Chapter Thirteen
Obviously, agreeing to fetch Abigail her cats had been a mistake. A simple-sounding task dressed up as a Trojan horse meant to lull Stephen into a false sense of security as his household descended into bedlam during his short absence.
He’d left his wife in the care of his trusted housekeeper and returned to find himself playing the part of unwilling host to the Duke and Duchess of Southwick.
The very heavily pregnant Duchess of Southwick.
The same Duchess of Southwick who kept staring thoughtfully at him whenever she assumed he wasn’t looking before grabbing her belly and either cooing sweet endearments at her unborn child or threatening the poor thing to “get out this instant, I can no longer see my feet.”
Meanwhile, Abigail—the woman he’d wanted to spend the remainder of December and a good part of January courting in an effort to convince her to give their marriage a real chance—was either with her hellish felines or attending the duchess, with rarely a minute spared for her husband.
It was not the quiet, romantic winter sojourn at Summerwind House that Stephen had imagined.
Then again, nothing in regard to Abigail was how he had imagined it would be.
Had he truly thought these three weeks would be any different?
Christmas passed with a whisper, and then it was on to a new year where nothing felt very new.
The duchess was still expecting, Susan was still hissing at him whenever the opportunity presented itself, and Abigail was still as far out of reach as she’d ever been.
With only five days left, he was ready to admit defeat and move on.
He couldn’t make Abigail love him any more than the duchess could make her child be born.
Except the baby’s birth was an eventual inevitability, whereas his marriage .
. . maybe his marriage had just been doomed from the start.
Turning the page of his newspaper, he sipped his morning coffee as he scanned an article that detailed the unprecedented freezing of the River Thames, trapping all boats in the harbor as London suffered one of its largest snowfalls in recorded history.
The unfavorable weather had extended to Northampton, dumping nearly two feet of snow on the ground before it moved northward.
Fortunately, his recent renovations of Summerwind House had included replacing all of the old, crumbling clay tiles in each of the thirty-five fireplaces, ensuring that while outside the manor it was cold and icy, inside the manor it was cozy and warm.
At least in temperature.
“Stephen? Are you in—there you are.”
He nearly spilled his coffee when Abigail entered the solarium, appearing particularly appetizing in a mint-green dress with her curls pinned up with a pencil (she was always looking for something to write with) and her spectacles resting on the tip of her nose.
“Here I am,” he said blandly, closing the newspaper. “Can I help you with something?”
Following the arrival of their unexpected houseguests, he and Abigail had made it a point to be flawlessly polite with each other.
There were no thinly barbed references to the past. No sharp words exchanged in the present.
Only dull, spiritless, plodding politeness.
The kind that made him want to bash his head against the nearest wall when he wasn’t painting on a cordial smile.
“May I sit down?” she asked, and he hid his flicker of surprise by jumping to his feet and pulling out a chair across the table.
“Of course.” If his hand lingered a touch too long on the back of her seat, they both pretended not to notice. “Coffee?”
“No, thank you. I’ve already had tea.”
“Better than the pond water I had to drink after we first met, I hope.”
Her eyes sparkled behind the smudged lenses of her spectacles. “Pond water that you nearly choked on, if I recall.”
“In my defense, you said . . . well, you know what you said.”
“Breasts?”
“Indeed.” Unable to help himself, he glanced down at her lovely décolletage framed in white scalloped lace before jerking back up to her face only to find that she was grinning at him.
Not a framed, politely stitched together grin that didn’t reach the edges of her mouth but a genuine, eye-crinkling grin that made the freckles on her nose dance.
“Breasts are merely a part of the human anatomy. Not unlike an arm, a foot, or a knee.”
“I’m sorry, but a lady’s breasts are not comparable to a knee.”
“Not in physical function, no.”
“Not in any function.”
She folded her hands on her lap. “I am afraid I did not come in to discuss breasts.”
“No,” he sighed with feigned melancholy. “Women never do.”
“By my calculations, there are five days remaining out of the twenty-one that you proposed.”
Stephen’s spine went rigid as he straightened in his chair.
He had been preparing himself for this very conversation.
With Abigail’s attention to detail, he knew it would be coming sooner rather than later.
