Chapter 12
Henry decided to give her an hour before he went after her.
And then he remembered that his watch had been smashed in the carriage accident, and he swore, aloud and obscenely.
Fine, then. He would give her some time. He would give her—oh hell, he didn’t know. Every minute felt like ten.
She was sorry. That’s what she’d said when he’d told her he wanted to talk. She was sorry.
It did not bode well. She knew—surely she must know by now what he was going to say. He’d tried a half-dozen ways now to tell her that he loved her, and something had come between them each time—an interruption or catastrophe or Margo fleeing the conversation.
He felt grimly certain that she did not want to hear it. If she wanted him—if she wanted his declarations and his stupid bleeding heart—then she wouldn’t have taken off like a startled doe.
It wasn’t worth it. There was no need for him to bare his soul.
And yet when he finally gave in and started to look for her, the words were on his lips anyway.
I love you, he was going to say. I’ve always loved you, since the moment I saw you at Number Twelve in your white dress and a cherry in your hand.
But then he couldn’t find her.
He searched around the waterfall. He made his way back to the clearing where he’d taken her on the ground, hoping like a lovestruck block that she might have returned there as well.
She hadn’t. And when he went back to where he’d tied up the chestnut gelding, it was still there, placidly nibbling at the gorse.
She hadn’t gone back to Darley Dale. She was somewhere in the Dark Peak, and he couldn’t begin to guess where.
“Goddamnit,” he said under his breath. He almost wished she’d stolen the horse right out from under him. At least he’d have known that she was on her way back to civilization, and not begun to panic that she’d tumbled into a mysterious crevasse or off another tree or into more ice-cold water.
He circled the waterfall again. This time, he shouted for her.
He felt a complete idiot. Twice now, in a single day, he’d searched for Margo.
He’d probably scared off all the birds in the Pennines with the volume of his shouting.
He was rapidly growing to despise the natural world, with its crumbling rocks and icy waterfalls and weather.
If it started to rain, he was going to move to the Caribbean.
And then he caught sight of her hair. His mind fixed on the bright anomalous red in the green-gray softness of the moors before he discerned that it was she.
She was sitting, he realized. She was tucked mostly inside a small cave amid the flat limestone rocks, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. He could see now how Matilda and Ashford could have disappeared.
Margo would have been almost invisible—her dress a mud-spangled dark green, her freckled arms camouflaged against the stone—if not for the siren call of her hair in the fading daylight.
“Margo.” His voice was hard, and he realized as he said her name that he was angry with her. “I’ve been searching for you—damn it, didn’t you hear me calling for you?”
She looked up at him from her place on the ground.
He could see she’d been crying, and guilt stabbed at him.
He fisted his hands at his sides. No. No.
He was tired of chasing her. He was tired of throwing himself in her direction when she could not even be bothered to hold out her hand, and if that wasn’t fair to her, well, he couldn’t summon up fairness and decency just now.
She rose. Her bodice was split at the side, and he could see a flash of white chemise. She still had leaves in her hair. He hadn’t gotten them all out.
“You didn’t have to search for me,” she said.
“The hell I didn’t. What did you expect me to do? Mount the horse and ride back to Darley Dale and leave you to your own devices?”
“Yes.”
He gritted his teeth. “For Christ’s sake, Margo. I’m not going to abandon you out here—there’s a goddamned waterfall you could topple over and about three hundred more trees for you to fall out of, not to mention the fact that I’m not sure you even know how to get back to Darley Dale—”
“I know you think I’m an idiot,” she said coolly, “but I’ve survived this long, Henry. I would have made it back in one piece.”
Guilt and frustration chased circles around each other in his chest. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, Margo.”
She threw up her hands. “Then why can’t you leave me here?”
Henry opened his mouth, then shut it again. It was a precipice, an edge over which he could not see, and he was terrified of the other side. “I want—I want to make sure you’re all right. It’s not because I think you’re incompetent, Margo. I’ve never thought that—not once.”
