For now.
With careful movements, he picked the glass from her face, her hair, her dress. His fingers bled. She bled too.How could this happen?
When he’d awakened halfway down the grassy slope, evening had already slipped into dusk. The driver was gone. Had the man been paid to lose control of the reins? Or had he gone for help?
Shifting to a sitting position, Simon straightened Georgina’s body and pulled her partway into his arms. Strange, that he should be holding her this way. He had sat beside her, at a proper distance, on parlor settees. He had even brushed her elbow a time or two on quiet carriage rides.
But now she conformed to him.
He felt her heartbeat.
Her breath.
Her hair, soft and disarrayed, against his arm.
He could not have sentiment for her. He knew that. He loved his wife, and any emotion he could ever feel for another woman would only be an echo of what he had lost. It did not matter that Miss Georgina Whitmore had risked her life for his children. It did not matter that she believed in him. That she loved him. That she listened, trulylistened,to everything he ever said.
He could never have her and she could never have him.
Perhaps many years ago.
But not now.
Closing his eyes, leaning his head against the back of the carriage, Simon shifted her closer than he meant to—and pretended, just for a moment, all his reasoning was untrue.
Fingers moved the hair across her forehead, easing away the blackness.Agnes.She tried the name, but it wasn’t right.
The fingertips scraped against her skin, as if with calluses. They were hesitant. Slow. Loving, somehow.
Another thing that could not be right, but she hurt too much to think. Instead, she forced her eyes open. More darkness swallowed her, save for the faint glow of moonlight shafting in from above. Terror smote her chest.
Broken glass.
The carriage overturned.
Simon.
She raised her head, leaned up on her arm, then fell back with a hissing intake of breath. Pain tingled. “Where—”
“Just lie still.” He situated her back against him, her neck falling back into the crook of his arm. “Let me see.”
She was not prepared for him to reach over her, for his probing, for the pain that coiled through her arm—and deeper. The last thing she ever wanted to be was this close to him.
Because she wanted it too much.
Had always wanted it, even from the beginning.
“It’s injured but not broken.” His whisper fell over her. “Do you hurt anywhere else?”
Did she? “No.”
“The driver is gone. I had hoped he would return, but it has been dark too long.”
“Are you…” She stumbled over the sentence, as her eyes swept up to his face. She searched his chest, his neck, his jaw, lips, eyes. Moonlight made him faint and shadowed, like a figment from her dreams. “Are you injured?”
“No.”
“You should have left.”
