Chapter 4 #2
“Look how charming they are,” Emmett exclaimed, crouching to gather a brawling pair into his hands and chuff at their attempts to gnaw on his fingers. “Where’s Beatrix? Did you leave her in the barn?”
“She died beneath a carriage wheel weeks ago,” she answered without inflection.
A fortnight ago.
The span of time she had left until she was a married woman.
“You didn’t tell me.” Emmett sank across from her, allowing the wrestling match to resume on her coverlet as he intervened a few times, dragging the feline attentions from each other with a trailing finger.
“You already had so much on you mind,” Rosaline said. “I didn’t want to give you unhappy news.” In truth, she’d been overwhelmed by the myriad of changes in their situation, and the family seemed all too happy to allow her to escape to her lonely room for entire days on end.
She, the youngest of the Goode brood, hadn’t Emmaline’s beauty or charisma, nor was she a lone male heir in a litter of females. She was ordinary, small, damaged Rosaline with dowdy ash hair, eyes too big, and a proclivity best hidden from the world.
Nova, the other black kitten, clawed her way up the bedclothes and climbed into her lap, loudly demanding affection.
Rosaline stroked the delicate down beneath Nova’s chin, her vision blurring somewhere in the middle distance. Focused on nothing. Seeing everything.
Should she be crying tears of terror? Celebrating good fortune? It was apparent Lucy and her mother would have thrown Emmett over in a moment for a chance to shackle a man named for Midas.
But all Rosaline could think of was how that story ended. How the golden touch became the greedy king’s nightmare.
Emmett put a hand on her knee, squeezing it reassuringly. “You don’t have to do this, Ros,” he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard.
Rosaline blinked his features into focus.
The thick umber waves of disobedient hair he always forgot to have barbered regularly.
The boyish blueberry eyes magnified by his spectacles, gloomier than they ought to be.
Observant and gentle and endlessly clever.
The brackets around his mouth deepened not by age, but by years of fathomless misery and mistreatment.
When so many would turn their pain into bitterness, like Emmaline was wont to do, he redirected his into a compassion so vast it strained credulity.
If there was a heart more tender in this world than hers, it was Emmett’s, and she couldn’t be the one to bruise it.
“Of course, I have to do this, and I should. The entire debacle is my fault.”
He pushed his spectacles up a patrician nose. “Perhaps this is a sign. Would it be so very terrible if we were exiled back to Fairhaven and lived the rest of our days in scandalous seclusion?” The hope in his question broke her heart.
“No,” she answered. “It wouldn’t be terrible for you or me.
But for them…” They both looked toward the door, the one that led down hallways of rooms belonging to seven Goode siblings in all, though most of them resided elsewhere at the moment.
Rosaline’s care stretched beyond the walls of Cresthaven.
“Now that you’re a Baron, Emmett, you’ve responsibilities to your tenants and to those in the employ of the shipping company.
You’ve a fortune and a legacy to look after.
You can’t run from that any more than I can run from the consequences of what I’ve done. ”
His gaze was unbearably bleak. “What if I’m not meant for a legacy, Ros? We all know the fall of the Goode name could at any time be discovered. And the fault would be mine.”
“That won’t happen.” Rosaline leaned over to grasp his hand. “We’ve buried it. You’re marrying a great beauty. No one will know.”
“We’ll know.”
She did know.
Knew that Emmett felt affection for other men, rather than women.
He’d developed an attraction to a friend at the age of nine and had been institutionalized for it.
Once he’d convinced the doctors he’d been cured, they’d returned him home at the age of sixteen, a sad and broken boy.
Lonely and troubled, afraid of any sort of connection with other men, friendly, filial, or otherwise.
Over the years, it’d become apparent his predilections hadn’t changed, but he’d zealously masked them.
Emmett had turned somber and introverted beneath the scathing control of their uncle and steward, who’d somehow erased any record of his incarceration.
However, they were all aware that the recent death of their uncle might yet prove disastrous.
In the event that damning paperwork was ever uncovered, it was imperative that Emmett marry and produce an heir.
So he could deny who he really was in order to maintain his freedom.
Rosaline cupped his cheek, one still not capable of producing a full beard even at seven and twenty. His lot wasn’t much better than hers.