Her lips curved, a sad, wry smile so far from her usual grin that he barely recognized it. “Don’t you? You’ve plenty of reasons to think so. I act the fool, I know. This whole bloody trip was a fool’s errand, and I dragged you along.”
“You didn’t drag me. I wanted to come.”
She’d been looking down, her dark auburn lashes shielding her eyes, but at his words, she looked up. Her eyes were very blue and they burned in the last light of the autumn day. “Why?”
Henry hung, suspended, at the point of falling off the edge. It was stupid—and pointless—he knew what she would say. He was absurd and too much, and if he never told her, he would never have to hear her gently let him down.
“I love you,” he choked out.
The words trembled into being between them.
Seven. There were seven freckles at the curve of her ripe-cherry mouth. He’d kissed every one.
“You love me,” she repeated. “That’s why you came with me? Not to help me find Matilda?”
“Not to help you find Matilda. Not because I think you wouldn’t have managed it on your own. I came because I couldn’t stop myself—because I wanted to fall asleep watching you and wake up to your voice. I came because you asked me to.”
She was blinking rapidly, and she opened her mouth, and he couldn’t bear to hear what she was going to say.
“I love you,” he said, his words coming faster.
“That’s—oh hell, Margo. That’s why I do anything.
That’s why I come to dinner at Number Twelve—just to watch you.
That’s why I took riding lessons five years ago, like a child, because I wanted to keep up with you in the park, and the son of a pipe-fitter in London doesn’t grow up on horseback like an earl’s offspring. ”
She blinked.
“I bring irises to Number Twelve because they’re the color of your eyes.
I didn’t take the position with Chatham’s in Bath because I didn’t want to move—not if you were in London.
I buy the fruit-sellers out of cherries all summer long because they make me think of you, and most of the time I think of nothing else. ”
“Henry,” she whispered.
He wanted to keep babbling—perhaps if he never stopped talking, he would never have to hear her response. But his name on her lips silenced him.
She licked her lips. “Why didn’t you—why didn’t you tell me?”
This is why, he wanted to say. He had told her now—and the space between their bodies felt huge and uncrossable.
“There was no point to it,” he said. He shrugged, a short jerk of his shoulders. “What would have been the use? There was no future possible between us.”
She flinched. “Because I am a Halifax Hellion?”
“Because you—” Henry stared at her in consternation.
He wanted to reach out and shake her, but he was afraid to touch her.
“Are you sure you didn’t hit your head when you fell out of that tree?
Not because of you, because of me. Because you are a lady and I was a scholarship student at school who can barely afford the coal to heat my apartment. ”
“Are you joking?” Color had risen to her cheeks. She was pink and freckled and streaked with mud, and he found a strange hot pleasure in the notion that he had made her so. She was so bloody beautiful and desirable that he almost lost the thread of the conversation.
“Not at all.”
She tilted her chin up. “If you truly think I would care about such things, Henry, then I find your declaration rather suspect. A stranger on the street who knew nothing more of me than what the scandal sheets print would know that I do not care about wealth or class or—”
“I care,” he snapped. “I care, Margo! I have nothing to offer you, nothing at all beyond stupid pointless words. You are—the sun to me.” He swallowed.
Years of habit wanted to force the words down, but he bit back his fear.
“You are all the light and joy in the world, and I am good at nothing so much as watching you from a distance.”
“Bollocks,” she said.
He gaped at her. He poured out his heart, laid it on the ground for her to trod upon, and she said—
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bollocks,” she said again, and he supposed it wouldn’t be Margo if she didn’t catch him by surprise.
“I think you’ve plenty of fancy words, Henry Mortimer, but you and I both know they aren’t true.
” She shook her head, and a leaf fell from her hair and descended to the pebbled dirt.
“You know perfectly well that you have something to offer me. You wouldn’t have come if you did not—you would have let me go alone.
