Chapter Two
Her gasp of shock was enough to make him realize he’d been rather blunt with his admission.
He had not intended to blurt it out so baldly.
And if Cecily chose to turn a deaf ear anytime his name was mentioned, who could blame her?
They’d been all but wed. Banns posted. Mere days from walking the aisle at St. George’s.
And then the scandal—The Scandal—had occurred.
She loathed him for it, and he could not, by any reasonable stretch, take exception to the fact.
It was well within her rights. Indeed, if their circumstances had been reversed, he wasn’t entirely certain he would be capable of keeping a civil tongue in his head.
And perhaps he didn’t wish for her to. If she were to rail at him, to rant and scream and hurl accusations he had no right and no grounds to deny, then perhaps he would finally feel as though he’d been punished enough for his misdeeds—misguided as they had been.
“Oh, I think not. I will not darken the doors of your ancestral home, Malcolm. Not for love, money, nor my salvation from Bartwell!”
“Are you certain of that?” He didn’t need to enumerate Bartwell’s flaws.
Her shudder was evidence enough that she was well aware of them.
“The house, Cecily, is largely empty. Most of the staff has been put off. Only Mr. and Mrs. Collinsforth have remained to act as caretakers for the estate. There will be no prying eyes and no gossip. And they will lie for you. I’m not entirely certain they would not lie down and die for you, if called upon. ”
Her expression softened momentarily. “Are they well?”
“Aging,” he replied. “As we all are… Well, not you. You are as perfect as ever. Precisely as I remember.” And remember he had. Nightly. Even during his brief and beleaguered marriage, comparable visions of her had haunted him.
“Do not,” she warned coldly. “I will go to Sedgewick Hall because it will be easier to hide there… and because I miss the Collinsforths so dearly. But this is not a reconciliation. Such a thing will never be possible so long as I draw breath and my memory—my very excellent memory—refuses to fade.”
He conceded the point with a brief nod. “Dress and join me downstairs. I will lay a fire in the hearth there and share what provisions I have. You must be starved.”
With that, and against every urge he possessed, he turned his back on the vision of her draped in only that dusty sheet and a curtain of red-gold curls and made his way back down to the primary room.
It was safer for both of them if they were far from the lodge’s only bed.
A bed that held too many memories for them both.
*
He was a widower. The moment the door closed behind him, Cecily sank to the edge of the bed, heedless of her near nudity.
She should have felt guilt for her reaction, for her immediate surge of satisfaction upon hearing it.
But her hatred for her grace, Elspeth Winthrop, the Duchess of Sedgewood, had been eating her alive for years.
From the very moment that Elspeth and her mother had arranged the appearance of a scandalous tryst, ruining herself and her reputation while gambling on his honor to save her. And it had.
She had been forced to step aside, having already given herself to him freely, while he’d married a woman who had feigned being his lover in order to trap him.
“A widower,” she whispered again, her voice echoing in the now empty room. That word gave rise within her to the most dangerous emotion of all. Hope.
“Do not be foolish,” she warned herself. “He married another. He left you behind. Discarded and forgotten.” But like anything set to flame, that hope refused to be extinguished easily. It was taking root within her, painfully stubborn and damning all at once.
Forcing herself to rise, she went to the small valise perched on the trunk at the end of the bed and dug within it.
With a fresh chamise and the last clean gown in her possession, she dressed and then began dragging a brush through her damp hair.
When the task was done, she twisted it into a simple braid secured with a bit of ribbon and then made her way downstairs.
Malcolm was squatted down before the hearth, stoking a fire to life.
“It feels a bit like stepping backwards in time, does it not?”
“Barring the fact that we’d both rather be anywhere than in one another’s company?” she queried. “Well, that and the hard layer of cynicism I know I possess—sowed and well cultivated by you.”
He glanced back at her. “You have sharper edges, Cecily, and you sling your barbs with enthusiasm. But you are still the girl I once knew.”
Not loved. Knew. And that hurt deeply. Because despite the fact that he’d abandoned her for another, she’d still hoped there had been genuine feeling for her.
Still hoped that she hadn’t been a blind fool, willfully led along a primrose path and then discarded in favor of a more eligible alternative.
“No, Malcolm. I am not. I am not that girl anymore and you… I’m not certain you ever were the boy I thought I knew.”
He went unnaturally still. Nothing moved save for the ticking of a muscle in his jaw.
Then, after a heartbeat, he eased—seeming to will himself to relax.
“Perhaps you are right. We are different now. The question, I suppose, is whether that is for good or ill? Either way, I suppose we shall have time enough to sort it out. The crash a few moments ago, if you heard it, was the footbridge being washed down stream. Until the Severn recedes, we shall be stuck here.”