Chapter Twenty-Four
“YOU’RE CERTAIN GAVIN’S coming?” Ina asked Moray for what must have been the tenth time that day.
The newspaperman blew out a frustrated stream of air and stared up at her from behind his desk, where he was trying to finish a last set of proofs before disappearing. “Yes. He wrote yesterday to say he’d be on the noon train into Waverley.”
“He’ll be here,” said Eva, placing a hand on Ina’s arm. The two women had met only a few times before because Eva rarely went out in society, but Ina felt a bond with her. The editor was kind and far more ready to trust her than Moray was—although Ina suspected he was slowly coming around. He’d sent the letter, after all.
It had taken Mrs. Sullivan just a few minutes to explain the plan she’d devised to get Gavin to return to Edinburgh, and just a little while longer for Ina to tweak and change it to suit Gavin, for she knew him best. Then they’d hopped in Mrs. Sullivan’s carriage and taken a ride down to the Lothian’s offices. If the matchmaker hadn’t been with her, Ina doubted Moray would’ve let her in, for he’d had a letter from Gavin telling him of her abandonment. However, even Moray couldn’t say no to Mrs. Sullivan, and so he’d called Eva into his office and all four of them had sat down to listen to Ina plead her case.
Now, four days later, she clasped her hands together in front of her and tried her best not to stare at the massive iron clock that hung on the wall of Moray’s office.
“It’s not even eleven forty-five,” Moray said, his voice softening a touch.
“I know,” she murmured.
“Do you know what you’ll say to him?” Eva asked.
She nodded. “I do.”
“What is that?” asked Moray.
Eva smacked him on the arm with a rolled-up newspaper. “Can’t you not think like a journalist for once and stop your incessant prying?”
“As though you don’t want to ask the very same question,” he said.
“I have the decency to wait until after she’s won Gavin back to demand the whole story,” said Eva primly.
The butterflies dancing the polka in Ina’s stomach began swirling around in double time. “If he’ll take me back.”
Eva shot her a smile. “You just tell him how you feel and he won’t be able to say no.”
Ina watched silently as Moray and Eva shuffled out of the office, just as the duo had agreed when she and Mrs. Sullivan had revealed their plan. When the front door shut, she knew she was the only one left in the building.
Her hands trembled as she untied the ribbons on the large leather portfolio she’d brought with her and began pulling out sheets of paper. It was time to win back the man she loved.
The train shuddered to a stop on track two, and Gavin jolted in his seat. He’d been lost deep in his thoughts, Moray’s letter half open in his hand.
He’d read his friend’s entreaty that he return to Edinburgh over and over again until the page was soft from being handled too often. By now he practically had the thing memorized, and each and every time he read it a new tide of worry washed over him.
G,
One of the reporters for the Tattler has heard of a rumor brewing around your wife. I’m doing my best to stem it any way I can, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep it contained. You’ll understand that the need for discretion is of the utmost importance. I don’t dare put anything in writing. We must speak as soon as we can.
—Moray
When he’d read it, his natural protectiveness of Ina had roared up with a power that had surprised even him. He’d cursed Moray for refusing to name the rumor, because it meant his mind went in a hundred different directions, each more frightening than the last.
His first instinct had been to suspect Gowan was at the center of whatever Moray’s reporter had discovered, and his blood pressure had soared. Without a second thought, he’d snatched up a pen and jotted down a note to Moray, telling him he’d be there. Then he’d rung for Harper to begin making the arrangements for his return to Edinburgh.
Through all of the packing, however, he hadn’t opened the letter Grace had given to him. He’d left it at Oak Park, hoping to leave behind all the misery that had been forged there.
Ina had been right, as she so often was. He was miserable in that house. His mother was now safely ensconced in the dower house, but he could still feel the weighty judgment of her influence in every bit of his childhood home, from the decoration to the way the staff was run. The house itself felt as though it was pressing down on him, trying to squeeze him into the mold of his father and all the other baronets who went before him. Men he was never going to be like. He’d be a writer first, always. Ina had seen that even when he couldn’t.
He knew now that his greatest mistake in life hadn’t been defying his father’s wishes, loving the wrong woman, or having the uncontrollable misfortune of being born second. It had been letting Ina go and stubbornly refusing to follow her.
