“I owe you no explanations.”
She didn’t. But he wanted one anyway.
“I suppose, though, I owe you something for saving me.”
He’d always save her. “Here, I’ll tell you something of myself, payment for your own story.” She was terrified of water and could not swim. Serious business. He’d have to offer a serious price. “I was five when my mother brought me to Slopevale. She was a seamstress in the village, and I looked exactly like my father, exactly like John, too. We could have been twins. The villagers were not blind, and they were quite aware of my father’s proclivities. I distinctly remember the vicar’s wife calling me Marquess’s Little Mistake several times, as if it were my name.”
Beatrice made a sound in her throat, her face screwing up with anger.
“Calm down, hellcat. It’s fine,” he said softly.
“You were a child! No one should treat a child that way.”
“Remember, you hate me.”
Another tiny noise.
He tapped her nose, and she swiped his hand away.
He shrugged his hands into his pockets. To keep from touching her more. “My mother grew tired of it. And she could not make money. No one wanted the marquess’s mistress sewing their clothes. So she carted me up to the big house, knocked on the door, and announced to the butler that the marquess could take care of his Little Mistake himself. Then she left.”
“Right then and there?”
He nodded.
“Richard, I’m… that’s…” She exhaled a deep breath. “It’s all rather familiar.”
Was it? “How?” He needed to know. Immediately. Needed whatever small thread connected them.
“My mother was illegitimate. I would have been had my uncle not discovered my mother’s situation, my father’s intent to leave her with child and unmarried. He forced my father’s hand. But for my uncle, I’d inhabit the position you do in society. I think I still do. Spinsters, you know. Most would rather forget entirely that we exist. No one likes to be reminded of failure. My uncle has told me many times, however, that men and women must chart their own paths, and the path they chart alone is what we should judge them by. Not where they started the journey. That is out of their control.”
How had he not known any of that? What had they talked about seven years ago? They’d been so young and intoxicated with life, origin stories had hardly seemed to matter. There had been no past or future. Only the headynow.
Age had corrected that perception. Perhaps age could correct them, too.
“I wish,” Beatrice said, “your mother had been as astute as my uncle.”
He wanted her to understand, but he didn’t need her pity. “I had a home, food, a new brother who immediately took me as his own, a father who was rather proud to have sired me, oddly enough, and a new mother, too.” He scratched the back of his neck. She was less welcoming. Not ready to talk about her yet. Or ever.
“Have you thought about living elsewhere? Some place they do not know you?”
“No. I am who I am. No amount of running changes it. And why would I run from my family? From John and Evie, from Lucy and the twins. Besides, I built a house in that direction”—he pointed north—“on some land I bought from John that wasn’t entailed. It’s my home now.” Right next to everything he held dear.
“Oh… I didn’t know.” She fiddled with a ribbon at her sleeve as she shifted to her back and stared up into the branches. They cast shadowed striations across the curves of her face and darkened the green of her eyes. “I was eight when my mother died, and I remember leaving the house one morning to look for her. I knew she would never return, but it was a… compulsion. I had to look. My father had not been home for… I do not know how long. And I think I was afraid he’d died, too. I found out later he’d been gone for four days, had sent the staff home, too. He’d forgotten I even existed. Perhaps I left the house looking for food as well. I don’t… I do not remember all the details. They are murky.”
“God, Beatrice.” He moved to her side of the tree, resting his forearm next to her head and pressing his palm to the trunk on the other side of her body near her arm, close enough for his thumb to stroke her if he wished. If she needed it.
She hung her head, spoke to their feet. “My aunt is the one who realized something was wrong. She went to see me, found the door open, the house empty. Mm.” She was fiddling with the ribbon again, and he was just trying to block out the world, to let her know, feel in her bones, that here, with him, she was safe. “Mm. My father had recently moved us to a lodging house near the West Indies docks. Closer to his offices. Before my mother’s death, we’d lived in a little townhouse. I don’t know where in London. Closer to my uncle and aunt. I remember there was a lovely garden nearby, and I liked to watch the women walk by in beautiful dresses. But my father saw no use in, mm, what he called idle comforts. So, we moved to the lodging house. It was two rooms and loud and crowded, and there was no more garden or pretty dresses. But he could easily walk to the docks.”
She was silent so long Richard thought she might not finish the story. So he flicked his thumb out and stroked the few available inches of her arm. Soft. His skin stood out starkly against hers. They had always been a study in contrasts, their differences enticing, explosive. Their newfound similarities rocked him more deeply, made him want to curve around her and never give her up.
She swallowed and said, “A child could easily walk to the docks, as well. I did. I remember how crowded they were. And the smell.” Her nose wrinkled. “And I thought I saw my father on a boat. So I found this narrow little… plank… I was balancing on it, proud of myself, but a man on the boat… he didn’t see me. He stepped onto the plank. Shook it. I fell. I must have screamed, but I don’t remember anything but the water—cold and ugly tasting in my mouth.”
He rested his forehead against hers, hoping against all hope for a happy ending. Knowing no matter what she said next the happiest ending had already occurred—she’d survived.
“The man who’d made me fall—he saved me. He couldn’t find who I belonged to, and I couldn’t stop crying to tell him. And then I caught a fever. My aunt says my uncle found me. She’d told him I was missing, and my uncle asked about everywhere, including the docks, hoping my father had taken me with him, wherever he’d gone. I do not remember much. The fever broke when I was at my aunt’s. So I remember that—waking up in Selena’s bed.” She chuckled. “I do not recommend a dunk in the Thames. It’s not at all beneficial for your health.”
He chucked her under her chin, saw in her newly raised eyes a barely hidden sadness he wanted to ease, to banish. He pulled her off the tree and into his arms, hugging her. Just hugging her. And for a moment, she let him, melting into the embrace, digging her face into his chest, causing his heart to explode and wrap itself around her.
