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She jumped up, paced the room. “I decided to quickly finish the portrait I was working on and slip away. My patron, Don Alvarez, may the Lord bless him, found me another commission, gave us secret transport and pledged to swear ignorance of our whereabouts to the agents I knew my father-in-law would dispatch when I did not answer his summons. Dispatch them he did, but as they did not speak the language, and friends abetted me, they haven't been able to catch us. Yet."
The fire seemed to leave her; her shoulders slumped and she exhaled a long sighing breath. "Eventually I must give him up. When his studies with Father Edmund are complete, when he goes to Oxford, I can no longer keep him hidden. And his grandfather will claim him."
Evan tried to work through his roiling emotions, tried to focus on facts. “You think his grandfather will still wish to acknowledge him?"
She looked back at him then. Tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes; one large droplet spilled down her cheek as she turned. "My Drew bears his name. He's too proud not to acknowledge him." Her chin jutted up, her jaw clenched, and she gazed squarely at Evan with the defiance he imagined she would show her absent father-in-law. "But until then, Drew will grow up surrounded by affection, knowing I am proud of him. Knowing he is loved."
The fact of her abandoned in Spain, near to starving, her father-in-law knowing of her plight but refusing to assist, suddenly caught in his mind. And flamed instantly to outrage.
"If your boy is some aristocrat's grandson, he should be living in wealth and comfort. As should his mother! Regardless of your father-in-law's opinion of you, if you were his son's legal wife it is only his duty to care and provide for you both. As he should have from the moment your husband died!"
She smiled, a bitter twist of lip. "No notion of 'duty' has ever intruded between him and doing exactly what he wishes. Besides, I think I should rather starve than live as his dependent."
"That matters not. He has a legal, as well as moral, obligation to provide for you. And should be made to do so, if common sense and decency do not prompt him to it."
She stiffened, then rounded on him. "My lord, I absolutely forbid you to intervene in this. No one that draws breath has ever influenced my father-in-law to do anything he did not wish. If you think he would listen to your prompting, you delude yourself."
Evan drew himself up. "I am neither his son nor a green youth. He would listen."
"And contact the nearest magistrate to have Drew taken from me! Do you not understand? He is a powerful man. Drew is his legal grandson. It makes my head spin to think how fast he would have me declared unfit to raise my son. Your intervention would only make that easier!"
"But 'tis unnatural and unjust," Evan sputtered.
She gave him a long look. "We have not much ground to stand on in prating of morality. Oh, your friend Mr. Blakesly told me how much you dislike bullies, but you must see your meddling in this would result in disaster. If he should ever discover us, my only recourse would be to take Drew and disappear. Beginning again elsewhere would be difficult, but if necessary I shall do it."
She drew a deep breath and looked at him defiantly. "I swore on Andrew's grave I would not allow his father to brutalize our son as he had Andrew. And I would die, if I must, to honor that pledge."
She faced him, her body taut, her hands fisted, as if... as if she feared Evan meant to rip away her security and her son. "Emily, sweeting, I would never hurt you! Or risk having taken from you what you hold most dear. Surely you know that!"
“Yes, I know you would never knowingly harm me. But he is out there somewhere, still looking. To challenge him would be to destroy us." She sighed and let her hands go limp, looking battered and weary. "The fewer people who know the truth, the fewer to let slip a name or location, the safer we stay."
As her meaning penetrated, he stared at her, affronted. "You think I would babble out information? I'm glad the Army Department has more confidence in me!"
"No, I don't think you indiscreet! Rather I..." she broke her gaze from his "...I felt there was no need to tell you, that probably our... arrangement would end before I need say anything."
That was even worse than her doubting his judgment and discretion. In two long strides he reached her and seized her hands. "I'm not going to just...go away, Emily! Not now. Not ever!"
She stared at him, her wary, defensive eyes searching his. Slowly her face gentled to a smile. "Oh, Evan. Neither of us can promise forever."
As the second tear fell, he pulled her roughly into his arms, the only reassurance he could give her—or himself. Her words were irrefutable.