He’d been foolish to delay their return to Edinburgh, and, even worse, he’d sacrificed her happiness for his own pride. She’d left her work, her friends, and her home without question to travel with him and offer comfort to two women she didn’t know when he’d needed her to, and he couldn’t keep a simple promise to return with her to their home. He’d failed her as a husband.
Their last fight still stung him. He’d been furious when she began to speak of Grace as though somehow his former love might be a replacement for Ina. In her eyes, it was Grace he should be married to, not her. It had shocked him, and his anger had boiled over. He’d demanded that Ina tell him she loved him, and when she couldn’t, he’d turned on her with the bitterness and scorn.
She’d wanted to share a life with him in Scotland. That was what mattered. All that mattered.
And yet he’d ruined everything, driving her away until all she could do was run. He’d pushed her away. It was his fault.
He didn’t know how he’d begin to repair the damage he’d wrought, but at least he could do his best to protect her as he’d always done.
He folded Moray’s letter and tucked it away amid the clatter of conductors and porters preparing the train for passengers to disembark. Gathering up his case and donning his beaver hat, he stepped down to the platform and wove his way through the teeming crowd of people in the station.
It was easy enough to find himself a hansom cab. He gave the address of Moray’s offices, and as soon as the driver clicked his tongue and flicked the reins, they were off.
When they arrived at the newspaper office, the street was quiet. The giant presses that made up the foundation of Moray’s empire weren’t running, but that was no great surprise. They were most active in the evening through to the early-morning hours. Now the workmen would be preoccupied with cutting paper, cleaning the machines, and beginning to sort type in preparation for the hard night’s work ahead.
He paid the driver and climbed down with his bag. He’d thought of driving to the house and dropping his things, but that would mean risking Ina finding out he was in Edinburgh. The ache to see her was powerful, but he wasn’t sure he’d be welcome, and that was too painful a prospect to even consider.
He was about to open the office door when something caught his eye: a piece of paper half jammed under the door. Stooping, he gently pulled it free. It was a drawing showing the back of a man with a hand outstretched as he reached for a doorknob. He squinted and then looked up at the brass plaque embedded in the wall next to the doorframe. 108 High Street. He looked down at the paper. 108 High Street, read the sketched plaque next to the man’s bent head in the drawing.
With a grunt, he pushed open the door and dropped his bag in the entryway. No one was there. The front desk where the newspaper’s diminutive secretary, Mr. Uglow, sat during the day was empty. There were no shouts or clangs of tools through the frosted-glass and wood door leading to the printing presses. Instead it was eerily silent as he’d only ever heard it after the last edition was out, when Moray would sit with a cigar and a glass of whisky, enjoying the momentary peace so unusual in his life.
“Moray,” Gavin called up the stairs. But almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth he stopped. There was another piece of paper on the first step leading to the offices.
He scooped it up. It was another sketch, and this time he knew exactly what he was looking at. In breathtakingly realistic detail, it showed a young woman standing with a hammer and chisel in her hand, frowning at the smiling face of a man seated on a little stool, his arms crossed and his mouth open as though in midsentence.
His heart skipped a beat. He held in his hand a drawing of the first time he’d inserted himself into Ina’s life all because he was fascinated by this young woman who spent her days in a tiny downstairs room rather than promenading in Princes Street Gardens or calling on friends.
Carefully he placed the drawing on top of the one he’d found outside and looked up the stairs. Another piece of paper sat six steps up, and he took them two by two to reach it. Snatching it up, he smiled. This time he and Ina were each crouched low in the saddle as they raced across Holyrood Park with Arthur’s Seat looming behind them in the background.
Another four steps up he found a drawing of Ina’s studio once again. This time she was carving an angel a church had commissioned years ago. He was sitting—in a full chair this time—with a book in hand, reading by candlelight as he kept her company. Emotion lodged in his throat. He’d never thought she’d remember such a simple, quiet time as this, but he’d never forget it, for it was in the quiet moments when he’d sat with her while she was carving this diminutive statue of Saint Catherine that he’d first fallen in love with her.
He took the next two steps more slowly now, but his heart was beating rapidly with the realization that this wasn’t just a random collection of drawings. Each mattered. They were all real moments of true connection in their friendship. They told him she’d noticed just as much as he had.
