Chapter Eight
“Come with me, Abigail,” Stephen said hoarsely, reaching across the mattress to lay his hand on top of hers.
It was the first hour of daylight after a night spent cuddled together for comfort that went beyond warmth.
“I don’t want this separation. I need you by my side.
As my wife. My lover. The mother of my children.
Come with me, to England. Be my countess. ”
Abigail almost said yes.
Her lips parted, prepared to gently remind him of their agreement, but instead . . . instead, she almost said yes. And that terrified her all the way down to the bone.
One night of heaven, and was she truly so ready to give up all that she’d worked for? To abandon her dreams when she was so close to finally fulfilling them? To trade the world she knew for a world that was as foreign to her as the surface of the moon?
Was Stephen’s hold on her that powerful?
As she gazed at their entwined fingers in the quiet spill of early morning winter sunlight streaming in through the window, Abigail was afraid of what her answer would be if she were honest with herself.
If she searched way down inside, to those secret longings hidden beneath layers of science, ambition, and her mother’s voice, feeble from her failing health, ringing in her ear.
“You are in control of your destiny, my darling Abby. I haven’t been able to provide you with the material belongings you would have had if you’d grown up as the daughter of a duke, but the one thing I have given you cannot be bought. Freedom from men and the society that would bind you to them.”
She had already betrayed her mother by marrying Stephen, but at least she’d done so on her own terms . . . for the most part. After one night together, was she really going to tear those terms asunder so that she could follow her husband across the Atlantic like an obedient pet?
“I am a practicing physician,” she said aloud, not entirely sure if she was reminding her husband of that quite important fact . . . or herself. “I cannot leave my patients to become a countess. There is important work to be done here.”
The coverlet rode low on Stephen’s hipbone when he drew himself up on his elbow, revealing corded muscle and sinew drawn over a taut abdomen of sunset gold.
In the glow of the candlelight, she’d caught only bronzed glimpses of his body.
In the light of the day, he was a sculpture brought to life.
A second David that rivaled the first with one not-so-small exception.
“There is important work for you in England,” he said, lifting a loose curl off her pillow and twining it around his finger.
“Having been raised as an American, I understand that you’ve an inherent loathing for the British aristocracy, but it is part of your heritage, Abigail.
And there is more to it than boring balls and tea parties.
You could start a charity, be a patron of the arts, or a benefactor for the local orphanage.
Most wives take up similar positions outside of the daily running of the household. ”
“I am not a wife,” she said stiffly, rolling off the mattress and taking the top linen with her.
Wrapping it clumsily around her in a swath of layered white, she scowled at Stephen who remained on the bed, a muscle ticking high in his jaw.
“I am a doctor. A doctor helping people here, in Connecticut, where I live.”
He sat up, naked, with the wrinkled coverlet draped loosely over his left thigh. “Except you are a wife and a doctor. You’re both, Abigail. It’s time you start to reconcile the two, because we did get married. And you will come to England.”
“In two years.” Panic skated across her skin, slick and cold, a pond freshly frozen over. “I have two years, and you’re not even supposed to be here. You’ve broken our agreement.”
“Our agreement did not address visitation.” His amber gaze hardened, giving her a glimpse of her husband she had never seen before and reminding her, once again, that she was married to a man she knew almost nothing about.
She knew what he looked like.
She knew the sound of his voice.
She knew the taste of his kiss . . .
. . . and the weight of his body pressing deliciously down on hers.
She also knew that he was a man capable of going to extreme lengths to attain whatever it was he sought.
He’d blindly crossed an ocean to find her, hadn’t he?
He’d hunted her down with all the ruthless determination of a hound after a vixen.
How could she have ever thought that he’d stop his pursuit?
That he’d be satisfied with the timeline they’d both decided on.
That he’d leave her alone. That he’d forget about her.
He was a wealthy viscount.
No, an earl.
And while that meant little in America, she was not ignorant to the power and influence it gave him in England.
