Chapter 18
“I’m going to the country.”
Hector blinked at the ghost his wife had become—only now she was made flesh once more, standing in the doorway to his study with her hands on her hips and a determined expression on her face.
He hadn’t seen her in a goddamned week.
He’d heard her on the other side of the wall that joined their bedchambers. He’d smelled her floral soap when steam from her bath floated through the crack beneath the door to his own bathing room. And, always, he’d been achingly aware of her presence.
Close enough to touch, and yet completely unreachable.
And now, here she was, even more beautiful than his imperfect memory had recalled of her. And she was insisting on leaving.
“I beg your pardon?” he said, certain he couldn’t have heard her correctly.
“I,” she repeated in a tone that suggested she felt she was speaking to an idiot, “am going to the country. To stay with my cousins, Xander and Helen. And their children. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“What?” he said, because fuck manners; he’d asked politely, and she’d given him the same ridiculous answer.
Clio narrowed her eyes.
“I know you can hear me,” she said acidly. “Your injured ear only affects you if I speak directly into it.”
This brought him up short. He’d never heard someone reference his injury in the context of something he could do, rather than something denied to him.
“It’s not that I didn’t hear you,” he said hastily. “It’s just that … It isn’t wise for you to leave London right now.”
“Why not?” she demanded, which was the precise question he didn’t want her to ask, given that he had spoken without having the faintest idea as to a reason.
He searched his brain.
“Ah, we are … We’re still newly married,” he said. “People might talk.”
Good Lord, he hated himself for even saying it.
Clio looked distinctly unimpressed.
“Oh, do you think they’ll say that you only married me because of a scandal and aren't actually madly in love with me?” she asked sardonically. “Oh dear. Oh no. How dreadful.”
It was rather hard to argue with that, but he was determined to try.
“I thought you wanted to wait for things to quiet down,” he ventured. He wasn’t certain why he was so desperate for an excuse—except, of course, for the parts of him that knew exactly why—but the idea of her leaving now rankled.
Would he ever even see her again if she left now?
“I thought you didn’t care about what bloody aristocrats—“ It was, he was forced to admit, a fair imitation of his accent. “—thought about you.”
He tried to think of a way to both get what he wanted and avoid the impression that he was caving to Society’s pressure. Luckily, Clio kept talking, as he didn’t like his odds of solving this issue.
“Besides,” she said. “You have ignored me for a week. I can only assume that this means that you are no longer interested in marital duties, or any heir that might result thereof. I am done wasting my days on idleness. I did not come here to ask your permission. I am merely informing you. Out of courtesy.”
Hector was still scrabbling for an answer. His expression must have given something away in his disinclination toward this plan, however, for Clio’s already tight mouth pressed tighter, enough that he could see a faint band of white around the outline of her plush lips.
“That is,” she said tightly, “unless you plan to renege on your promise.”
That struck him as hard as any hammer in the forge had ever struck metal to bend it into shape.
He wasn’t the kind of man who broke his promises. He didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to his honor, but he had that much. Besides which—that promise had been right to make. She deserved her freedom. What was more, she clearly needed it.
But he rebelled against the idea of letting her go alone. If she went off without him, he feared that the thread binding them together, already so tenuous, would snap. And—God help him—he did not want that with a desperation that should have alarmed him.
But the alarm faded in lieu of triumph when he finally seized upon an idea.
“Of course, I have no objection to your going,” he said, which was only slightly a lie, and he figured it was worth it, given the way some of the tension went immediately out of her shoulders. “But I should accompany you. For safety.”
Her nose scrunched up. Lord, spare him from her wonderfully expressive face.
“I assure you,” she said, her tone suggesting that she was holding back far less polite words, “that I am perfectly capable of traveling on my own. You will recall that I have traveled extensively.”
Indeed, she had—far more extensively than he had done, come to think. But he wasn’t about to let a small thing like logic get in the way of his good idea.
“You are married now,” he said. She looked like she was considering striking him. “It is now my duty to ensure your safety.”
“Your duty,” she repeated acidly.
