Chapter 17 #3
"You said it worked before," Roman countered, his tone gentle but unyielding, a persistent tug at a thread she had left hanging. "You spoke with the certainty of someone who had watched a specific fever break. Which child was it, Miss Hartley?"
She was silent for so long he thought she might refuse to answer entirely. She stared at her own hands, her fingers twisting the linen apron into a tight, wrinkled knot.
"My niece," she said finally, the words coming out in a low, ragged whisper that sounded like the absolute edge of her endurance.
"My sister’s girl. She... she ran a fever during her first winter.
It was the same as this. The same dry heat.
The same terrifying rattle when she tried to draw a breath.
We did not have the gold for a physician like Harrison, Roman.
We had nothing but a well and an old bottle of vinegar from the larder. "
She turned her head to look at him then, her dark eyes swimming with a raw, unprotected honesty that caught him completely off guard.
"I held her for fourteen hours. I watched her skin turn from red to white, and I knew that if the water did not work, she would be gone before the sun cleared the hedgerows. That is how I know."
The honesty of her grief was a physical thing, a heavy weight that seemed to crush the lingering suspicion from his mind. He looked at her pale, exquisite face, at the wild auburn hair falling over her shoulders, and he felt the last remnants of his aristocratic detachment crumble into ash.
"Your niece," he said softly. "What was her name?"
"Yvette," she whispered, her voice cracking on the syllables. "Her name was Yvette."
Roman let out a long, slow breath. He reached out, his large hand finding hers where it lay against the dark wool of her skirt.
His fingers slid between hers, his palm pressing against hers in a firm, possessive grip that left no room for the boundaries of master and servant.
Her hand was cold, but it warmed instantly in his grasp, her fingers curling around his with a desperate, clinging strength that felt like a confession in itself.
"I am sorry," he said, and he meant it for more than the dead child.
She didn't answer. She simply leaned her head sideways, her forehead settling against the solid curve of his shoulder with a soft, final sigh.
Within minutes, the exhaustion of the night claimed her completely, her breathing slowing into the deep, rhythmic pattern of sleep.
Roman sat perfectly still in the half-dark, the weight of her head a warm, comforting pressure against his arm.
The rain had stopped outside, leaving only the lonely, persistent drip of water from the stone eaves of Langley Hall. The first faint, gray light of dawn was beginning to touch the edges of the high windows, turning the blackness of the room into a pale, ghostly slate.
He thought about the house below them. He thought about Lady Daphne Vane, who had arrived with her scented trunks and her elegant plum velvet traveling suits, her arrival orchestrated down to the last detail by his mother’s strategic hand. He had agreed to the courtship.
He had allowed the woman into his home, had permitted the formal laughter in the drawing room, because the alternative was an administrative reality he could not bear, the absolute certainty that if he did not present a traditional, compliant household to the world, his mother would find a way to strip Liliana from the nursery and cast her into some nameless, blind asylum in the city.
He had accepted the engagement to protect them both. He had entered into a cold, transactional alliance with a woman he did not care for, simply to build a wall high enough to keep the world from invading the nursery floor.
And yet, there he sat.
He looked down at Miss Hartley’s face in the graying light. Without her watchful, defensive gaze, she looked incredibly young, her long eyelashes casting delicate, feathered shadows against her pale cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted, her breath warm against his neck.
The desire to lean down, to press his mouth against the soft curve of her jaw and wake her with the weight of his own hunger, was a physical ache in his chest. It was madness, a complete and total dereliction of every duty he had been raised to honor.
A soft, wet sigh from the cradle broke his meditation.
He turned his head slightly, his eyes tracking the movement of the child above them.
Liliana had shifted, her small limbs relaxing out of their rigid, defensive posture.
Her tiny forehead was no longer dry and hot; a fine, cool dew of perspiration had broken out along her hairline, the skin pale and sweet under the gray light of the morning.
The fever had broken. The child was safe, her breathing deep, even, and entirely clear.
But as Roman sat there in the silence, the baby’s recovery brought no relief to the cold calculation running through his mind. He could not stop thinking about what she had said before the doctor left.