The next drawing was unmistakable. It showed Ina in an evening dress on her knees while he sat on a sofa in Mrs. Sullivan’s library the night she proposed to him.
Four steps up, their wedding day. This one was sketched as though a member of the audience was taking in the soaring altar that dwarfed Reverend Macdonough as he stood between the two of them, Ina’s long veil flowing out behind her.
The drawing after that sat only one step away. It was Ina in her dressing gown, standing just over the threshold of his bedroom on their wedding night.
The drawings were placed every other step now. The night he came to her bedroom to tell her about his job. The two of them eating sandwiches in her studio. The boat ride to Daldour Abbey. A drawing of them in Daldour Abbey that would make even a libertine blush. Them at breakfast. Them by the fire in their drawing room, each with a book in hand. The train ride to Oak Park. Him holding Ina while they sat on the window seat in her room at the manor house.
He clutched more than a dozen sketches in his hands now, and he was almost to the top of the stairs. He looked up, and pinned to Moray’s office door to cover the glass was one last sketch. He hurried up the stairs and nearly stumbled when it came into view. It was drawn as though by someone looking through the office door to Moray’s desk. Leaning against the desk with her arms braced on either side of her was Ina.
He dove for the handle, pushing open the door. His breath left his body when his eyes landed on his wife standing just as she’d drawn herself.
“Ina.” Her name was half groan, half prayer on his lips.
She let go of the desk, her hands coming together in front of her skirts as they always did when she was nervous.
Before she could say a word, he was across the room. Sketches scattered around their feet as he caught her up, one hand at her waist and the other cupping the back of her neck, and kissed her.
He kissed her as though he’d never kissed her before and would never kiss her again. She melted against him, and he poured everything into that kiss, because he’d known the moment he saw those sketches on the stairs that she’d told him exactly what he’d longed to hear all those years. She loved him.
Her fingers gripped the fabric of his jacket a little tighter, as though she never wanted to let go. But then she broke away. Still clinging to him, she leaned back to study his face.
“You’re kissing me,” she said.
“Yes, and I want to do it again.” He tried to bundle her in his arms, but she leaned back further, threatening to upset a pile of papers on Moray’s desk.
“I had an entire speech planned out where I was going to beg you for forgiveness,” she said.
“You can still give me the speech if it makes you happy.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re supposed to be angry with me. Furious. You never wrote after I left you word. I thought you were gone forever.”
He frowned. “I never got anything in the post.”
She shook her head. “I left a letter with Grace.”
The letter Grace had given him had been from Ina. He’d been so wrapped up in his own anger and disappointment he hadn’t even considered that his wife might’ve tried to leave word explaining to him why she’d left.
“She only gave it to me two days ago, and I didn’t realize it was from you,” he said.
She pulled her shoulders back and let go of him. “Then I have things I must say.”
He smiled as he looked down at her. “So do I.”
“Me first,” she insisted. She swallowed, and then said, “I’ve been a coward for a long time.”
“No.”
She shook her head. “I have. It was easier to be your friend, so that was what I wanted more than anything else. I clung to that idea so hard because my life was easy so long as I stayed unmarried. I had you and my work. That was enough.
“Then we married and it was as though everything turned upside down. I began to understand that you were more to me than a friend, and more to me than a husband.”
He raised a hand to cup her cheek, his thumb stroking over the indent just below her lower lip. Her eyes fluttered closed and he reveled in the pleasure it gave her. He never thought he’d touch her again, and each night he’d broken a little more because of it.
“There are so many things I regret,” she said, “but the one thing I don’t regret is marrying you. I love you.”
Those three words filled his heart up until he almost couldn’t take it. For years he’d wanted to hear her say it without prompting or coercion. I love you. Not with a qualifying as a friend. Just those three words and nothing else.
Ina bit her lip, refusing to flinch or cringe in embarrassment as she watched Gavin. She loved him fully and without reservation. He should know, and if he didn’t feel the same way she needed to know now.
She’d thought she was prepared for him when she heard him on the stairs. Her hands had trembled terribly against the mahogany desk while she waited, and she’d feared he might see her sketches and simply walk out. When he’d come crashing through the door, her knees had almost given out in relief. Then he’d dropped everything and kissed her like a starving man, and she’d been lost.
But now everything was in his hands. All she could do was wait.