You wouldn’t have chased after me, over and over, if you’d thought you didn’t have something to give. ”
He hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. He felt dizzied, rocked by her words and the sight of her there in the red glow of sunset. “I—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I think you’ve invented this lie about how you are so far below me to cover up the truth.”
His mouth felt dry. “And the truth is?”
“That you didn’t trust me.”
“I—” He wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Of course I trust you.”
“You don’t,” she said. “You don’t trust me to make a fair judgment of you.
You invented a whole story in your mind and never gave me the chance to make my opinion heard.
You never gave me the opportunity to know my mind, to have some say over what happened between us.
If I had not forced the issue on this trip, we would still be dancing out of each other’s reach. We would never—”
“Blast it all,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me. I know I’m a goddamned coward, Margo.”
Her lips parted. “What?”
“I’m a coward. I’ve cocked everything up because I was too damn terrified to tell you anything.
Because it seemed safer never to tell you, and I wanted what was safe.
I would have rather”—his voice went choked and raspy, and he hoped he would not cry—“I would have rather kept what little I had of you. I would have rather talked to you like a brother, like a friend, and watched you from across the room, and ridden beside you forever, than tell you how I felt and lose it all.”
She bit her lower lip, and the tiny overlap of her front teeth made him want, made anguish and hunger and loss rise in him.
“You’re right,” he said. “I would not have spoken. I would not have acted were it not for you. But I did. We did. And I can’t go back.”
Oh fuck, this was a mistake. He heard the words as they came from his mouth, and he wanted to drag them back in. He wanted to shake his head and go down on his knees and beg her to pretend he’d never said anything at all.
But he couldn’t.
“I don’t have very much to offer you.” She opened her mouth as if to speak, but he raised a hand to forestall her.
“But not nothing. I want to marry you, Margo Halifax. I want you—in my bed or on the ground or—hell, against a wall, anywhere. I want to give you six redheaded babies. I want to carry you when you have a blister and bring you a hundred glasses of champagne to make up for the one I dumped in the grass. I want you and your light and your names for cows and your reticule full of cheese.”
Somehow he’d gotten close enough to brush his thumb against the curve of her lips, where her freckles gilded her, the place where he most wanted to put his mouth. “I want your soft, tender heart, and I want your passion. I want it all, Margo. No more half-measures.”
It did not seem entirely rational, the way he could watch her lips tremble and want to hold her and comfort her and tell her everything would be all right—and at the same time want to press his thumb into the wet heat of her mouth.
But that was how he’d always felt with her—off-balance, ravenous, careful and ferociously demanding at the same time. He wanted her—he’d had her and still he wanted her with the same keen edge. He could be inside her and it still would not be enough.
When she finally spoke, her voice was low. “It’s not fair to me, Henry.”
He dropped his hand.
He couldn’t imagine why disappointment had him about the throat. He had known. Hadn’t he known—what she would say?
Surely it was not possible that somewhere inside his chest he had still allowed himself to hope.
Her lashes fell again over her eyes. “It’s not fair to put all of this on me—with no warning, with no suggestion of how you felt—and expect me to answer right away.”
“Of course,” he said mechanically.
“I’m not”—her voice cracked—“I’m not saying no, Henry. I need time to think, that’s all. I need time to sort out these last seven years, and Matilda leaving, and who I am by myself, without you or Matilda or Spencer or Aunt Lavinia or the scandal sheets.”
“Certainly.” His voice sounded stiff, but he did not care. He was holding himself together by sheer force of will. “That’s more than fair.”
He could wait. He’d waited seven years. It seemed possible that he would still be waiting for her when he was a dried-up husk, a solicitor made of nothing but bones and the memory of Margo beneath him.
I had it all, he would say to the fresh-faced law students, his hair white and his voice hoarse with age.
I knew the most extraordinary woman in the world, and for two perfect days in 1821 she was mine.
“I want to go back to the village,” she said. “Will you ride with me?”
“Go on alone.” He could be patient and calm—he could do this—he could. But not just yet. “You and the gelding know the way. I’ll be right behind you.”