Page 150 of The Earl She Once Saved

His breath caught. For years, he carried the field hospital with him: rain against canvas, lamplight upon her tired face, her hand beneath his. After he recovered, he searched for the surgeon’s daughter and found no way to reach her. He feared that the night which changed his life had been no more than one terrible night among many in hers.

She remembered.

He wanted to hear whatever she would say next. He knew he should have moved away before hearing any of it.

At the far end of the passage, a maid appeared with fresh towels folded over her arm. Rafe stepped toward the stairs. She curtsied as she passed, and he returned her greeting. By the time she reached Verity’s door, he was on the landing below. He stopped there with one hand upon the banister.

In the yard, he had spoken because Roland was trying to make Verity small before the people who knew her work. Rafe would have defended any person treated so unjustly. He could no longer use that truth to conceal the rest. The words had come easily because, after years of silence, he wanted her to hear him say what he saw in her. He cared nothing for who else heard.

He loved her.

He loved the young woman who stayed beside his cot in the lamplight, and he loved the woman who kept Edgeworth standing after everyone with a claim to it failed her. Time had given him the chance to know her stubbornness, her skill, her fierce care for people who depended on her. He wanted her safe, and able to choose where she lived and whom she trusted. He wanted her free even if she chose a life in which he had no place.

Verity was still Roland’s wife. Rafe gripped the banister until the wood pressed into his palm. Loving her did not alter that fact or give him leave to ask anything of her. It did settle what he would do now.

He would find Henshaw and put the threat before him plainly. He would learn what protection could be secured for Verity, and keep looking until he found a way to free her from Roland for good. He would not leave her to meet his brother’s next move alone.

Rafe went down the stairs to send for the solicitor.

Chapter 25

By late afternoon, the light in the library turned the color of weak tea. Verity sat at the long table with the Coombes account open before her, though she had read the same entry three times without taking it in.

The cart had gone to the north culvert. Harris sent word that the timber was unloaded and work begun. Coombes’s allowance remained in the ledger. Everything settled that morning ought to have stayed settled.

Instead, she heard Rafe’s voice whenever the room fell quiet.

She is the best of anyone here.

He said it before Harris and Coombes, before the visitors from the county, before Roland. The praise had left her unable to meet his eyes. Now, alone, she could not decide which troubled her more: that he had seen what those years had cost her, or that he had cared nothing for the consequences of saying so.

Then, the library door opened. She kept her gaze on the account until she recognized his step.

“I am occupied,” she said.

“I can see that.”

He came no farther than the near end of the table. Verity looked up. Rafe held a sheet of drawing paper by its edges, taking care not to bend it. The sight of it brought back the day she had entered his room and found the folio open: her own face looking up from page after page, years of memory made visible in charcoal and pencil.

She knew this portrait at once. In it she stood beside a window, sunlight falling across her cheek. She wondered where he had seen her smile like that. When she asked what the drawings meant, he reached for Celestine’s name and spoken as though the portraits were nothing he valued now.

“You locked it away,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Why bring it out?”

Rafe placed it on the table between them. “I told you something false when you found it.”

Verity watched his hand withdraw from the paper. There was a faint smudge of charcoal near his thumb, as though he touched the folio before choosing which sheet to bring.

“I said it was nothing,” he continued. “I cannot ask you to believe that it was truly nothing.”

Verity lowered her eyes to the drawing. The woman on the page looked younger than she felt. He caught the small crease beside her mouth and the loosened strand of hair she was forever pushing behind one ear. More difficult to bear was the pleasure in her expression.

“I was angry that you kept them from me,” she said.

“I know.”