Chapter Twelve #5
Olivia didn’t move, didn’t dare move. She let the whiskey-soft voice wash over her, settle in her hair, caress her face, slip under her skin.
She felt him approach, but he remained behind her.
She stayed just as she was, eyes closed, breathing in the scent of him.
His fingers touched her hair, caressed her face, and slipped under the edge of her shawl to lay her skin bare.
She reached for him then, laid her hand over his. Just that, nothing more. Olivia welcomed him home.
Griffin required a few moments to collect himself before he could stand before her. Relief briefly shuttered the pain and weariness in his eyes. He removed the rug from her lap, took her hands, and lifted her to her feet. “I didn’t bring tea.”
“It’s all right.” She drank him in instead.
His face was thinner than she remembered, more sculpted, the scar more noticeable.
His hair was damp at the edges, darker than chestnut there, curling just above the collar of his frock coat.
There was the faintest bluish tinge in the outline of his mouth, lingering evidence of the bone-chilling wet that had been his companion on his journey.
Shadows marked the underside of his eyes, their color not so different from what she observed in the line of his lips.
Olivia removed her hands from his, stepped close enough to feel the chill coming from him, and unbuttoned his frock coat.
She inched closer still, this time to bring her body flush to his, and slid her arms under his coat and around him.
She rested her cheek against his shoulder, turned her face into his neck, and held on.
Griffin’s chest heaved once, then his arms closed the circle at her back.
“Christ, but I wanted you to be here. I was afraid…so afraid that you wouldn’t come back.
” He turned his mouth toward her, pressed his lips to her forehead.
“Your housekeeper said you’d gone,” he whispered.
“She didn’t know where. I don’t believe she would have told me if she’d known.
I was wild for finding you; I think she was afraid of me. ”
“You went to Jericho Mews?”
“Mmm. It’s where I thought you meant to stay. When she said you’d left…bloody hell, Olivia…I was going to make your brother account for it.”
“Alastair didn’t show me the door. I found it myself. I didn’t want to wait for you there, not any longer.” She tipped her head back and looked at him. “He brought me the notice of her ladyship’s death. I pitied her, Griffin, but I was sorry for you.”
“I know,” he said gently. “I know.” He brought her head back to the curve of his neck as a small tremor slipped through her slender frame.
She wept softly, almost soundlessly, and when she was done he gave her one tail of his intricately tied stock to wipe her eyes.
He glimpsed her watery smile as she did so.
“I wished I could have told you myself.” He shook his head, sighed. “If wishes were horses…”
“Do you think I didn’t understand? I did. If you’d written, I don’t believe I would have been able to stay away. Can you imagine?” Alastair’s words came to the forefront of her mind. “How would you have explained me to your family?”
Griffin’s arms tightened. He laid his cheek against her ginger hair. “What accounting could I give save the truth? I would have introduced them to the woman I love.”
Olivia stayed upright because she was already leaning into him. “Is it truly so simple as that?”
“It is, for me. I cannot say what they will make of it.” He nudged her hair. “Nor can I say how you will receive it. You are not going to be sick, are you?”
She smiled because he did not ask if she was going to faint. He knew her that well. “No, I am not going to be sick.”
“Well, there is something to be said for that.” Griffin did not anticipate a like reply and did not receive one.
He was satisfied for now that she hadn’t squirmed out of his arms and charged for the dressing room.
He felt another tremor slip down the length of her back.
No tears this time, but a reaction to the cold he’d brought into the room and pushed right up against her.
She’d absorbed his chill while he’d taken her heat.
It was, as so often was the case in his dealings with Olivia, an exchange in which every advantage was his.
Griffin set her from him long enough to remove his frock coat and settle her shawl evenly on her shoulders.
He picked up the rug and set himself in the wing chair, then invited her to join him.
“Do you think I’ll break?” he asked when she lowered herself with so much care onto his lap.
“You weigh as much as a thistle. Come, ease your legs over here. Let me cover you with this.” He snapped the rug across her and tucked it around them both.
“Here. What’s this?” He found the book she’d been reading, held it up, examined it.
“Songs of Experience. You like Blake’s work? ”
“It’s very fierce, isn’t it? Fearless, too. I admire that.”
“Of course you do.” He lowered the book over the side of the chair and let it drop to the floor. She settled comfortably against him, finding just the right niche for her shoulder, for her hip, and finally, for her head. “What news of the gentleman villain?” he asked.
“None at all. He never showed himself to me. I told you he would not find me at Jericho Mews.”
“Just because he did not show himself, it doesn’t follow that he wasn’t there.”
“He does not deserve so much of your attention. I am here, aren’t I?