To the power and influence it gave him over her, his wife and property.
If he demanded she accompany him now, if he took their contract and ripped it to shreds, she would have no recourse.
No court would hear her pleas. No one would help her.
“I . . .” She pulled the linen a few inches higher. “I appreciate that you wanted to come and tell me the news of your father’s passing in person. Once again, I am sorry for your loss. But I should like you to leave now.”
Not so long ago, when her vision had begun to blur from reading too many medical terms, she’d selected a book at random from her shelf and flipped it open to a chapter on the regal lions of Haryana, India.
The text had relayed the firsthand account of a man who had found himself in the unfortunate position of traveling through their territory in the early hours of the morning when his party’s guide had assured him the lions were at rest.
“One moment,” he wrote, “there was nothing but balmy air and the quiet rustle of grass. The next, the male lion was upon us, dragging our guide into the underbrush before we even realized we were under attack. Such is their ferocity. Their cunningness. Their ability to stalk their prey between breaths.”
One moment, Stephen was on the bed.
The next, he was standing in front of her, his hands wrapped in a tight, painless grip around her wrists as he drew her up against the hard, unforgiving length of his body with only the thin linen between them.
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?” His voice was a hoarse whisper; velvet scraping against stone that roused a potent yearning from between thighs that were still tender from their lovemaking.
“You came to tell me about your father, and you did.” She tried to avert her gaze and failed miserably.
When Stephen was hundreds of miles away, she could—with a great deal of effort—force him from her mind.
But when he was right in front of her, when he was holding her, feigning indifference was as impossible as putting blood back into a bleeding patient.
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?” he repeated, the rough pad of his thumbs pressing against the delicate blue-and-green veins on the inside of her wrists where her pulse fluttered in an erratic rhythm.
She bit the inside of her cheek. “Because your business here is concluded.”
“Why do you want me to leave, Abigail?”
Because I am afraid if you do not, I’ll give up everything to follow you anywhere.
“Because I wish I’d never married you!” she cried, her words firing through the air like cannonballs. When they landed, they did so with a crash, leaving deep furrows in their wake as they plowed through the earth.
Stephen’s countenance went blank. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. She did wish she hadn’t married him, except it wasn’t for the reason she was letting him believe.
She wished she hadn’t married him because he was .
. . confusing. If her dream of being a doctor was a smooth, glassy pond, then Stephen was the rock that skipped across the surface, causing any number of ripples.
In theory, their marriage had been the logical solution to both of their problems. In reality, it had caused her nothing but doubt and heartache.
“Fine.” He dropped her wrists as one might drop a candle that had burned too low. “There is a boat leaving the harbor this afternoon for New Haven. I’ll make sure that I’m on it, and you won’t hear from me again.”
Her audible sigh of relief caused the corner of his mouth to lift in a cold, uncharacteristic smirk that hardened the edges of his eyes and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that while she may have married Viscount Brunswick, she was now pledged to the Earl of Lancaster.
A far more layered, dangerous husband than the one who had pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek in an old Boston church.
“This is not goodbye forever, Abigail. In two years, I will come for you and you will return with me to London whether you want to or not, because that is the bloody agreement. Do I make myself clear?”
She nodded, and kept nodding even after he’d left, closing the front door behind him with a quiet, controlled click that somehow echoed far louder than if he’d slammed it shut.
Hugging the linen to her chest, she sat on the mattress, the creak of the springs attracting the attention of Susan who paraded into the bedroom on the tips of her orange paws.
Already purring—her pleasant mood apparently returned now that Stephen was gone—Susan jumped onto the bed and began to knead Abigail’s thigh, her sharp claws lightly making contact before retracting in a steady ebb and flow that brought a sense of calm to a room still filled with crackling tension.
“Two years,” Abigail murmured, scratching Susan behind her ear. “Two years, and he’ll be back, which means there’s only one thing to do, isn’t there? We need to disappear.”