Chapter 14 #2
A surge of sudden, unchecked anger made her ill. “Why should he? After what he’s done, he shouldn’t have any right at all. He is violent. He killed his first wife!”
Grant held up a hand. “We don’t know that for certain, and there is likely no proof.”
“Isabel doesn’t need proof to be afraid, or to know what kind of man he is. She has the right to protect herself and her child!” Cassie couldn’t sit another moment. She got to her feet, the motion splashing the drink, still untouched in her glass, over the rim.
“I agree,” Grant said calmly, his eyes following her as she set the glass on the flat arm of the sofa. Her wrist trembled. “However, there is little the law can do for her, and many would say she’d be better off married than unmarried when the baby is born.”
“She should not be made to marry him!” Cassie said, her anger unspooling.
“It isn’t her fault that she doesn’t have the sort of family who loved her or cared for her enough to keep her away from him, to understand that she didn’t deserve to be punished with an unwanted marriage.
” She clasped her hands together, her fingers twisting as once again, she saw his face—Renfry’s face—looking down at her at Archambeau Manor, all but leering as his mind took him back to the few times he’d successfully lured her into his bed.
How stupid she’d been. How naive and desperate and silly.
Her eyes stung as she stared into the fire.
“It isn’t her fault her aunt didn’t love her enough to send her away for her confinement before anyone could notice her increasing. To formulate an excuse that the whole family upheld to protect her. And then to bring her home afterward and continue to pretend…”
Her voice caught, and she couldn’t go on.
She shouldn’t have said so much. Her whole body flushed as she realized what she’d done—and that it might not have been a mistake.
The smallest part of her, a part she’d avoided listening to, had wanted to confess.
Wanted to know how Grant would react. If he chastised her, despised her, she could hate him again.
The flames in the hearth entranced her as she waited with her back to him.
Grant didn’t speak as she heard him rise from the sofa.
He continued to stay silent as he approached.
Without looking, she knew he stood behind her.
The warmth of his body pressed against her back.
His hands touched down on her arms, bracing them, and her nerves lit with a galvanizing stir.
“Look at me, Cassie,” he whispered. “Please.”
She sniffled and blinked back the stinging tears. “I don’t want to.”
His palms tightened around her arms, and he closed more space between them. He angled his head toward her ear. “Why don’t you want to look at me?”
Because she knew she wasn’t going to see disdain or disappointment. She wasn’t going to see censure or repulsion. And then she wasn’t going to be able to hate him.
Slowly, she allowed him to turn her. And even more slowly, Cassie lifted her eyes from the sliver of skin at his unbuttoned collar. His green eyes, usually clear and pale, were now dusky. There was a tenderness in them that she hadn’t expected. And yet, glaring fury too.
“You are no longer talking about Isabel,” he said softly.
She gave her head a small shake. The muscles of his jaw jumped, and Grant tucked his chin, unblinking. “It happened to you.”
She closed her eyes, feeling as though she was about to step over the edge of a precipice, not knowing what lay below, or how far the drop would be.
A tear slipped free and wet her cheek. It was too late to reverse course now.
He knew. Even if she said nothing, he would know.
Cassie gave another jerky nod. Just one.
Grant’s grip on one of her arms released so that he could bring his thumb to her cheek.
“You’re still not looking at me,” he said as he cleared the dampness from her skin.
She gathered all her mettle, all the strength she’d convinced herself she possessed these last many years and split her wet lashes apart. Grant nodded, still holding her in a direct stare.
“It was Renfry?”
God, why was she doing this? Why did she want to tell him?
Her lips quavered uncontrollably. “Yes,” she managed to whisper, the single word a hiccup.
Grant’s hands fell away from her. His chest heaved as he took deep breaths, his expression suddenly devoid of any tenderness.
Instead, it tightened with barely contained wrath.
He strode several steps away, rubbing the back of his neck.
Cassie rocked back onto her heels, her pulse beginning to throb in her ears.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” she said, the words tinny from panic. How could she have been so bloody daft? “We worked so hard to keep it secret, and I’ve never told anyone else, I don’t know why I…”
Grant spun back around and closed the space between them, taking her arms again. “The truth is safe with me. Breathe, Cassie. Just breathe.”
