Two well-heeled and besotted young gentlemen were doing their best to charm her, entirely ignorant of the fact that their wide-eyed fascination with her fiery hair and voluptuous figure was guaranteed to have the opposite reaction. Already she wore that apathetic and unsubtle irked expression which she always wore around such irritants and he could only imagine the insulting and tart answers she would have for whatever honeyed twaddle they were spouting in their quest to seduce her. As he thought it, she speared one of them with a blatant poison verbal dart and the idiot blinked as if he must have heard it incorrectly, then brayed like a donkey when he wrongly assumed she was being droll. Her plump lips flattened in instant irritation, then, as if she sensed Luke watching from afar, their eyes met across the crowded foyer and she rolled hers heavenward, knowing he would understand exactly what that meant.
They had solidified their unlikely friendship in the past two weeks, yet already he valued it above everything else he had here. They flirted—or rather he flirted to vex her while she playfully glared—but mostly they talked. About everything and nothing. She listened to all his woes concerning solicitors and the superficiality of London, while she bemoaned the idiot men who thought her dim-witted fair game and, once the moaning was done they discussed books and politics, disappointment and dreams. Everything really.
Or almost everything.
She was reticent about sharing anything detailed about her writing and he never volunteered the truth about his mother or the real reasons why he had moved to Bloomsbury in such a hurry.
Abigail noticed him staring at Hope and frowned, then immediately smiled her brittle, ever so wounded smile which he now saw right through. ‘I am glad I ran into you... I have been desperate to speak to you since you left. I sent another note to that effect last week. Did you not get it?’
She knew he had because she had instructed the messenger to wait for his response and Luke had tossed the boy a sixpence and told him to tell Her Ladyship that he had no response and likely wouldn’t for at least the next few months. Exactly what was there left to discuss?
‘As I assumed you only wanted to flog the dead horse of your unsavoury marriage proposal or attempt another wholly inappropriate and unwelcome seduction, I decided to ignore it.’
Almost a month since and he still couldn’t quite believe the bare-faced nerve of the woman or not feel disgusted by what she had done. Thankfully, he had awoken before anything regrettable happened, the last remnants of his rampant desire for Hope shrivelling like a salted slug on a wet path as he had screamed his outrage from the rooftops.
He folded his arms, letting his irritation show. If they were going to flog dead horses, he had his own rotting nag to flay. And politeness be damned, for once he would not pull his verbal punches with a woman or care about their feelings.
‘To be frank, I find myself strangely grateful you showed your true colours in all their manipulative glory when you did, because I had been desperate for a decent excuse to leave you for months. It was only ingrained politeness and my foolish belief that I needed to look out for my half-brother’s grieving widow which kept me there. Thankfully, I have purged myself of both misconceptions and am nothing but relieved to finally be shot ofyou.’
He intended to stride off then, even started to, but she grabbed his sleeve as her face crumpled with hurt. ‘Wait...please.’ Fat tears instantly swam in her eyes which made him feel bad for speaking plainly even though she had had it coming. They were enough to make him follow when she tugged him into a secluded alcove. ‘Please hear me out. Please allow me to apologise, Lucius... I beg of you.’
Luke folded his arms, making no attempt to hide either his disgust or his suspicion until the first tear fell and he instantly felt a cad.
‘I am so sorry... It was so wrong of me. Desperate even...b-but...’ As her bottom lip trembled she spared them both the embarrassment of a scene by turning so that her back was to the crowd before she buried her face in her hands. ‘I am s-so l-lost.’ Fresh tears hovered on her bottom lashes threatening to spill at any moment and she impatiently swiped them away. ‘Just know that I wasn’t myself that night... I am still not to be honest. I really do not know what has got into me of late. I am so confused.’ She touched her forehead. ‘And so very sad all the time.’
Luke’s ready pity annoyed him because he didn’t trust her or this uncharacteristic display of emotion. Unbeknownst to her—or perhaps with brutal intent—she was jabbing at his most exposed nerve with her tragic behaviour. His Achille’s heel.
Surely that wasn’t coincidence?
He had learned to trust his gut, as it had not failed him once in all his life, and his gut called foul. Yet it wasn’t in his nature to be callous and unsympathetic of another’s pain either—especially when he had caused it. He stood awkwardly for several uncomfortable moments while she composed herself and he tried to figure out if her pain was genuine.
When she finally looked up at him, her eyes were red-rimmed and her features pale. ‘Do you ever feel like your world is spiralling out of your control, Lucius?’
