Chapter 8
“I’m with child.” Eliza delivered her lightly performative announcement with a pleased blush.
Bella offered her congratulations, determined her brother would never discover how long she’d known.
West hadn’t seen fit to join them that morning, a fact Bella could not lament, so it was only the three of them at the breakfast table. It also marked the first morning in days when her perfect cup of tea was absent—she very much lamented that fact.
Poor Ben. He wore an expression that somehow appeared both overjoyed and nauseated at the same time. Impulsively, she stood and rounded the table to reach him, then wrapped her arms around him as he rose to meet her.
He stiffened. “Bella, I—”
“Congratulations, brother,” she repeated pointedly as she pulled away. She shot him a look she was certain he didn’t need. Ben was a fool, but he was a besotted fool, and he would never do anything that might cause Eliza to fret in her condition.
“Thank you,” he croaked.
“I’m so pleased for you both.” She offered Eliza a smile as she returned to her seat.
Ben’s hands clasped together, then broke apart thrice in quick succession, as though he’d forgotten their purpose entirely.
“Are you well enough to break your fast?” Bella asked Eliza.
Benedict remained standing like a dolt.
“Some toast, I think. Pryor had some suggestions that might settle my stomach. But the upset is normal at this stage, apparently.”
“I still think we should get a second opinion,” Ben insisted, finally sitting.
“I’m certain it’s quite normal,” Eliza repeated.
“But surely you shouldn’t be feeling so poorly.”
“It’s not so unbearable,” Eliza said, then took a bite of bare toast. She chewed slowly, methodically, then a sickly green tinge overtook her flush.
Bella glanced between her brother and his wife. She’d give it even odds which one was more likely to cast up their accounts first. Beneath the table, she gave Ben a sharp kick to the shin. He straightened, glaring at her.
The sharp rattle of a chair leg against wood echoed through the room. “Excuse me,” Eliza mumbled as she rushed toward the door.
“I’ll just—”
Bella waved him off with a dismissive gesture and settled in for an unusually quiet breakfast.
Ten minutes later, Ben returned. He slumped into his usual chair and stared at his plate with a lost expression.
“She will be well, Ben,” Bella said, unable to abide the silence a moment longer.
His gaze flicked up to meet her own, an unusual sorrow in his dark eyes. “I— you cannot know that.”
Bella felt the annoyance seep from her spine. “She is not Mother. Eliza is strong, healthy.”
“I thought Mother was too—”
“If you think that way, you’ll make yourself sick with worry—and Eliza, as well—before she reaches the midpoint.”
“I need her. I don’t know how to exist without her anymore. If she— If something I did…”
Bella huffed. “That notion didn’t slow you down every morning and night—sometimes twice.”
An unfamiliar blush bloomed on Ben’s cheeks. “You heard that?”
“Every damn morning and night,” she repeated.
“Sorry.” He drew a hand behind his head, scratching the scruff of his neck.
“You can apologize by ensuring the men return to work on the other wing as soon as the harvest is over—sharing a wall with you on one side and West on the other is bad enough—I am not built for squalling infants, Benedict.”
“Agreed.”
“She’ll be well. You’ll see.”
Ben’s expression did not shift with her reassurance. Theirs was not a relationship for sincere moments—Ben had others for that.
“What did West say? He’s much more rational about these sorts of things—side effect of a loving family, presumably.”
“I haven’t told him. He was not in his room.”
“Oh,” she murmured, unease falling over her. Why should she care if West had fled from the house? It was no fault of hers. Last night, she had been well within her rights to order him from her room—it was the proper response.
Never mind the warmth she’d felt in his arms. The safety.
“He’ll be pleased,” she said, pulling herself out of such thoughts. “So will Effie.”
“She will,” he agreed, with a small, pleased smile.
Bella couldn’t name it, but there was something in her brother’s expression, or perhaps his carriage… He was a man in a way he hadn’t been the night before.
Impending fatherhood suited him.
Her teeth would be ground to nubs by the time West arrived. She’d painted two signs out in their makeshift workshop in the field without a single wry comment from him—because he’d found elsewhere to be. The arse was two hours late.
Annoyance threatened to overtake her.
Bella tossed the paintbrush aside and turned for the stables, determined to remind him of his responsibilities. He’d promised to help with the last of the plantings—and Bella certainly would not dig the rest of holes.
Her goldenrod skirts clung around her ankles with every furious stomp toward the barn, where West was surely hiding. He’d be lucky if she didn’t run across Effie first—it would serve him right if she told his mother he was neglecting his duties.
The fury—as well as all the air—left her the moment she rounded the stables.
West at the heavy bag was a dangerous sight at a distance. But this—mere steps away—he was deadly.
She swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. Though she couldn’t hear anything over the rushing of her veins, she must have made a sound because he straightened and turned toward her.
“Bella.” His voice was hoarse and tight. She had only heard such a tone from him once—the morning after that night.
She rolled her shoulders down her back. “Weston. Did you forget you agreed to help with this absurd festival?”
