He moved, propping himself half up on the pillows. Only pride kept her from backing away, for his shoulders looming out of the bedcovers were naked. “Supper,” he repeated.
She swallowed. “I was worried about you,” she confessed.
She thought he might be irritated by that, but he didn’t appear so, at least in the darkness. In fact, he said nothing, although his gaze remained steady. The silence stretched.
“Why did you not write?” he asked abruptly.
“Why didn’t you?” she countered.
“Because, in the absence of any word to the contrary, I had to assume you would not be pleased to hear from me.”
Without thinking, she sank onto the edge of his bed. “Perhaps I wouldn’t,” she admitted. “I was very confused. I thought my heart was broken, and I had lost my best friend in the bargain. I was a child.”
“So was I, or I wouldn’t have done anything so stupid as to offer for you the week after your sister became engaged to Calvert. I didn’t even know if your father had told you.”
“He told me and forbade me to think of you. Which is one reason it’s so insolent to expect you to marry me now!”
She thought he smiled in the deepening darkness, but it was impossible to tell. She reached for the flint on his bedside table, meaning to light the candle, but to her surprise, his fingers closed around her wrist.
“It seems we talk more in the dark,” he said.
For some reason, she found it difficult to breathe. And yet, his grip was not tight. “What more do you want to say?” she managed.
His fingers brushed back and forth across the veins of her wrist, causing a novel and far from unpleasant sensation. “Oh, everything.” There was a kind of rueful amusement in his voice. “And nothing.”
“I’m listening,” she said breathlessly. A sweet excitement flowed through her veins from his fingertips.
“Are you?”
She was glad of the darkness now, hiding her blush, her confusion. “Is this the nothing part?”
A breath of laughter kissed her hand. The world seemed to halt. Yet the sudden tension was curiously intimate. She knew an urge to grasp his broad, naked shoulder, to trail her fingers across his chest…
The laughter had died on his lips, but she found herself remembering their sculpted shape and texture. Silence stretched between them like an unspoken question. She was aware of nothing except the large man in the bed beside her, still holding her hand. The handsome stranger with Harry’s face and his memories…
Was it forbidden to lean forward and rest her head on his chest? To press her cheek to his and feel, perhaps, his mouth against her skin. Was this the question hovering between them?
She heard his intake of breath, and then he turned her hand, and his lips brushed against her knuckles before he released her. “You should go back to your bed,” he said, not quite steadily. “Before I forget, I am saving you from ruin.”
She sprang up. “Then you say no to supper,” she managed, backing toward the door. “You are quite right. It is too late.”
Without any recollection of getting there, she found herself in her chamber, where she closed the shutters and let her gown fall to her feet. Her heart beat so fast she pressed her fist over it in wonder.
Harry had kissed her hand.
Why had she never realized before how handsome he was, how overwhelmingly attractive?
But as she climbed back into bed and lay down, she knew she had recognized it a long time ago. It had just seemed wrong to her sixteen-year-old self. She had buried it, refused to recognize it, had even talked herself into sharing her sister’s passion for Calvert.
My broken heart was hurt pride. It was Martha I missed. And Harry…
She had been too young, too confused to cope with changing feelings, and she had let him go.
Well, now it was too late. She was ruined and would never, could never, marry him now. Even supposing he offered, which he had told her categorically he would not.
In any case, it makes no difference, she told herself blithely. She was older and wiser and would no longer let a little physical excitement get in the way of their friendship.
Chapter Four
In the morning, Harry could only be grateful that he had, mostly, kept his hands to himself. But to have wakened to the heady knowledge that she was in his bedchamber was so much the stuff of his wayward dreams that feigning sleep had seemed the only protection for them both. Until her anxiety had hit him like waves. Until she had touched him, and he couldn’t be still.
His gentlemanly instincts had won in the end, though it had been a hard fight. Especially when he had felt her racing pulse beneath his fingers. Whether that betokened desire or fear, that had not been the moment to find out. And God help him, he was not about to ruin their so recently renewed friendship by a crass and mistimed attempt at seduction.
And so he had let her go. That did not, of course, prevent him imagining how it would feel to hold her in his arms at last, how she would kiss… If she would kiss. Knowing Meg, she was more likely to slap him and tell him to stop teasing her.
His shoulders shook with silent laughter as he washed and dressed. He anticipated the rest of the day with some pleasure.
As he walked downstairs, his wound only ached a little, certainly not enough to distract him from the delicious smells of frying bacon and newly baked bread that made his mouth water.
The distraction came in the unexpected form of an altercation that clearly began beyond the inn’s front door but spilled suddenly inside with the arrival of an angry lady leading a small child by the hand. However, it was not her anger which caused his foot to pause on the step. It was that he recognized her.
He had seen her before. At winter quarters in Spain. She was not the sort of woman one forgot. The only name he could dredge from his memory was Aline.
She did not glance up. In any case, judging by the angry spots of color on either cheek, she was far too enraged to pay him any attention, let alone recognize him in return. And the reason soon became clear as a gentleman barged through the door she had deliberately let fall back on him.
Aline and the child sailed past the foot of the stairs toward Mrs. Travis, the innkeeper’s wife, who had just emerged from the parlor. “A private room, if you please, and breakfast for myself and my son,” she commanded.
“My apologies, madam,” Mrs. Travis said nervously. “My one parlor is taken, but here is a quiet corner where you won’t be disturbed. Will the gentleman be joining you?”
“No,” Aline said shortly.
“Yes, he damned well shall,” snarled the gentleman, which was when Harry finally recognized him, too. Captain Gordon Garrow, one of Wellington’s staff officers. And by the slur of his words and his aggressive voice, he was three sheets to the wind.
Now, this is interesting…
“Remember who’s paying for it,” Garrow growled. “Wife.”
Aline is Mrs. Garrow? Really? When did that happen?
Meg had materialized in the parlor doorway, looking stunned by Garrow’s public rudeness, although, in fact, it was doubtful he noticed they were observed by anyone other than Mrs. Travis.
“I shall not be treated so in front of my son,” Aline snapped. “You have gone too far, and I will not tolerate it. Eat in the taproom if you must. It is more suited to your behavior.”