And he’d already told himself—ordered himself—that he would accept her decision to leave with whatever dignity he had left.
“Yes, that is correct. I can arrange transportation for you back to London—”
“I’d like to stay here,” she said in a rush, and no amount of preparing could have readied him for that particular statement.
“What?” Under the table, his fingers dug into his thighs as pink climbed into the arches of her cheekbones. Above it, his expression remained carefully blank.
“I . . . I realize that when I accepted your generous proposal of three weeks, you did not intend to have that time stolen by my work.”
“You’re a doctor, Abigail. With an important patient living under your very roof. In spite of whatever your opinion of me may be, I am not so inconsiderate that I would ask you to deny Her Grace the care she requires to ensure a healthy delivery.”
“I am a doctor, but during these past three weeks, I was supposed to be a wife.” Her lashes lowered, dipping into the pools of pink. “Unless you’d prefer to send me back to London at the end of the week, I should like to stay at Summerwind House to the end of February. For the sake of fairness.”
Prefer to send her away?
Prefer to send her away?
Was she mad?
There were a hundred places he’d prefer to send her instead of London.
Onto his lap.
Against the wall.
Into his bed.
. . . to name a few.
“NO.” He all but shouted it, the tight rein he had on his control slipping a precarious inch as his mind continued to conjure any number of decadent alternatives to Abigail leaving. “No,” he repeated, more calmly, when her beautiful green irises widened behind her spectacles.
“No, you’d like me to leave, or—”
“Stay,” he said hoarsely. For the love of God, stay.
“I want this marriage to work, Abigail. I’ve wanted it to work from the beginning, and I’ve made no secret of that.
As I said before, I won’t force you to stay.
Not when it would only result in misery for us both.
But for as long as you’d like to be there, I will never ask you leave. ”
She nodded, then stood. “I . . . I should see how Mara is feeling this morning.”
“Wait.” Pushing his chair back, he went to her.
The urge to gather her in his arms and lower his mouth to hers was nearly unbearable.
Having finally gotten a taste of what he’d yearned for these long three years in the carriage, he desired more.
He desired everything. To slide his tongue between her lips.
To feel her tremble when the rough pads of his thumbs ran across the sensitive peaks of her nipples.
To touch between her legs and find her wet and wanting.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Your spectacles,” he said gruffly. “They’re dirty.”
With the precision of a surgeon, he removed them from her face and cleaned the lenses with a monogrammed handkerchief pulled from the inner lining of his waistcoat.
When the glass was spotless, he carefully placed them on the bridge of her nose and slid the temples behind the curved shells of her ears.
“There.” With infinite regret, he lowered his hands. “That’s better.”
Her tongue skimmed across her bottom lip, and was she trying to kill him?
“Th-thank you,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome.”
“I . . . I should go.” Lifting her skirts, she spun around and bolted from the room.
*
Abigail’s heart pounded in her chest as she leaned back against the wall in a narrow, rarely used hallway and closed her eyes.
Why hadn’t she kissed Stephen?
She’d wanted to, but she’d lacked the courage to initiate the deed.
Which was utterly foolish, as they’d kissed before .
. . and done a great deal more than that.
But for some reason, it now felt as though it meant something else.
Something more. As if by kissing him, she would be agreeing to stay.
Not just for another month, but for a lifetime.
And she wasn’t ready to commit to that. Nor was she ready to commit to ending her marriage.
Instead, she found herself trapped in the hazy gray of in-between.
The place where doubts festered and there were more questions than answers.
“Oh, do make up your mind,” she said aloud, stomping her foot in frustration.
“Make up yer mind about what?” a voice asked from the shadows, and Abigail’s shriek of surprise was shortened to a strangled gasp when a familiar face peeled itself away from a portrait of some long forgotten relative.
“Jack. What—what in the world are you doing here?” She’d only met the recalcitrant charge of Mara’s sister, Kitty, the Marchioness of Kentwood, twice. But twice had been enough to make a lasting impression.
“Got ’ere a little bit ago. Came with Kitty and William. They want to see the baby.”
“There is no baby. Not yet, anyway.”
Jack shrugged. “Then I guess we’ll stay ’ere until there is.”
“You’ll stay here. At Summerwind House?”
“Yep. Already picked out my bedroom and everything.”