Ah, well, yes, he probably could have chosen better words, given that the last time they’d alluded to duty, he’d been using it as a euphemism for taking her to bed and pleasuring her until she was drunk with it under the guise of ‘producing an heir.’
And then, he’d promptly not done any of it.
“My honor,” he amended.
She didn’t look convinced.
“So, to summarize,” she said, and Hector had never had a pretty governess.
Still, it was hard not to imagine Clio in that role now, as she stood there all prim and proper and full of barely suppressed rage—and harder still not to find the image alluring, “you plan to accompany me to ensure my safety now, but then you are going—at some unknown point in the future, I might add, since you haven’t seen fit to give me the details—to leave me behind while you return to the North? ”
Ah, what a concise report on the utter bloody mess he’d made of his life.
“I’m still here now,” he said, because blindly agreeing seemed like a trap, even if she were correct. “So, we will go together.”
Clio looked like she had more to say about this act of high-handedness, and he almost wished she would say it. He understood their footing when they argued. Perhaps it would even lead to something productive between them.
But the words died before they made it past her lips.
“Fine,” she said flatly.
“Fine,” he agreed.
And then she left, leaving him wishing that he’d said more, even as he was entirely unsure what those words should have been.
“Do you think you’ll break this one, too?”
Hector addressed his comment out the window of the carriage, his tone entirely casual, but Clio jolted anyway. They’d already been riding for the better part of an hour, and they’d spent it in utter silence.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have things to say. She had a million things to say. She just feared that if she let any of them out, she would devolve to the kind of hysterical shrieking that made men dismiss women out of hand.
Or, worse, she might reference how cursedly handsome he looked in the watery morning light as they made their way to the Godwin Estate.
So. Silence was better, if not a great deal more awkward.
Until, of course, Hector baited the hook.
“I beg your pardon?” Clio asked reflexively.
He turned almost lazily to look at her.
“The carriage,” he said, gesturing to the ducal conveyance, which was surprisingly practical, given what Clio knew of Hector’s showy younger brother.
Clio had barely seen Matthew, who was residing primarily at his club, in the weeks that she’d lived in the same house as him.
His wife, Anne, was a more common presence, but she’d greeted any overtures that Clio had made with a sniff down her nose.
Their young son, Michael, was more pleasant, but in the way that all children of that age were pleasant enough if you discussed the kind of things they liked.
Jon, at present, was fond of dogs and had spent a cheerful half hour telling Clio about all the dogs he’d ever seen when she’d visited him in the nursery.
Now, though, Clio caught up with Hector's meaning.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you asking me if I am going to break the carriage?”
There was a gleam in his eye that Clio hadn’t seen since before their marriage, and she wasn’t certain if she was heartened to see it or dismayed at the threat it posed to her sanguinity.
“Aye,” he said shortly.
She really, truly should not rise to this obvious bait.
“Are you thereby implying that I somehow broke the last one?” She sounded rather shrill, but it only seemed to amuse him.
He held up one hand, as if weighing facts. “You were in the carriage.” He lifted the other hand. “The carriage broke.”
He pretended to weigh the scales between the two and gave her a look as if to say, You draw your own conclusions.
“Seriously?” she demanded. “That is truly, honestly, seriously the argument you are making?”
She didn’t want to tease him. She didn’t want to banter with him. She knew that it would only make the crash that much harder when things went wrong between them again.
But there was clearly something very seriously wrong with her, because she found that she couldn’t help herself.
“It isn’t personal, Clio,” he said in such absurdly somber tones that she almost giggled. “I just only have the one good leg left, you see. I need to know if I ought to be prepared.”
“You are bloody incorrigible,” she muttered, turning away so he couldn’t see her smiling.
There was only so much space to get away in a compressed carriage, however, and he was clearly pleased when he retorted.
“Nobody has ever called me that before, but that’s probably just because they called me things that I cannot repeat in front of a lady.”
She shook her head at him. “That just goes to show what you know about ladies. We hear far more than men think. Besides, I’ve sailed back and forth from the Continent multiple times—and my brother was a sailor.
If you think they’ve invented curses that I haven’t heard, then you are dead wrong, sir. ”
He was grinning at her, and it was an impossibly lovely smile.