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Leaving his spent horse in the mews, Evan summoned a hackney to bear him back to Portman Square. He didn't wish to intrude on the little party Emily had promised her son. The stunning discovery of the boy's existence was still too new for him to sort out how he felt about it, much less how he should behave toward the child.
That flesh-and-blood reminder of a hero husband so much more powerful than a miniature tucked at the back of a drawer.
He wouldn't encounter the lad often—Emily had made that clear. She felt it safer for her son to remain in residence with his tutor, she explained, and had no intention of bringing him to live at their—her house, at least not...
She'd left the sentence dangling. Not until he no longer came to her.
Jealousy clawed him again, prowling through a wasteland of hurt, puzzlement—and fear. She had run with the boy once and would again if she felt him threatened. Little as he knew about her, Evan could easily lose her without a trace.
Giving the driver of the jarvey his address, he climbed in. Equally dismal thoughts, irritating as the day-old stubble on his chin, scratched at him as the vehicle lumbered off.
She regarded their relationship as so temporary she'd felt it unnecessary to divulge the fact of her son. Evan had never really considered how long their liaison would last, at the beginning being too dazzled to think, and now...
Had she not felt the growth of their affection? How could she still look on their bond as temporary, a fleeting flash of passion to be enjoyed and as swiftly forgotten?
Too disturbed to remain trapped in the narrow, ill-smelling confines of the vehicle, he banged on the roof. After clambering out to pay the bemused driver twice his normal fare, he paced off.
What did Emily feel for him—and he for her? She seemed to care for him, in the smile that sprang to her lips when he entered the room, the small, tender touches she sometimes gave, the fierce intensity of her passion. But never in words had she vouchsafed any emotion at all.
He couldn't be sure she didn't feel only the pull of lust tempered with a bit of fondness—nothing more. Not the same deep, intense, awesome emotion he felt for her.
When he'd first come to town after Oxford, he conceived a violent attachment to a lovely opera dancer. His obsession, however, dissipated considerably once his passion was slaked, and died altogether after several evenings of the lady's uninformed chatter.
In subsequent years, he'd never again felt that immediate, irresistible attraction to a woman. No lady of his own class inspired him to more than affectionate warmth. By the time Richard sailed off to war, Evan had felt confident in pledging to look after Andrea, having concluded the soul-stirring emotion poets rhapsodized about was simply not in his nature.
Then Emily burst into his life like a shooting star, captivating him from the first moment. Time spent with her had only deepened his initial attraction to a more complex, all-encompassing bond that made the mere thought of another woman distasteful even as it honed the first sharp edge of passion into something purer and more lasting than desire.
A state of being that mimicked every nuance of depth and intensity the most rapturous of poets might have used to describe "love."
Emily—his beloved. The words sounded so right together. His heart soared and he laughed in giddy delight.
Emily the middle-class shopkeeper. His grin faded.
Each year a handful of the aristocracy, desperate for funds, married into the ranks of the merchant-princes in a business transaction of lineage for wealth. Such daughters of rich bourgeois were virtually indistinguishable from their better-born peers, attending the same schools, clothed by the same couturiers and living the same socially restricted, idle lives as the daughters of the gentry.
A captain of industry would no more allow his own daughter to work in a shop than would an earl. Evan had never heard of a man of title marrying a woman who actually earned her own bread. 'Twas worse than bad ton, 'twas—unthinkable.
What a clever man, Evan thought, kicking viciously at a flagstone. He'd finally discovered what love was. So clever, in fact, that his passionate affection had been inspired not only by a woman whose own feelings toward him he had no assurance about, he'd managed to fall head over heels for a woman society would never accept his marrying.
The ramifications of that conclusion were so daunting he refused to think further on it. Cursing himself for a fool, he picked up his pace.
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A few days later he assisted Andrea, becomingly garbed in one of her new gowns, up the steps to attend her first party. A dinner given by one of his mama's friends, it would be followed by an informal dance and attended only by a limited number of close acquaintances, to ease Lady Cheverley's shy charge into society.