Often. Almost daily of late and he loathed it. ‘Sometimes.’
‘These last few months since Cassius passed have been so awful that some days I feel as if I am losing my mind.’
And there they were. The magic words. Not that his mother had ever uttered them when her illness held her in its unrelenting grip, but which he had learned to understand were the truth whenever she had lost the capacity to see the wood for the trees.
‘I know it is no excuse, but nowadays I barely recognise myself. Not what I think or how I behave. The dead and numb way I feel inside...some days all the misery just becomes a blur, yet I haven’t even cried yet.’ Then she hiccoughed out a bitter laugh as her fingertip wiped away the solitary tear trailing down her cheek. ‘At least not until now... Isn’t that strange?’
‘Grief affects us all in different ways.’ Although he sincerely hoped that six months of pent-up grief weren’t all about to come tumbling out right here in this Covent Garden theatre. His gaze drifted helplessly towards Hope who had managed to shake off her unwelcome suitors and had re-joined her father, willing her to turn and notice he was trapped so that she could extricate him from his needy sister-in-law’s clutches, but she didn’t. For future reference and for the sake of himself, he should probably appraise her of his situation with Abigail so she could come to the rescue in the future.
And while he was appraising her of Abigail, maybe it was time he entrusted her with the whole truth about his situation?
He almost had, once or twice, especially now that his mother’s visit loomed, and he was worried sick about how that would affect her. The travelling alone was daunting enough because he had no idea how she would react to it, but as his mother was, understandably, an intensely private person and London, with all its bad memories and nosy people, could well prove to be her nemesis. But even so, there was no putting her visit off either. He got the sense from her letters that she was desperate to see him and absorb his strength. No outright alarm bells, not yet at least, but enough niggles to make him uneasy about how the next few months would unravel and to wish he had someone to share it with. At least if Hope was aware of the issues, she could be an extra pair of trustworthy eyes in Bloomsbury when he had to be elsewhere.
And then, of course, there was the niggling need to confess it all to her anyway to see if they could be more than friends. He had never entertained that possibility before, but every night after he left her and he couldn’t stop thinking about her, a growing part of him wished she would always be beside him. An extra pair of trustworthy eyes and a soulmate in every sense of the word...
‘I never expected to become a widow at thirty-three, Lucius.’ Abigail’s voice pulled him reluctantly back and uncharitably, he was surprised she was that young. He had always assumed she was nearer his elder brother’s age than his. ‘I assumed I would be a mother by now, surrounded by children to love and busy raising my family...but your brother was...’ She glanced away, her breath coming out in staccato bursts as if she were determined to ruthlessly hold back all her emotions. ‘I apologise.’ She flapped her hand this time as she shook her head. ‘It is wrong to speak ill of the dead and though he might well have been my sorry excuse for a husband, he also was your brother.’
‘There was no love lost between Cassius and me. You know that.’
‘I do. And I worried about the chasm in your relationship and tried to convince Cassius to mend it.’ Had she? He had seen no evidence. ‘I even tried talking him out of what he did to your mother, but he would not be swayed.’ Luke instantly stiffened, not wanting to hear any excuses for that travesty and certainly not in the packed foyer of a theatre. ‘Even though I thought his actions were unchristian.’
‘Unchristian!’ The anger came swift and hot. ‘It was criminal, Abigail.’ To put it mildly. ‘She had been doing well for years.’ He remembered that halcyon decade with bittersweet fondness because he had believed she was finally cured. She laughed. She went out and she had embraced and enjoyed life, until the cruelty of his brother had sent her to the fetid inner circle of damnation of Mill House. ‘There was no moral justification for him to have done what he did. There was barely a legal justification either!’
His brother too, had found a loophole in the law, and had got one of her original London physicians, a man who hadn’t treated her in fifteen years, to sign the certificate condemning her. And with a certificate from one of the most respected doctors in Harley Street attesting to her madness, he had then legally hired people to use brute force to have her committed within hours of their father’s funeral and while Luke was conveniently two hundred miles from home attending it. The location had been deliberate too, when he could have found any number of similar cesspits in Devon or Cornwall, Cassius had chosen one on the plains of Wiltshire, over a hundred and fifty miles inland from Tregally, and had given them strict instructions not to allow her any visitors. A cruel stipulation, but because it was his money which paid them, Cassius’s hired gaolers stuck to it like glue.
