The Prince's Bride

Chapter Seven

“Get up,” Gabriel rasped.

“Will you—”

“I said, get up.”

He didn’t wait for her to comply. He turned away and trudged to the door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped. He asked himself where he intended to go. His lack of choices was devastating.

He could run away—like a coward, he could run—but to where?

He could evict her—simply, toss her out into the storm—but she knew. This woman knew, and it was too dangerous to trust what she might reveal to others.

He could hide somewhere nearby—close enough to observe her, to wait and see—but he’d been hiding for half his life. Foryears, he’d hid. And for what? So she could locate him on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday night... no warning... on her very first foray into the forest?

He could simply admit the truth: he could tell her he’d been “Prince Gabriel” once upon on a time, but not anymore—not for years. But this admission would mean so much talking, explaining, hours of discussing it. He wouldn’t survive it. Discussing his identity with someone who wanted something from his old life would feel more revelatory than walking up the high street in Marlborough and shouting his name.

But what ifhe simply told her that he had no idea what she was talking about? What if he carried on with the lie he’d been telling everyone, including himself, for all these years. He could tell her she was mistaken.

“I’m not mistaken,” she said from behind him.

He craned around. She stood in the center of the room.

“I understand if you’re not prepared to admit it,” she said calmly. “Your life has been a trial, clearly but—I’ve found a stack of letters I wrote to you when I was a girl, Highness.”

She reached into her pocket and extracted the bundle of letters that he’d carried with him from his chamber at the Palais Royale, to his jail cells—first in Temple Prison, and then in the Conciergerie—and finally, on his flight from France. She held them up like a stolen candlestick.

“Say what you will,” she continued, “but I know who you are. I was led to this forest by your own letter—I’ve already said this—and now here are mine. I heard you pronounce your name as if it was the most familiar thing you’d ever said. You’ve a library of French literature. If that’s not proof enough, well—I don’t mind telling you that you resemble your late father. May God rest him. I’ve met him, remember? I met all of you. When we were children. Your family traveled to Guernsey twice and you were our guests at Winscombe. It was on the last visit that I recall the imposing sight of your father. He was tall and broad, with hazel eyes. Just like you. I’m sorry, Highness, but Iremember. I’ve found you. I’ve actually managed to find you.”

Gabriel did not feel found—he felt trapped. The storm was behind him. She stood before him, waving his private, personal keepsakes and calling them her own. Perhaps she had written them, but they’d belonged to him. They’d been one of the few things he’d managed to secret out of the palace during the arrest. Why he’d taken them, he couldn’t say. Why he’d kept them, he also could not say.

I took them because I wanted them, he thought, staring at the small, crumbling stack of parchment. I liked to read them. I respected my father’s wish for my future with the daughter of his old friend.

To Gabriel’s young, terrified mind, clinging to the betrothal had seemed like the noble thing to do. He’d been forced to leave behind so much from his old life, but he’d wanted to keep her.

No, not her, he reminded himself, her letters.

And now those letters were being used to unmask him. She was unmasking him. Lady Marianne Daventry had found him, and trapped him, and threatened everything he held dear. She’d made him feel homesickness—something he’d not felt for years. It was a roiling, bubbling stew of emotion—too much for a man who subsisted on a diet of very bland, very simple feelings.

“Look,” she continued, “we needn’t commit to anything this precise moment. Not when you’ve just blown in from the storm, wet, stomping mud on the rugs. You’re soaked through. But can you...?”

She set the letters aside and extended her hand to him. “Give me your coat. I’ve hung my cloak by the fire but there is another peg. I’ll hang it while you see to your boots. I’ve made coffee—I hope you don’t mind. Will you take a cup?”

“Don’t placate me,” he warned, not moving. He thought of how she’d rifled through his things. It was a profound intrusion, and how much easier to dwell on this than on her accusation.

“Forgive me,” she said, retracting her hand. “It’s not my goal to manage you. I’ve only one goal, which I stated even before I knew that you were, well, you. I—” She took a deep breath. “I can acknowledge that everything about me comes as a very great shock. I am not, by nature, a shocking person, nor a bold one. Seeing to wet coats and offering refreshment come much more naturally to me than asking a strange man for help. I am loathe to be a bother to anyone—the man who rescued me from certain doom, least of all—but my family have found ourselves in dire straits. The old betrothal has forced me to hunt you down, but I won’t try to disguise it as anything less than an imposition. To you—that is. A very great imposition.”

