” he asked, smiling.
She smiled back. “I would have loved him all our lives,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “as I would have loved Anna-Marie.”
Ah, yes, this was another reason for his coming. His wife, so much more recently lost than Zach. He needed to spend at least a few minutes of a festive evening with someone who would understand because she had suffered a similar loss.
“Yes,” she said. “But we did love them while they lived, and that is what really matters. It would be even more dreadful to lose loved ones and have to live with the guilt of knowing that we had not loved them as we should while they lived. “
“Are you ready to love again, Barbara?” he asked quietly. He unconsciously held his breath.
She laughed softly and smoothed her hands over the silk of her dress on her lap. “I gave up the right when I lay with Zach and conceived his child,” she said.
“Is the ability to love a right that can be lost or discarded, then?” he asked.
She smiled down at her hands. No, it was impossible that that was why he had come. She must not even begin to think such a thing. She was a fallen woman, he the heir to a marquess. She must not invite unnecessary pain. She raised her eyes to his.
Such misery and such suffering he saw there that his smile faded. God, what was it? He crossed the room to her and was down on his knees before her chair and taking her cold hands in his before he realized what he was doing.
“Barbara,” he said. “I am ready. I did not think it would be possible, or not quite so soon anyway. I was prepared to make a marriage of convenience. Or perhaps not quite that—a marriage of affection, let us say. I did not know that I was ready to love again. Not until I met you.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she bit her upper lip. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t. You must know how vulnerable I am, how lonely. You must know the temptation you are pressing on me. But I will not take another lover. Not even if I were ten times more lonely.”
If he had not been directly before her, blocking her path to the door, and if he had not had such a strong grip on her hands, she would have fled the room and left him to find his own way out of the house and back to the ball and Eve’s waiting arms. She hated him at that moment. She hated him because she wanted him so much and she knew she could have him with just one word.
“Lover,” he said. “Yes, I want to be that to you, Barbara. And friend. And father to Zach. And your husband.” He watched her face closely. He could not guess at her thoughts. He watched two tears trickle down her cheeks, and resisted the urge to take her into his arms. “I have come here to ask you to do me the honor of becoming my wife.” She was on her feet then and pushing past him. She stopped in the middle of the room, her back to him. She was laughing, though there was no amusement in the sound.
“Do you not realize what I am?” she said. “ ‘Whore’ is the word that has been used in my hearing more than once. Do you not realize what Zachary is? ‘Bas—.’ “
He caught her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. “You are a woman who loved unconditionally,” he said. “Zach is a product of that love. You have never let those labels destroy your pride, Barbara. Why remember them now?”
“Why?” she said. “Because you have just asked me to be your viscountess, daughter-in-law of your father, the Marquess of Highmoor. Because you have asked me to take a place in respectable society at your side and to allow my son to become your stepson. Do you not realize the utter impossibility of what you ask?”
“There is only one fact that would make it impossible,” he said. “Only one, Barbara. If you do not love me. Sometimes in the last few days I have thought that perhaps you do or that perhaps you can come to do so, given time. But perhaps it has just been your loneliness or your sympathy with my past with which you can identify. Or perhaps it is just friendship and can never be more.”
Her hand was against his cheek suddenly, though she could not remember lifting it from her side and placing it there. “I have one of the sweetmeats from Zachary’s box wrapped in a handkerchief upstairs,” she said, looking directly into his blue eyes. “I know that I will keep it there for the rest of my life, along with the silver locket Zach gave me on this very day eight years ago.”
His hand was over hers, holding it against his cheek. “Say it, then,” he said. “Say it, Barbara.”
“What is the point?” she said. “I cannot marry you. We both know that. And I will not lie with you. I will not. Ah, please don’t ask that of me, for I might say yes, you know. “
“Say it,” he said. And his eyes burned into hers and exultation was growing in him.
“I love you, then,” she said. “There. Are you satisfied? I love you, my lord.”