They’d both be consigned to loveless marriages.
Good lord. She was going to have a husband. She was going to have to—to do what husbands and wives did.
She prepared to cringe with revulsion, but it wasn’t as forthcoming as expected.
“Emmett…” she ventured, drawing little whorls into Nova’s long, wispy coat with a fidgeting fingertip. “Do you find Mr. Wolfe handsome?”
His head snapped up and his brows drew together in approbation. “Don’t ask me such cruel questions, Ros.”
“I’m not meaning to be cruel. I just…” She leaned closer, pressing her forehead to his. “We could whisper about it if you wish. I don’t mind that you are—who you are.”
“What I am, you mean?” He winced as if to cringe away from himself, turning from her.
“No.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “Who you are… I think that who one loves is part of who one is.”
His throat bobbed with a difficult swallow, then another, his eyes never leaving the brawling kittens as he said, “I wish I could tear that part of me out. That I could be who everyone expects me to be.”
She cupped his jaw and let the moisture gathering in her lashes fall down her hot cheek. “I wish you didn’t have to.”
“None of that,” he crooned, extracting a handkerchief from his shirtsleeves to wipe at her tears.
“He is handsome, your Mr. Wolfe.” Emmett breathed the words like a gentle confession.
“I…I liked the way his eyes creased at the corners, and the exaggerated shape of his jaw. He has a rather—I don’t know—vital way about him, does he not?
Strong and um—well, he’s the sort that would be capable in a crisis now, wouldn’t he? ”
“I suppose you’re right,” she agreed, the vise around her ribs loosening one notch. “Not as good a shot as Morley, I’m thankful to note.”
That summoned a wry smile to her brother’s lips. “I’m glad, too; I couldn’t imagine carrying on without you.” Instantly, he sobered. “Did you take something from him, Ros?”
She gulped in air once. Then again. Wringing her hands in her lap. “I-I…did.”
“Oh, Rosaline.”
“It was only this.” She rushed to where she’d shoved her treasures beneath the fluffy blankets in the kitten basket and extracted the odd half of a goblet. “You should have seen the mountain of treasure spread throughout the observatory. I didn’t think it’d be missed.”
“Still, you should return it.”
Rosaline couldn’t look up from the cup clutched in her clammy, frigid fingers. She couldn’t face the pitying censure she knew filled his gaze. Her voice was unidentifiable as she pulled it from the rotting grave of her undying shame. “I know.”
“What made you do it this time?” Emmett’s voice was gentle as it was long-suffering. “Was it Lady Brackenfeld? She’s been a rather terrible houseguest.”
Rosaline nodded, knowing her tolerant siblings didn’t understand her dreadful tendency any more than she did. “I—I hate that she’s going to be part of the family. I hate that she’s unkind and domineering to you. She reminds me of mother.”
“I can’t say that comparison hasn’t crossed my mind,” he muttered.
“At least you and your wife will have that to commiserate over… Poor Lucy.”
“Poor Lucy in so many ways.” Emmett reached down for the calico kitten who seemed unable to climb the coverlet as her more enterprising siblings had. Kissing her downy head he confessed, “I’ll never be able to love her.”
“I’ll never be able to love Mr. Wolfe. Eli…” Her husband’s name was going to be Eli.
Elijah Wolfe.
Mrs. Rosaline Wolfe.
“You could try, you know.”
She looked over at him, aghast. “Emmett, what are you saying?”
His shoulder lifted. “It’s not the worst thing I can imagine, having a man built like that to stand between you and the rest of the world.”
She paused, considering his words.
He was alarmingly large, her intended. Hard and scarred and dusted with dark hair.
He didn’t just occupy space, he claimed it.
Claimed it with his wide shoulders and his deep chest. A chest chiseled with grooves and sculpted with swells that sophisticated British men didn’t possess.
Indeed, there was nothing at all elegant about him.
His hands were rough and square, both his palms and his voice heavy and abrasive as brick.
Emmett lay back on her bed with what she could only identify as a dreamy sigh. “Doesn’t it seem like he could protect you from—well, from just about anything?”
Rosaline joined her brother, staring up at the canopy as little creatures romped and clawed their way over and around them. “It does,” she agreed softly.
But who would protect her from him?