“More than an imposition, I’d say, to nose about in the personal possessions of a stranger, to ransack his property.” He eyed the letters on his table. Where had she found them? The desk? The bedside? God, had she been in his bedroom?

“I asked you not to touch anything,” he said, flinging his hat back and forth, shaking off water.

“Yes, you did,” she allowed carefully. “The coffee was a practical matter, just to be clear, and I don’t make a habit of nosing about the homes of strangers. I cannot say why I did it, except that... I knew? I’d sensed it. Deep down. And this knowing propelled me to explore. It’s no excuse, but...”

She trailed off with a shrug and stared into his face. Her expression was forthright, and wary, and (if he was being honest) contrite. Her eyes were a smoky gray-blue; the color of a ribbon of mineral that bisected a chipped rock. It was subtle and cloudy and almost no color at all. And it cut him in two.

“Give me your coat?” she tried again, speaking gently.

He stared at her. He could feel himself wanting to comply. She had this quality—a calmness, an observational air. She seemed disinclined to argue with him. He shouldn’t forget that she’d calmly, observantly pawed through his house until she’d lit upon his identity. Why argue when she simply did whatever the hell she pleased? But even so. She was the opposite of the flash and rattle he associated with most females. Not the radiant sunrise, the cool shade at noon; not the butterfly, the moth. She had been this way, even as a child. And perhaps that’s why he’d kept her letters. Her even, neat handwriting... her earnest, everyday musings... made him feel steady and calm when his world spun into chaos.

She nodded to the coat and he held it out to her.

“This is a fine coat,” she said, plucking it from his arm. “What is the material?”

“Oilskin.”

“Oh, lovely. Is there a craftsman in Pewsey?”

“No.”

“Marlborough, then?”

“No.”

“But did you have it made in London? I ask, only because my sister Diana—you may recall there were three of us girls. I’m the oldest, then there’s my middle sister Diana? She manages the sheep and lands at Winscombe, and she is outside in every kind of weather. She could benefit from a coat like this.”

“Your sister manages your sheep and lands?”

“She has a foreman who answers to her—they manage it together. Our father fell ill five years ago, and he was never much for estate management even before his heart gave out. Diana is keenly interested in it, and we’re so very lucky for it. The grounds and livestock are her purview. I manage the house. Our youngest sister, Charlotte, is in the schoolroom at the moment, but our hope is that she’ll escape the demands of Winscombe and marry. I should say, this is her hope, but we want what she wants. She is very much taken with the idea of a London debut and Season. We’ve an elderly aunt who can sponsor her, but one thing at a time. Forgive me, I’m prattling on. If you’ll hand over your socks and gloves, I’ll set them by the fire to dry.”

His socks were sweaty and gnarled with patches and there was no world in which he would pile them in her small pink hands. But he extended his gloves and she plucked them away. He watched her arrange his disembodied gloves above the fire. It felt like she was stealing sections of his body, one at the time, and priming them to burn. And all the while, he simply stood there and... allowed it.

She turned back to him. “Forgive me, Highness—”

“Please refer to me as Rein.”

“Right.” She sighed. “Forgive me, Mr. Rein, but will you tell me about this house? I’m ever so intrigued. Is it—?” She ran a careful hand along the crevice of gravel where the timber wall met the exposed rock of the cave. Watching her, he felt the phantom caress of that same hand touching a crevice inside his chest. Her expression looked mystified, and something about that look caused a little inward tickle, like the swish of a feather over his heart.

“It is a cave, is it not?” she asked. “Unless I’m mistaken, we are underground?”

She looked so very delighted by the notion, he heard himself say, “Yes, it is a cottage built out from a cave.”

“Astonishing,” she breathed. “And yet you cook and raise heat by a hearth. There are proper floorboards and a window. You come and go through a door that locks. But is it damp? There are caves on Guernsey but the sea is a constant source of wet.”

“It is not wet,” he answered, looking to her. She had effectively trapped him in his own doorway. Did she mean for him to pad, shoeless, across the floor, to stand—where would he stand? The cottage was barely large enough for him, and now he was to navigate a woman?

“Will you stand before the fire?” she suggested. “I went to the grate immediately when I came in.”

“When you came in,” he corrected, “you ransacked drawers and cabinets.”

