Chapter 18 #2
He knew she had not.
She confirmed it when he took the room key from the innkeeper, asked for more firewood, and ordered a basket for the road to be ready for seven.
“Is there a private parlour we might use for an hour?” she said. “And a carafe of wine and two glasses.”
The innkeeper called for his wife to open the parlour and light the lamps, then took two glasses from beneath the counter and wiped them with a rag.
“We’d have more privacy in our chamber,” Hugh said.
“We both know what will happen if we go upstairs.” She laid a hand on his chest, over his racing heart. “Sometimes it feels like there’s a cavern between us, and I deserve to know why.”
He nodded. He’d stumble on the words. Rage would begin in his gut and spread like wildfire. “We won’t need it for an hour.”
“I’ve a suspicion we might.”
The innkeeper took their luggage upstairs, while his wife led them through a low door and into a room with sagging beams and crooked walls.
“I’ll return with your wine.” The woman’s kind face matched her manner. “Have you had supper? I can fetch a cold platter.”
He had no appetite for food.
Emma smiled. “Just something small, thank you.”
The woman returned with the wine, and her husband came with more wood for the fire. “That should see you right for an hour. There’ll be a hard frost come morning. I’ve told my lad to warn your coachman.”
The innkeeper shut the door as he left.
Hugh stood on one side of the old oak table, gripping the chair rail. Emma stood opposite, unbuttoning her pelisse, though her eyes never left his.
Neither rushed to fill the silence.
“I came to The Sentinel that night for one reason,” she said, her words calm and measured against the crackle of the fire.
“Yes, to berate me for printing the wrong story.”
“I came for the truth. That thing you pride yourself on, only when it applies to others and not yourself.”
“This truth is deeply personal and no one’s business but my own.” He watched her flinch as if stung, and softened his tone. “You’ve changed that. And now I find myself in the rare position of not knowing what the hell to do.”
A light rap on the door had him cursing. The innkeeper’s wife entered with a tray and paused, looking from the chairs to them, wondering why they were standing. She set the tray on the old oak table.
“If you need anything else, come to the taproom.” She drew the curtains and left the iron key sitting in the lock. “There’ll be no more disturbances tonight.”
Emma thanked the woman and locked the door behind her. She stood there as if she’d trapped a tiger and didn’t know what to do with it.
“You should pour the wine, Hugh.”
“To loosen my tongue?”
“To calm my nerves. I can’t recall ever being so frightened.”
That cut to the bone. He wanted to protect her, to cushion her from life’s blows. “That was never my intention.”
“I know.” She moved to the tray, took a small piece of cheese, and ate it. “Now I understand why Melinda is happy with Thomas. The fear of losing this is hard to bear.”
She’d stolen the words from his mouth.
“Why do you think I’ve kept the secret?” He couldn’t stand to say the words to himself, let alone to her. “I hate that we’re even having this conversation.”
“And yet we’ve been having it since the first time we kissed. You want me. Then you don’t. Then—”
“I’ve never stopped wanting you.”
Her lips parted. Her eyes softened to a warm sea-blue in the firelight, a moment of calm before the storm. “Then what is it? If it’s my joke about you being a mere mister, I was speaking of Melinda’s prejudices, not mine.”
He wished to God it was as simple as that. Wished the wine were brandy. He took the carafe and filled both glasses, swallowing more than a mouthful while deciding where to start.
“Is it the cupboard?” She spoke as if his father might hear her. “You still flinch at thunder.”
“I’ve grown up analysing every sudden sound.”
“Because life was hard at home?”
“Unbearable. I hated him.”
“I see.” She took her glass and sipped the wine. “How long did you spend in there before he let you out?”
He glanced around the room—at the picture of hounds on the hunt, the sooty hearth, the burn mark on the oak table. He was a grown man in a parlour, no longer a boy in a cupboard.
“A few hours. The whole day.”
She thrust her glass down and rounded the table. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” She ran her hand up his arm and over his shoulder as if she might rub away every horrid memory.
“It wasn’t the dark that hurt, or the smell of beef when your stomach ached. It was never knowing what you’d done wrong, why you weren’t good enough.”
Her fingers sank into the fabric of his coat. “You are good enough. You were good enough. You weren’t the one at fault.”
He drew a long breath. “But I reminded him of his pain. A selfish man hurts the innocent because he doesn’t know who else to blame.”
She cupped his cheek firmly. “And you’re permitting him to have that hold over you now. You only need look at the empire you’ve built, at your loyal friends, to know your father was the loser here.”
He fell deeper in love with her in that moment. This stubborn, reckless woman who’d accused him of lying and named him her protector in the same breath.
“He might not be my father.”
The heavens didn’t rumble.
Her eyes widened, then she frowned.
“I bear an uncanny likeness to my grandmother’s coachman.”
She didn’t stumble back. The disgust he’d seen on his father’s face was absent from hers. “He must have been remarkably handsome, and far too intelligent to sit atop a box all day.”
“He was kind.” That was enough.
“And that’s why you smashed the garden at Stonefold. A way to punish your father for his cruelty when you probably wanted to throttle him as he lay dying.”
“Yes.” He’d always thought so. That last jibe had cleaved his heart in two, and the rage that followed had driven him into the garden like a madman.
“He waited until he was on his deathbed to tell me I wasn’t his son.
I smashed the garden because of what he said, but I realise now that wasn’t true. ”
“What was the truth?”
“I smashed the garden because it was too late.”
“Too late?”
He felt his father’s hands on his throat, squeezing from beyond the grave. “Too late for him to love me.”
She wrapped her arms around him and laid her head on his chest. “Oh, Hugh. This deep sadness has been living inside you all this time, and you were afraid it would come between us.”
He buried his face in her hair and waited for her to draw a different conclusion. The right one. She didn’t.
He clasped her upper arms and eased her back, needing to see her face. “That’s not what stands between us, Emma.”
The colour drained from her. “There’s something else? Another secret?”
“No. There’s every chance I’m a servant’s by-blow. You know damn well what that means for us. For you.”
Recognition dawned. She stepped back, wrenching free of his hold. “You think I care about what people say? We’re lovers. There’s nothing more damning for an unmarried woman.”
“No one knows we’ve been intimate.”