And all of a piece. Enough has been said on that matter.
” She pressed two fingers to his lips to stay his objection, and she was not swayed when he caught her hand and kissed her knuckles.
“Tell me the rest,” she said in a tone that was both gentle and firm.
“All of it. You will have no good sleep until you do, and you are already fair on your way to exhaustion.”
He did not release her hand, but set it against his chest and covered it with his own.
“She had consumption. Had been seen by doctors well over a year ago. In Italy first, then France. One of them recommended the hot springs at Bath. She returned to England, most reluctantly, I believe, as by her account she’d been engaged in a splendid liaison with the Comte Auguste DeRaine, and presumably all of his liveried servants. ”
“Griffin.”
“I’m sorry. It’s what she told me, what she wanted me to think.
I don’t know if it’s true. DeRaine did not accompany her to Bath.
There are similar springs in France that would have served as well.
The comte may have sent her out.” His chest rose and fell with his next deep breath.
“It speaks to Gardner’s wealth of contacts in every kind of society that he was able to find her.
She had been in Bath less than three months, living as the widow Jeannine Aubert, though a more accurate description of her state would be that she was dying as that widow.
Gardner did not learn that particular detail until he met her. ”
Griffin rolled his shoulders slightly, shedding some of the tension that was pulling his back taut.
“Elaine used her own name—her maiden name—when booking passage, and she came through London. Gardner and his men followed that trail from inn to inn, found variations of the name, and traced the permutations until they led to the widow. I don’t know if I’d have sent him after her if I’d been aware she was dying.
I don’t know if he would have gone. Faced with the choice of what to do when he came upon her, the truth of her condition obvious to his eyes, he tells me he simply explained why he was there and asked her if she would accompany him back to London. ”
“And she agreed,” Olivia said softly. “How extraordinary.”
“Extraordinary.” His tone communicated it was none of that.
“She had her reasons, Olivia. Atonement was not among them.” He closed his eyes briefly against the press of the firelight.
“God’s truth, but I didn’t know it would be so hard.
” He squeezed her hand, tilted his head, and regarded Olivia’s calm, yet somehow expectant features.
“There is a child. A boy. Hers, she says, and I cannot think why she would lie about that. Mine, she also says, but then why would she say otherwise when she wants legitimacy for him and for herself?”
“Are you so certain he is not yours?”
It was the directness of the question, the lack of surprise in her eyes, that let Griffin know Olivia had had some hint of what he’d found so difficult to say. “Someone told you.”
“I’ve been here since the day you buried your wife, Griffin. It would have been impossible for me not to learn of it in all that time. Still, it was not revealed in a deliberate fashion. It was not even the thrust of the conversation, merely an aside. Impulsive, really.”
“Beetle,” said Griffin. “Or Wick. But I am wagering on Beetle.”
“You’ll get no name from me. Except for that once, no one talks about it in front of me, and I have not asked. It was your place to tell me, and so you have. Now, I want to know if you are certain he is not yours.”
Griffin was a long time in answering. “No. No, I’m not.”
And because she understood that had been the very hardest thing to say, Olivia cupped his face with her free hand and brought his dark, troubled eyes back to hers. “You do not like to recall that you were intimate with her after you had full knowledge of her adultery.”
“Once,” he said. “Only once.” To his own ears he sounded like the veriest schoolboy offering that most ridiculous of defenses to the headmaster. He’d done better when he had been a schoolboy. “Bloody, bloody hell.”
“He must be six or there about.”
“Six in three months. June. The timing…Hell, it is not merely timing, but a precise calculation. I would not expect less from her. Whether it is his true birth date, I doubt if I will ever know. He says it is, but what else would she have taught him to say? There were documents, though. A record of his birth. It does not mean a great deal to me. According to Elaine, the physician attending her at the birth wrote it out. Perhaps it is a common practice in Italy. I don’t know.
Perhaps it is merely an invention, something done because she was always capable of taking the long view and thought there might be need for it some day. ”
“Does he look like you?”
“He looks like her.”
“How is he called?”
“Nathaniel. He is Nathaniel Christopher Wright-Jones.”
“I see.” One corner of her mouth edged up in a sad parody of a smile. “Of course he would have your surname. Does it trouble you?”
“Trouble me? That is making much too little of what it does to me. If I denounce his mother, I shame the boy. If I accept him as my son, I have a bastard for my heir. If that is not being placed squarely between Scylla and Charybdis, then I cannot comprehend what is.”
Olivia swept back a lock of hair that had fallen over his brow. “Homer again,” she said, her smile tender. “But you have it exactly right.”