“I...” She pulled the linen a few inches higher. “I appreciate that you wanted to come and tell me the news of your father’s passing in person. Once again, I am sorry for your loss. But I should like you to leave now.”
Not so long ago, when her vision had begun to blur from reading too many medical terms, she’d selected a book at random from her shelf and flipped it open to a chapter on the regal lions of Haryana, India. The text had relayed the firsthand account of a man who had found himself in the unfortunate position of traveling through their territory in the early hours of the morning when his party’s guide had assured him the lions were at rest.
“One moment,”he wrote,“there was nothing but balmy air and the quiet rustle of grass. The next, the male lion was upon us, dragging our guide into the underbrush before we even realized we were under attack. Such is their ferocity. Their cunningness. Their ability to stalk their prey between breaths.”
One moment, Stephen was on the bed.
The next, he was standing in front of her, his hands wrapped in a tight, painless grip around her wrists as he drew her up against the hard, unforgiving length of his body with only the thin linen between them.
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?” His voice was a hoarse whisper; velvet scraping against stone that roused a potent yearning from between thighs that were still tender from their lovemaking.
“You came to tell me about your father, and you did.” She tried to avert her gaze and failed miserably. When Stephen was hundreds of miles away, she could—with a great deal of effort—force him from her mind. But when he was right in front of her, when he was holding her, feigning indifference was as impossible as putting blood back into a bleeding patient.
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?” he repeated, the rough pad of his thumbs pressing against the delicate blue-and-green veins on the inside of her wrists where her pulse fluttered in an erratic rhythm.
She bit the inside of her cheek. “Because your business here is concluded.”
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?”
Because I am afraid if you do not, I’ll give up everything to follow you anywhere.
“Because I wish I’d never married you!” she cried, her words firing through the air like cannonballs. When they landed, they did so with a crash, leaving deep furrows in their wake as they plowed through the earth.
Stephen’s countenance went blank. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. Shedidwish she hadn’t married him, except it wasn’t for the reason she was letting him believe. She wished she hadn’t married him because he was... confusing. If her dream of being a doctor was a smooth, glassy pond, then Stephen was the rock that skipped across the surface, causing any number of ripples.
In theory, their marriage had been the logical solution to both of their problems. In reality, it had caused her nothing but doubt and heartache.
“Fine.” He dropped her wrists as one might drop a candle that had burned too low. “There is a boat leaving the harbor this afternoon for New Haven. I’ll make sure that I’m on it, and you won’t hear from me again.”
Her audible sigh of relief caused the corner of his mouth to lift in a cold, uncharacteristic smirk that hardened the edges of his eyes and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that while she may have married Viscount Brunswick, she was now pledged to the Earl of Lancaster. A far more layered, dangerous husbandthan the one who had pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek in an old Boston church.
“This is not goodbye forever, Abigail. In two years, I will come for you and you will return with me to London whether you want to or not, because that is the bloody agreement. Do I make myself clear?”
She nodded, and kept nodding even after he’d left, closing the front door behind him with a quiet, controlledclickthat somehow echoed far louder than if he’d slammed it shut. Hugging the linen to her chest, she sat on the mattress, the creak of the springs attracting the attention of Susan who paraded into the bedroom on the tips of her orange paws.
Already purring—her pleasant mood apparently returned now that Stephen was gone—Susan jumped onto the bed and began to knead Abigail’s thigh, her sharp claws lightly making contact before retracting in a steady ebb and flow that brought a sense of calm to a room still filled with crackling tension.
“Two years,” Abigail murmured, scratching Susan behind her ear. “Two years, and he’ll be back, which means there’s only one thing to do, isn’t there? We need to disappear.”
Chapter Nine
The Medical Office and Private Residence of Dr. Chadwick
London, England
December 1813
Stephen had imaginedthis reconciliation a hundred times.
No, athousand.
He’d pictured the different expressions on Abigail’s face. The way her eyes might widen or her mouth would drop open. The sound of her gasp. Or maybe she would cry. He’d never seen her cry before. He didn’t even know if she was capable of tears. He doubted it. Snow only turned to water when it melted, and his wife was cold as ice. But he’d taken grim pleasure in imagining her dissolving into sobs as she flew into his arms and apologized for leading him on a year-long fucking goose chase.
Some nights, while he’d laid alone in a laughably small bed above a noisy tavern in some nameless New England town, he had visualized her slamming the door in his face. In his worst nightmares, he’d pictured himself knocking... and there being no one there to answer, because he was too late, yet again. Always two steps behind, never one step ahead.
Except for today.
