The solution to all her ills. “Yes.”
“My clever Caro.” He stroked in and out, raking her pleasure higher as one hand found her naked hip beneath her skirts, passed over her belly and rubbed right over her pulsing pearl. She moaned, and he circled her higher and higher. He placed kisses on her neck, her shoulder, tugged her earlobe between his teeth. “You do not need a plan. You are enough. Brilliant wife.” He pulled out to the very tip and rocked back home to the hilt. “Beautiful wife.” Again. “You are more than enough.” Again and again. “You are everything.” Words of love, so close to those she ached to hear, those he had not yet said. When he thrust home one final time, her body quivered into completion.
She may have screamed his name. She certainly rolled her backside as close against him as possible. He may have bitten her neck. He certainly kissed adoring words into her skin as he pulled from her and released against the curve of her rear.
Notpreciselythe words she wanted, but glorious still. She gathered them up like she’d have to gather up the pieces of her shattered body. She held them fast to her heart, let them rearrange the shape of it.
And when he gathered her into his arms and collapsed on the bench pulling her safely onto his lap, she was still hazy with heavy pleasure. It ran thick through her veins.
“Well, Caro,” he said, cradling her to his chest. “What think you of improvisation?”
“It has its delights,” she managed to say. “I’ll consider giving it another try in the future.” She chuckled. “Perhaps you have the right of it. Perhaps I do not need to know immediately how we’ll use the nursery or if we’ll convert the conservatory into something else. Or who will run Hawthorne during the Season. What we might do if we have children.” Whatever it was she must decide, she’d have this man to help her, to give her the confidence she needed to grasp her desires and make them reality.
He stiffened. No more languid muscle beneath her. Marble now, cold and hard. He set her to the side then stood, buttoning his fall and tucking in his shirt. “I do not care one way or another. About the conservatory. The nursery.” The words were like bullets spit into the ground. His boots kicked up gravel as he strode away from her. “Children.”
She righted her skirts, smoothed them as she stood. “Where are you going?” She followed him to the house where he hesitated on the threshold. She followed him up the stairs, which he took slowly, as if his ascent were a funeral procession.
He found the old nursery and threw the door open, tried to step over the threshold. But couldn’t. One boot hung in the air, and he stepped back out. “It looks…”
Dusty windows let in dim light, and Caroline took a few halting steps toward him. Some demon rode him. Hard. And she did not know how to stop it. His shoulders so rigid… he did not invite touch. Even after what they’d shared mere moments ago, he seemed a world away from her now.
“I’m told they were found here.” The words low and grating, and almost as if he thought himself alone. He shuffled over to a window and placed a hand on the glass.
She mirrored him, placing her palm on his back. He’d gone cold when only moments ago, he’d been on fire for her.
“Caro… I’m not sure I can stay.”
She jerked her hand away from him, curling her fingers into a fist so she didn’t grab at him. Disbelief rocked her backward. “What do you mean?”
“Here. I’m not sure I can stay here.” He turned to look at her over his shoulder, but he wasn’t looking at her. Chin in shoulder, he seemed to gaze at nothing at all. “I have been trying to see Hawthorne the way you see it. So that I can follow your plan for it. For us. It is a plan I desperately would like to follow. But…” He turned back to the window as his voice cracked.
A pane of glass in the window was cracked, too, and he traced it with a bare finger.
She joined him, standing shoulder to shoulder. “Hard to see anything past this dirt, but”—she reached out, drew a line on the windowpane through the dust alongside the crack—“light still makes its way in.”
“I told you that I’m looking forthem. That I can… almost feel them when I’m closest to losing my own life.”
Them. His family. “I remember.” And she hated it. Surely his family would have preferred he search for them in life instead.
“I feel them here most of all, and that’s how I know this place… it is more dangerous to me than anything I’ve ever done.” Such sorrow packed into that flat tone. “I was happy here. My happiest memories come fromhere.”
What changed? She wanted to ask it. Couldn’t. Waited instead.
He drew a square around one windowpane, following its thin frame. “We all got sick. Smallpox. My father sent the servantsaway. He didn’t want to infect them. I do not know how long we were alone. Days. More than a week. Mostly I remember silence as footsteps stopped and doors never opened. The fires died out, and there were no sounds but for the wind at night and birdsong during the day.”
She held her breath, and in its absence heard birdsong beyond the window. Inside, she cried.
“My mother was in here, so I’m told,” he said, “with my young sisters, nursing them, and my father tended to me in another room. My brothers had quarantined themselves alone in their rooms. I don’t remember much. Too feverish. Unconscious mostly. But then even the wind and birdsong stopped. And I heard… wailing. And then I think… he must have… my father left the room. He must have been too sick. And there was more wailing and more and more. My mother’s. I think. And then silence. And when I regained full consciousness, it was to a face I didn’t know. Not my father’s or my mother’s. Someone from the village. And but for him, I was alone in the house.”
Alone. Meaning… the only one alive. “Felix,” she whispered, lying her head on his shoulder.
“I hate this house.”
She understood now why.
“I want to be here with you, but I… I do not know…” His arms were chains around her, holding her fast as if afraid she might slip into the darkness while he was not looking.
“I understand.” She did. Shedid. But it hurt so much. The house that was her dream was his nightmare. She pressed her eyes tightly closed, holding back biting tears.