His hand traced down her arm until he reached her hand. His fingers danced over hers before pressing their palms flush against each other and lifting her hand to his lips. He pressed a kiss to the back of it, sparking her skin.
“I came back because I’m hopelessly in love with my wife.”
Her heart soared. Gavin still loved her. It hardly seemed possible after everything they’d gone through. After all of their time apart. And yet here he was, professing it to her amid all the sketches that were her way of showing him that he mattered. That she cared.
“I knew you were special from the moment I first sat down and talked to you, but it took me some time to realize I’d fallen in love. I became infatuated because you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but that was a superficial sort of love,” he said. “It wasn’t until we married that I understood what it was to really love you. Body and soul. I want you with marble dust in your hair. I want you sitting across a fire from me, distracting me when I’m trying to read. I want you in every way a man can want a woman.”
She blushed at that.
“I want you when I make you blush too,” he said with a grin before leaning in, his voice a whisper. “When you blush all over.”
“Gavin,” she said, pushing gently at him.
“I loved that you left because you were thinking only of what you thought was best for me,” he said, kissing the inside of her wrist and making her shiver with delight. “I loved that you came to Oak Park without question.” A kiss to her forearm. “I loved you on Daldour.” Her elbow. “I loved you on our wedding night so much I could hardly be in the same room as you for fear I’d reveal too much.” He edged her against the desk again, his legs pressing against her thighs. “I loved you the day I married you.” He kissed her neck. “I loved you the day you proposed to me.”
She laughed.
“You hold my heart in yours, Ina. You always have,” he said softly. “Is there any chance you might come to trust me once again?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” she said, her eyes brimming. “I was the one who left Oak Park. I was so frightened you’d come to resent me. Everything your mother said is true. My family is only just respectable and that’s only because of my father’s money. People still talk about my mother. I have a passion that’s not supposed to be fit for ladies. I’m ill-suited to run a grand house like Oak Park.”
“I don’t care a whit about any of that,” he said. “The truth is, my mother’s a horrible snob.”
“I should never have run. I thought I was absolving you of our marriage. I’d just found out about Grace and she was so much more suited—”
“She’d never suit me. She isn’t you.”
She couldn’t help the smile that touched her lips. “You truly don’t care that I make a poor baronet’s wife?”
“I’m a baronet and you’re my wife. That’s all I care about. I’ve been thinking about letting Oak Park as soon as I can make the necessary improvements to the land. I don’t want to live in that stodgy old house any more than I imagine you do.”
“It would give me great pleasure never to set foot in it again, but”—she drew in a deep breath—“if it’s important to you that we live there for part of the year, we can make arrangements.”
“Not at all. I was thinking that we might look at buying our house on Rothesay Place with the income from Oak Park’s rents. Or we could go somewhere else.”
“We’ll figure that out later,” she said. “There’s something else I’d rather do first.”
She pulled him down into a kiss.
This was where she was meant to be. With the man who saw her for who she was and loved her without hesitation. The sculptor and the writer. The Scotswoman and the Englishman. Ina and Gavin.
When at last he pulled away, he pressed a kiss to her temple. “There’s no rumor, is there?”
“Rumor?” she asked.
He pulled out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She skimmed it, her eyes widening. “Is this what Moray wrote to you?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought something had happened to me?”
“I thought Gowan might be spreading rumors because you’d come home unaccompanied,” he said. “I worried that you might be in some sort of danger, and I couldn’t get here fast enough.”
She shook her head. “It sounds like Moray knows you better than you think.”
“If you tell him that, he’ll never shut up about it.”
She laughed. “Your secret’s safe with me. We should go home and give him and Eva their office back.”
“Before we do . . .” He bent over and shuffled through the sketches on the floor, handing them to her as he went. Finally he held one up in the air, triumphant.
“This one is coming with us,” he said, turning the sketch from Daldour Abbey for her to see. “I’m considering having it framed and hung in our bedroom.”
“Our?” she asked with raised brows as she stuffed her sketches into her portfolio.
“Pick one of them. I’m done sleeping apart from you. We can keep separate rooms if you think it’ll scandalize the servants any less,” he said.
She laughed. “If we hang that on the wall, sleeping in the same room will be the least of their worries. Besides, aren’t I supposed to be the scandalous one?”
He grinned and looped his arm around her waist. “Then I’d better start catching up.”