“And, I made coffee. Will you take some?”

He watched her maneuver around him, taking up the kettle with a cloth to the handle. Her feet, he now saw, were bare. Oval toes poked beneath the muddy hem of her dress. He glanced around until he located her shoes; they were lined neatly beside the fire with her stockings draped across them. He looked away.

“Can you direct me to the cups and saucers, Mr. Rein?” she said from the kitchen. “Sorry to say that I failed to locate your dishes whilst engaged in my diligent ransacking.”

“Above the basin,” he said, his eyes returning to the stockings. They were ivory wool, splattered with mud, spread limply over muddy shoes. Even so, the sight of them felt like walking by the open door of a church and catching a glimpse of the beauty inside. Was it a sin, he wondered, to compare women’s stockings to church? Certainly the sight of them felt a little spiritual. He was reminded of the feel of her legs beneath his arm when he carried her. He thought of her small bare feet.

Gabriel’s adult life had afforded him with fewer women’s undergarments than it had churches, and he’d not been to church in years. Any public gathering felt like a luxury; his true identity always put others at risk.

Women, on the other hand, could be arranged. When he absolutely could not take the solitude another night; when he was out of his mind with need; when he had the money. Endurance work with horses sometimes took him to the low hills on the opposite edge of the forest, near the town of Marlborough. It was his practice to never leave the wilderness in the light of day, but could slip into Marlborough’s southern-most quarter after sunset and pay for an hour in the company of a woman. Stockings were never part of these encounters; they were dark, and silent, and anonymous.

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out memories of Marlborough. The women were perfectly cordial and seemed pleased that he was generous with his tips, but the interludes were unsatisfying and transactional. And that was the sum total of his experience with females: nameless brothel workers and... this person. She stood in his kitchen, pouring coffee, and strewing wet garments about the hearth. She challenged his identity and claimed to be the grown-up version of his childhood fiancée. And he couldn’t stop looking at her.

He watched her crane up to the cabinet on her tiptoes, reaching for a stack of cups.

“Oh, but look at your sturdy stoneware,” she was saying.

You mean primitive and crude, he thought. He was just about to turn away when she tumbled backward. She’d reached too high and the cups were too heavy. He lunged just as the pottery fell. She windmilled backward, trying to both avoid the cups and catch them.

He grabbed her from behind, snatching her back to his front and banding an arm around her waist. She made a small gasping noise and grabbed his outer thighs in each hand. Four cups hit the wooden floor with a thud, but the fifth landed directly on her foot and she yelped. Wincing, she curled her body into the shape of a nine, bowing against him.

“Careful,” he rasped, holding her tightly.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she whispered in short, pained breaths. With each word, she burrowed more deeply against him. Gabriel molded around her, tucking her head beneath his chin. As he bent, he felt the tickle of her hair on his throat; her ear against his chest; her hip to his groin; the arch of her feet against his shins. He memorized all of it, the woman-shaped imprint burning into him.

“I’m alright,” she breathed. “I’m alright. That hurt like the very devil but, remarkably none of your cups are damaged. Look.”

“You needn’t make a fuss with coffee.”

“I’m not usually so clumsy.” She chuckled and relaxed the hand on his left thigh, laying it on top of his arm. Her other hand remained on his right thigh and he would feel her handprint forever.

“I’m really rather handy,” she went on softly. “Everyone says it.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel breathed.

A chuckle. “For what are you sorry?” She lifted her chin, trying to see him.

I’m sorry, he thought, that I’m inarticulate and mannerless. Sorry that you’ve been forced to make coffee like a servant. Sorry I snatched you up like you were trying to hurl yourself off a cliff. Sorry you found the letters.

He didn’t say this—he didn’t know if it was true. She began to jostle against him, her hands sliding from his arm and his thigh. He loosened his grasp, a concession that felt akin to breaking off his hand, but she didn’t pull away.

She pivoted, spinning in his arms until they were pressed together in a sort of face-to-face embrace. Her chest pressed against his ribs, the most urgently needy part of him pressed into her belly.

“Will you give me a tour of your house?” she asked quietly.

He ignored the question and looked down at her. Was this really Lady Marianne Daventry? Here? In his house—in his arms?

