Page 98 of The Winter Companion

“But why?”

He lifted one shoulder in a faint shrug. “I thought you might need someone.”

Her mouth wobbled. She bent her head. Tears started again in her eyes.

“Was I wrong?”

“No. But I didn’t dare hope—” She stifled a sob. “I thought I would never see you again.”

His stomach clenched with guilt. “I’m sorry, Clara. I’m so s-sorry. I…I should have—”

“It’s all right. How were you to know I’d be in such a state? I didn’t know myself. Indeed, I was perfectly well until yesterday evening. And then this morning, when I saw Simon—”

“You’ve talked to your brother?”

“At a coffeehouse across town. He… He says…” Pulling her hand from Neville’s, she abruptly rose to her feet and crossed to the other side of the room. “He says when he’s done at university, he’ll make me his housekeeper.”

Neville slowly stood. He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. “His…housekeeper?”

Folding her arms, she went to the window. The heavy curtains were closed. She nevertheless faced them, giving him her back. Her shoulders shook as if she was weeping again.

“Clara…whatever has happened…”

“What’s happened is that I’ve spent every day of the last four years trying to turn myself into another person. Trying to become someone else. Because I have been so ashamed of who I was.” She swiped at her cheek with her hand. “A dreamer. A lover of poetry and romantic stories.”

He regarded her with a frown. In Devon, she’d spoken of such things as girlhood fancies, seeming to reflect on them with embarrassment and regret. “There’s n-nothing shameful in that.”

“Not in and of itself. But such romanticism can lead one in an unfortunate direction. It can make one fanciful. Imagining things that aren’t there.” She turned at last to meet his eyes. The expression on her face tore at his heart. “I told you that my brother had a tutor. Do you remember?”

Neville went still. Something in her voice put him on his guard.

“I was a teacher then, at the village school. But some afternoons, when I came home, Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde would encourage me to join in my brother’s lessons. He’d talk with me about books and poetry. It seemed we had a great deal in common.”

Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde?

Neville swallowed hard. She’d mentioned her brother having a tutor, but she’d never before spoken the man’s name.

“I was young. Unaccustomed to such attentions. When he complimented me or touched my hand, I imagined he was fond of me. And one day”—she brushed impatiently at the tears on her cheeks—“he met me in the meadow behind our cottage as I walked home from school. He brought me a bouquet of wildflowers and…he kissed me.”

Neville stared at her, unable to think. Unable to breathe.

Clara’s face was pale. “I told my mother we were engaged. Because I was certain we must have been. To kiss someone—to give them flowers, and to recite poetry to them—was tantamount to a proposal in my mind. And there was something else. Something he’d said. Something I’d thought he’d said.” She pressed a hand to her corseted midriff, as if the recollection made her physically ill. “My mother brought me to see the squire, to confront him about his son’s intentions. He called in Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde, and…he denied me. He said he’d only been kind.”

“He c-called you a liar?”

“No. And that’s the rub of it. He admitted to everything—everything except the kiss. He painted a picture of me as a little mouse of a girl desperate for affection, who had taken his civility—his kindness—and spun it into a romance. And you know—” Her voice broke. “I thought I must have done. For when I next saw him, he looked at me so coldly. As if I didn’t exist at all. As if I were a nonperson. And I knew I’d got it all wrong. That they were right. I’d made it up. Imagined it. Because I’d wanted so badly for it to be true. For him to have cared for me.”

Neville’s chest tightened. Somewhere, in the back of his consciousness, his overloaded brain conjured the memory of Clara perched atop a boulder on the beach, her hands cradling his face, as the storm and sea raged all about them.

“You did mean me, didn’t you?” she’d asked. “That I’m the one you wish to kiss? I wasn’t imagining it, was I?”

He knew now why it was she’d doubted his intentions.

“The scandal was too much to overcome,” she said. “I lost my position at the school, and my brother lost his tutor and the patronage of the squire. I took a job as a companion to a lady in York, and my mother found employment at a girls’ academy in Scotland. We agreed to combine our incomes to help pay for Simon to be sent away to school. And then, when he went to university, we did the same. It was the least I could do to make up for all of my silliness. For making our family a spectacle and damaging Simon’s prospects.”

Neville closed the distance between them, coming to stand with her in front of the window. His searched her tearstained face. “But you didn’t make it up,” he said. “Did you?”

Clara wiped her cheeks with her hands, inwardly cursing her lack of self-control. She’d known when she left Simon at the coffee shop that she was due for an all-consuming bout of tears. What she hadn’t reckoned on was running smack into Neville Cross.