Someone to Care

She was worried about Harry. Always, always, always. Pointlessly worried. There was nothing she could do to ensure his safety. But she should at least be there to read any letter that came from the Peninsula. Oh, would the wars never end?

And what had happened to her moral core? Morality had been her compass through her life until . . . how long ago? Two weeks? Three? She was losing track of time. But in that time she had been living a life of sin. Or had she? Was it sinful to love a man and to allow him to love her? It was not love, though, what was between them. It was lust.

It felt like more than lust. But that was self-deception. He had never pretended that this was anything more than business as usual for him. How many days ago had he told her what he wanted most out of life was pleasure? She had known it from the start, though. She had not been deceived. She had come with him because she had wanted pleasure too.

Because she had lusted after him, and still did.

She lifted her face to the wind and closed her eyes. A gull—the same one?—cried mournfully again. She felt horribly, despicably lonely. But she deserved no better. She turned and walked back up the beach. He was standing surely in the very spot where she had left him. She stopped a short distance away.

“I need to go home,” she said.

And then felt sheer, raw panic.

He looked very large with his tall hat pulled firmly onto his head, in his many-caped greatcoat and his top boots. He looked remote, austere. His eyes, hooded as they often were, looked darker than usual in the shadow of the brim of his hat. He looked curiously like a stranger, a rather grim stranger.

“I am glad you said it first, Viola,” he said. “I never like to hurt my women.”

Even his light, soft voice sounded unfamiliar. She felt hurt anyway. Had he intended that—to hurt her even as he denied any wish to do so? Or was he merely speaking the truth? He had tired of her and was glad she had announced the end of the affair before he had to do it himself.

“I miss my family,” she said. “They will be worried about me.”

“I thought you said you had written to them,” he said.

She had mentioned it soon after their arrival.

“But without any detail or explanation,” she said. “And it has been longer than two weeks.”

“Has it?” he said. “It is amazing how time flies when one is immersed in pleasure.”

Was he insulting her? There was no insult in the words themselves, but something in his tone chilled her. “It has been a pleasure,” she said.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “I have rarely known better.”

Was that word rarely carefully chosen to cut into her? But she had no reason to be offended. This had never been anything else but an affair, and only for her was that a momentous thing.

“You will be glad to go home to your children,” she said.

“Indeed I will,” he said. “I will need to recover some stamina. You have come near to exhausting me, Viola.”

Oh, he was insulting her. In the subtlest of ways. He was telling her that she had been a thoroughly satisfactory mistress, but that now he was ready to move on to the next one—or would be after a short spell in which to recuperate. He was suggesting that she had been insatiable—as she had.

“There does not need to be any bitterness in our parting, does there?” she asked.

“Bitterness?” His eyebrows rose and he raised one hand as though to clasp the handle of his quizzing glass. But it was hidden beneath his greatcoat. “I certainly hope I never arouse bitterness in any of my women, Viola. We will part as friends, and it will be my hope that you will have fond memories of our liaison after you return to the respectability of your life.”

. . . any of my women.

He made no mention of any fond memories he would have. In a month’s time he would probably have forgotten all about her.

She had known that from the start.

“Tomorrow?” she said. “We will set out for home tomorrow?”

He did not reply for a few moments. His face looked a bit like granite, his eyes hard and opaque. And, fool that she was, she hoped he would beg for a few more days.

“With these longer nights I suppose it would be wiser to wait until tomorrow,” he said. “Yes, we will leave early.”

It felt like a slap to the face. He would have preferred to leave today.

It took them less than an hour to make their way back up the valley. They did not stop to look around or listen to the birds or catch their breath. They skirted muddy puddles and scrambled over fallen tree branches without fuss—and without touching. The only time he stopped to help her over a tree trunk, she pretended not to notice his hand. The next time he did not offer it. They spoke not a word to each other.

They had not quarreled. There was no reason in the world why they should not still converse amiably and be easy with each other. There was the rest of the day to live through, after all, and the night and then however many days it would take them to travel back. She would have him take her to Bath rather than all the way to Hinsford. It would surely not take many days to get there. They would not be traveling in anything like the leisurely manner they had when they came here.

But every hour was going to seem an eternity. She had not thought ahead to this. When she had thought of the end of their affair, she had envisaged herself back at home, alone and lonely and picking up the threads of her life. She had not thought of the actual getting from here to there. She wondered if she should suggest traveling by stagecoach from the town on the far side of the valley.

But it would seem like an insult on her part.

He stopped walking suddenly and uttered an oath so startling that she stopped too and looked at him in surprise. But he was not looking at her. He was gazing, narrow-eyed, upward to the cottage, which had just come into sight. She looked up there too and froze.

There was a carriage drawn up on the dirt terrace before the door. Not his carriage. And nothing local either, surely. It was altogether too grand. They were still too far away to see any detail, but . . .

“We have company,” he said, the words coming from between his teeth and sounding savage.

“Who?” she asked foolishly. How could he be expected to know any more than she did? But even as she asked the question, three figures stepped into view—two men and one woman.

One of the men was Alexander.

The other—Joel?—was pointing in their direction.

The woman was Abigail.

Marcel swore viciously again—and again did not apologize.

* * *

• • •

He swore silently to himself as they climbed the hillside toward the cottage. How the devil had they found this place? Viola had admitted to writing to her daughters while he was out purchasing the carriage that had brought them here, but she had assured him she had said only that she was going away for a week or two—and he had believed her. He had recognized the crest on the door of Riverdale’s carriage before he recognized the man himself. Head of the Westcott family, no less. And he did not doubt that the young lady was one of her daughters. His eyes confirmed the suspicion as they drew closer. She looked a bit like Viola. He had never seen the other man before, but he would wager upon his being the schoolteacher artist son-in-law.

His considerable arsenal of profane language had been exhausted. He began repeating himself. This hill seemed to grow steeper and longer every time he climbed it. Viola had gone a little way ahead of him. Her question—Who?—of a couple of minutes ago was the only word she had spoken since they left the beach.