“I— No. I only thought—” He shook his head, banishing whatever thought he’d conjured.
“I wasn’t certain you’d wish to see me after— I thought perhaps it might be best if I returned to London.
” Finally, his darkened eyes caught hers—regret, or something very much like it, written in their down-turned set.
Her stomach dropped straight into the center of the earth. “Now? Now you want to return to London?”
“I thought to, yes—” He intended to leave her with nothing but chaos to organize. The infuriating arse—
“Now that Eliza is with child and Ben is having a fit of apoplexy over it— Now you wish to abandon me to deal with the fallout?”
His eyes widened. “Eliza is with child?”
“Obviously,” she said, rolling her eyes. Honestly, men were entirely ignorant about such things. “And you wish to leave me to manage Ben while he fusses himself to death? He’ll not wish to worry Eliza, which means the only person left to worry is me!”
“Is she well? And the babe?”
“As far as anyone can tell, yes. But Ben certainly is not. He’s already fretting that she’ll… You cannot go to London.”
His brows hit the sweat-dampened strands of hair decorating his forehead. “I cannot?”
Bella crossed her arms, knotting her hands into fists to keep them from tightening at her waist. “I forbid it.”
“You forbid it?”
“Yes, it would be beyond the pale for you to abandon me with a half-finished festival, an invalid, and Ben’s mother-hening.”
“I thought—after last night—that you would want me—”
“Away from my bedroom in the middle of the night?” she supplied, refusing to consider the real reason she had ordered him from her room.
“Gone,” he finished, voice raked over coals. The single word, so absolute, so final, left a void in its absence.
“I want you to speak sense into Ben—that way always you do. And I want you to dig— I do not dig. You cannot do those things from London.”
His shoulders unfurled. Until that moment, she hadn’t noticed how hunched they were—how small he had made himself.
“So you want me to stay?”
She ignored the instinctive jolt her heart gave. In her most imperious tone, she explained, “I want you to do as I’ve asked. If you can achieve those things from London—by all means.”
Instead of the too-knowing look she expected, something different, softer, washed over his features. “I can do that.”
A wave of relief lapped at her chest—washing away the panic. That tension that had appeared entirely without her permission—now set free by… No!
Her heart clenched. Not again. She could not possibly survive it again. Why did this man have such a hold over her? Why did her body respond to his words and his… Him?
She cleared her throat. “See that you do,” she ordered before spinning on her heels, ignoring the chuckle that followed her retreat—and the answering warmth in her chest.
With far too much effort, she maintained a steady pace until she was certain he could no longer see her. Then her feet carried her away—instinctively making their way through the familiar copse of trees.
The wooded area was long overgrown with tricky roots and vines. But she knew it the way she knew the letters of her own name. Even now, it took little thought to navigate the path.
The dower house was the only ruin on the Blackwood property that could not name her father responsible. Bella could not name its last occupant, but age and neglect had reclaimed the property long before she’d found it.
Ignoring the inches of mud claiming her hem, she set foot into the clearing with a gasp.
She hadn’t seen the house—hadn’t even thought of it in years. Small and claimed by vines, the stones were caked with decades of filth, but the sight still made her breath catch.
Because just there, on that patch of grass just beneath the hawthorn tree, West—fresh off his first win in the ring and shuffling his feet in the mire—had presented her with a carved silver hairpin dagger.
In that moment, she’d fallen just a little bit in love with him.
She’d fallen the rest of the way in the weeks that followed.
When, day after day, she’d practiced pulling it free from her hair, then slashed and stabbed at him as he played at villainy, and he met her with laughter and a biting wit.
Her heart had fluttered each time he approached her here, forgotten by the real world. But even then, she hadn’t dared to dream of anything more—anything real—between them.
Her position as lady of the house afforded her more choices than some women—particularly at a young age.
But those were false choices—couched under the weight of her father’s expectations and financial ruin.
Bella had made precisely two choices of consequence in her life—the night she offered herself to West in the stables and the day she wrote to Ben of Father’s plan to hurt Eliza, all those months ago.
The second, she had little cause to regret. The first… Much as she wished to, she’d never regretted that either. She could not say the same about the morning that came after.
She plopped down on the little hillside—just out of the muck—and gathered a butter-yellow sprig of toadflax between her fingers. The blue-green, stringy leaves were familiar in her hand, the faint, sweet scent a comfort.
Just once—a few weeks before the night her father had offered her to Draycott—while she had still retained the privilege of naivete, she and West had sat just here.
And he’d woven together the stems of several blooms, forming a surprisingly adept floral crown that he’d plopped on her head with grand ceremony.
When it flopped to one side, he’d straightened it with an “I have you.”—the first. Those eyes, clearer than the sky and filled with something even Bella’s cynical heart knew as nothing but love, had stolen her heart.
The mutinous organ had clenched and refused to release—beating only the letters of his name.
Precisely the same way it had just moments before, and every other time he’d said those words. Because impossibly desperately, she wanted to believe him. She wanted more than anything to allow herself to fall and trust that he would catch her—that he could love her.