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It wasn’t true. At the moment he would take her any way he could have her, he was so hot for her. He was taking a risk and he wondered if she would back out. His frustration made him clench his hands into fists at his sides.
She was staring at him, her lips a little swollen from his kiss, and that nearly undid him again. And then she sighed and with relief he knew he’d won. “No, of course not. I understand.” She glanced up at him again, and there was a certain curiosity in her gaze. A tentativeness he had never seen there before. “So you will require me to kiss you? To touch you?”
“I will. I will require you to do those things and more, Lavinia.”
She nodded and her gaze locked with his. “Then it shall be as you wish. Goodbye Captain Longhurst.”
He stood there after she had gone, his heart still thumping, wondering what he thought he was doing playing these games with Patrick’s wife. He was travelling down a road that might end in disaster, in fact it probably would.
And yet he couldn’t seem to help himself.
Three
Autumn 1816, Monkstead House, Mockingbird Square
Sebastian Longhurst nodded his thanks as his horse was brought to him. The bay gelding whickered in greeting. The animal had served him well but was getting old now, although he had no intention of replacing it. In his opinion loyalty and trust were to be valued.
There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He asked himself why he was surprised. What had he expected? For Lavinia to fall upon him, sobbing and begging his forgiveness? It wasn’t going to happen; it was never going to happen.
Any faint and foolish hope he might have had vanished as soon as he’d met her eyes over the threshold of Monkstead’s library.
She hadn’t wanted to speak to him. Indeed she had been hiding in the hope he would go away and leave her alone. Hard to believe they had once been lovers and he had thought her the most perfect woman he had ever met or would ever meet. Now, when he remembered what he had done for her sake on the field of Waterloo, he felt cold and hurt. Cheated and empty.
He set his horse to a trot across Mockingbird Square, blind to the elegant Georgian town houses and the autumn colours of the trees in the garden. Currently he was living with his brother and family in a far less fashionable area of London but at least it gave him somewhere to call home while he considered his future.
Once he’d believed his future would be with Lavinia, but now he saw that had always been a foolish dream. He needed to put her behind him once and for all. Move on. It felt as if he’d been asleep for the past year, waiting while his injuries healed and she was in mourning, but now he’d awoken. This outcome might not be the one he had hoped for, but he was still young and vigorous. He had his life ahead of him.
By the time he reached his brother’s house he had managed to talk himself into a more cheerful state of mind. It would never do to let his sister-in-law and two nieces see him down in the dumps.
“Uncle Seb!” the shouts were deafening.
“Girls!” His smile was no longer forced, he was just happy to see them and bask in their worship of their favourite uncle.
“Did you see her?” his sister-in-law Megan came forward, shooing her daughters back to their studies. Her eyes narrowed. Megan didn’t like Lavinia, despite never having met her, and wasn’t averse to letting him know it. She’d told him several times that she thought him far too good for the likes of Lady Richmond.
“Don’t worry Megan, I’m not marrying her.”
Megan flushed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Sebastian, was I that obvious? I just . . .” she sighed. “I wish you could forget her as easily as she has forgotten you. Not once did she visit you in the hospital when you were recovering. Not once.”
“That’s in the past.” He forced another smile, this one not quite so successfully.
She patted his arm but obligingly changed the subject. “Mark has gone out. Business. He said he needed to talk with you when he returned.”
“I have nowhere in particular to be.”
Megan’s smile was sympathetic and Sebastian couldn’t wait to escape from it. He didn’t want sympathy, he didn’t want to think about Lavinia, he just wanted to close his eyes and feel glad to be alive.
After Waterloo the doctors had been amazed that he lived at all. His injuries had been severe and for a time he lay in a limbo between life and death—his head still bore terrible scars, though hidden now beneath his hair, where his skull had been opened and the slivers of broken bone pressing upon his brain removed. The surgeon who treated him had wrought a miracle, but if his will hadn’t been strong he would never have survived and made a full recovery.
Thoughts of Lavinia had contributed to that strong will. His longing for her and his son. He’d asked for her in the hospital. In his confused and weakened state he could only think that the reason she hadn’t come to see him was because she didn’t know he was injured.
It wasn’t until his brother Mark came to see him, that he finally learned the truth.
“She’s left for the county. In mourning for her husband. Devastated, so they say.”
Devastated. Sebastian wanted to believe it, to use Lavinia’s mourning as an excuse for her not visiting him. But as time had passed and the letters he sent her were returned unopened, he could no longer pretend.
She had a son, and that son was not Patrick’s. Was she afraid Sebastian would tell? He couldn’t believe she didn’t know him better than that. He’d only seen the baby once, before he hastily left England to join the battle against Napoleon, the recently escaped French emperor.
