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“No. I’ve always had too much energy I couldn’t control. It’s gotten me into more trouble than any boy rightly should have experienced.” He moved into step beside her.
She chuckled. “My older cousin—Lachlan—was much the same way. I was always the hesitant one in the group of us, but between Lachlan and Sloane and their mischievousness, and my oldest cousin, Jacob, allowing all of their crazy ideas, I got dragged into one debacle after another with them that I didn’t want to do.”
“Such as?”
“There was one game we used to play, Valor of Vinehill.” An impish smile came to her lips. “And it used to terrify me because it would entail climbing up the vines on one side of the castle to see how high and how fast we could go. There were iron footholds mixed in with the vines, but the fear that would strike me when I got past the first floor would freeze me in place sometimes. I hated that game.”
“Yet you still played it.”
“I did. I climbed. I had to.” The smile on her face faded. “I did it because being left behind would have been worse than breaking my arm on a fall.”
“And did you ever fall?”
“No. Amazingly enough, no.” She wavered slightly as she dipped forward on her left leg, but then she caught her balance. It didn’t escape her notice that his hand had flung out, at the ready to steady her if needed. “But I was painstakingly careful as I climbed. I was always last, but I also always made it into the windows.”
“Your cousins made you do things you thought not possible.”
“Exactly, so in that sense it was good for me. But it was never good for my nerves. I learned to swallow a lot of fear just to keep up with them.”
“But you never felt like you totally belonged?”
In mid dip, her look jumped to him. “How would you know that?”
“I’m taking a guess. I know what it is to be an extra.”
She shrugged. “They have always been my family—more so than my own parents and brother. I was three when I went to live with them at Vinehill. And I belonged as much as I let myself belong. The three of them—Sloane, Lachlan and Jacob always made me feel like I was their sister. I was part of their family. There was no doubt in that. The only doubt was of my own making, not theirs.”
They rounded the far corner by the ladders to the quarterdeck in silence.
As they started along the next long stretch of the circle, Roe looked to her. “Your husband, Lord Apton, passed away fourteen months ago, correct?”
“He did.”
“He was older?”
“Yes, he was.” Her eyebrow arched, daring him to say something derogatory about her husband. Her husband had been not just older, but much older and she presumed he already knew that fact.
“Did you love him?”
Her head snapped back. She hadn’t expected that question. She expected snide. The smirk that she’d suffered countless times in London when people found out she was Apton’s wife and not his daughter.
She looked away from Roe, her gaze on the inky depths of the sea. “I did…he was kind and sweet to me. Sloane introduced us a few years after she became the Duchess of Wolfbridge. And he married me when…” Her voice trailed off as she silenced her thought. Lord Apton had married her, limp, scars and all.
Though he’d never wanted to see her legs, see the mangled flesh.
Not that she blamed him.
She respected what he was willing to do and made sure to cover the scars with long stockings whenever they were intimate. Though it didn’t matter, for he’d never looked down when they had sex. He stared at her face, expectantly every time. Expectant for what, she wasn’t sure.
She blinked, setting a smile on her lips, sad though she knew it was. “He adored me and I adored him, even if it wasn’t the grand love match that I had dreamed of as a child.”
“What did you dream of as a child?”
“Excitement.” She glanced at him. “Love that made my heart pound so hard in my chest that I would tempt death every second of every minute.”
His right cheek lifted in a half smile. “Sounds like a good way to die.”
“I thought so.” She looked forward as she took her next long dip. “But not anymore. Apton was exactly what I needed in a husband. Kind and patient. He made no demands on me.”