Her hair was darker, she’d grown obviously, but her large bluish eyes were unchanged. She’d had a general air of quietness, and this was also the same. Her request to see the house came out like a gentle suggestion. Her voice was soft and her mannerisms were calm. He couldn’t have borne brashness, he thought. He was accustomed to the quiet rustles and snaps of the forest. She fit nicely inside the small cave. She fit even more nicely in his arms.

“I’ve not prowled about, no matter what you think,” she was saying. “I would hate to leave a proper cave without a tour. Do you mean to restore me to Pewsey tonight?”

“My intention was to take you to the edge of the village in the morning.”

“Tomorrow, then. Thank you for harboring me. And rescuing me. Thank you for everything.”

“I regret it,” he said, the words out before he’d realized it.

“You regret rescuing me?” she asked on a chuckle. “That is a terrible thing to say.”

“I am terrible.”

“Your value, sir, is still in question. At least where I am concerned. It depends on what you’re willing to do for me.”

“I’m not willing to do anything for you.” He forced himself to release her. He took a step back. “We’ll ride to Pewsey and part ways.”

“I don’t believe you,” she declared softly. “You rescued me from the highwayman. You’ve taken me in. You saved my letters these great many years. You’ve been very gracious about—” A pause. “About the collision of our lives. All things considered.”

Gabriel stooped to collect the fallen cups and clunked them, one by one, on the tabletop. Should he contradict her? Tell her she’d been extracted, not rescued? That he’d not taken her in, but stashed her out of the rain? That he was a rustic, primitive beast of a man who gaped at her like he’d never seen a woman? That he’d hauled her through the forest on his shoulder because that was what primitive, beastly men did?

What of the rest of it? Should he tell her that the freedom of his forest life was something he would never give up?

Being a prince was not an honor, it was a type of servitude. Princes existed at the pleasure of their families, and loyalists, and history, and money. Every aspect of royal life was controlled. And Gabriel would rather be primitive and free than to ever go back.

He was a man forgotten by civilization—or who’d forgotten how to be civilized. He’d allowed it all to slip away in order to survive. But there wasn’t space in his life to also manage the survival of Lady Marianne Daventry. Regrettably. Selfishly.

And it made no difference that she seemed unfazed and accommodating, and that she hadn’t challenged him about keeping her letters. And it made no difference that he’d managed to touch her ten different ways since he’d scooped her from the road and she hadn’t seemed to mind.

If only he’d not touched her, he thought. If he’d not touched her, he probably would be stomping through the rain, hauling her to Pewsey tonight.

He’d not meant to put his hands on her, but Meade’s men were too numerous. Against the rock, they’d needed to hide. In the road, he’d needed the element of surprise. On the trail, the rain was too heavy to drag her. He’d had no choice but to scoop her up. Her position over his shoulder had been a practical matter, logistical; but then her hip had settled against his cheek and her thighs rested against his chest and his body had awakened at each point of contact. Muscles twitched, groin tightened, hairs stood on end. Gabriel’s skin was like a thick, leathery husk; long detached from the sensations of softness. He rarely encountered female parts, or fragrant cloaks or wet curls, or lips against his throat. The husk had dissolved when he held her; every nerve ending tingled and throbbed and sought.

Physically, his body had climbed up that hill; mentally, he’d cataloged the contour of her breasts against his back; her hip against his cheek. It had taken all of his control to carry her away instead of dropping to the ground and touching and touching and touching every part of her until there was no earlobe or shoulder blade or the inside of a knee unknown to his hands. He’d wanted to gobble her up.

He hadn’t gobbled her, he’d removed her from the road—and then he’d held her against his chest and slowly expired while she nestled into him.

And now he’d touched her again. In his own kitchen. And declared that she should stay the night.

“Mr. Rein?” she was saying, trying to get his attention.

“Tell me your name again?”

“You know my name.”

“Tell me.”

“Alright. I’m called Ryan. Lady Ryan Daventry. When we were children, you knew me as Lady Marianne.”

“I do not know you, Lady Marianne Ryan Daventry.” He would say it, and say it, and say it.

“You do.”

“I do not.”

She exhaled, closed her eyes, opened them again. “You wish to speak in circles? Fine. Let us circle back to this: Will you show me your home?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see it.”

“I’ll show you to where you will sleep.”

“Oh, you’ve a guest room? Lovely.”

“No. I do not have a guest room.” It’s a cave, he added in his head.

“Right. Of course. Lead the way.”