She inhaled a shallow breath, then another. It took a third for the chiming in her ears to subside. All the while, Grant’s palm stroked her arm, elbow to shoulder and back down again.
“You said ‘we’,” he said after a moment. “Who knows? Not Renfry?”
“No, God no.” A shiver worked down her spine, though it might have been from the soothing scrub of Grant’s hand. The slow, intimate caresses had tempered her panic.
“Hugh and Audrey?” he guessed.
Cassie nodded. “And Michael and Genie.”
Grant’s hand stilled. “That is surprising.”
“Michael loves me, even if he is inflexible and conventional to a fault. He would never have forced me to marry the man who lied to me. Who used me and…and threw me over.”
Again, Grant stepped away, his aggravation visible in the flexing of his hands, into fists and out again. Cassie brought her arms around herself, her hands replacing where his had been soothing her. It didn’t work half as well.
He raked a few dark strands of hair from his forehead, appearing overwhelmed. So was she. Never in a thousand years would she have thought the first person she’d tell, outside her protective family circle, would be Grant Thornton.
He seemed to hesitate. But then met her eyes. “The child?”
The child. Those two words blasted apart the glass casing she’d erected around her heart.
There had been cracks in it, of course, fissures and fault lines.
But Grant’s simple inquiry ruptured them all.
Cassie barely made it to the Chesterfield before her legs disappeared beneath her.
She leaned forward, burying her face in her hands as the memories of that wretched day swarmed.
The horrible pain, the relief of it ending, and then more stabbing pain in her chest when she’d seen her.
She could still hear her daughter’s shuddering wails as she was cleaned and bundled by the midwife, and then laid into Cassie’s arms for the first, and what would be last, time.
The sofa cushion beside her dipped with Grant’s weight. He didn’t touch her, but his presence was enough.
“You needn’t tell me anything,” he said softly. “However, nothing you do tell me is going to change how I already see you.”
Cassie moved her palms to uncover her eyes but continued to cup her wet cheeks as she peered at him. “How is that?”
Right then, she felt like a disaster. Weak and vulnerable. She didn’t want anyone to see her this way.
Grant leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his thighs just as Cassie was doing. His hands clasped together, and he knit his brow in thought. “Brave,” he said. Then, “Caring to a fault. You’re strong and stubborn and a warrior for others.”
She shook her head, even as his compliments made her feel the slightest bit radiant. “I’m not strong. I’m broken, and I feel like I’m breaking apart more and more every day.” A sob caught in her throat, squeezing off that last word.
He nodded and rubbed his palms together, but he remained quiet. He didn’t push her to say more, or console her with well-meaning words. He simply sat next to her, waiting for her to either say more, or not. The purposeful silence said it was to be her choice.
“I don’t want to talk about Renfry,” she finally said. “He doesn’t matter. He is nothing.”
And that was the truth. He’d injured her, to be sure, but it had been the product of that injury—the child—that had scarred her, not his ill treatment.
“I will never say his name again if that is what you want,” Grant said.
It was perhaps even more generous than the words he’d just used to describe her. She sat up a bit straighter and rested her hands in her lap.
“Philip sent me to Stockholm, to be in the care of friends there. The Olssons. They were kind, and they found a family for the baby. I tried to prepare myself, but when she was born…” She shook her head, more tears welling.
“I knew I could not keep her, but giving her away, coming home without her… I left a piece of my soul behind.” Her throat closed off again, feeling as though it was being crushed.
Grant reached for her hands, which were twisting the fabric of her gown over her knees.
He laid his palm over them, his large hand easily encompassing her own.
His skin was coarse and warm, and the touch instantly calmed the tremors shuttling up and down her spine.
Cassie looked at him, and to her surprise, his eyes were glistening.
They were full of pain and sympathy, and she felt suddenly wretched for not considering that he knew a similar pain.
“When I wrapped my daughter in her burial shroud, I felt a part of me die too,” he said, his voice a rasp. “It’s why I cannot attend births anymore. I’m too afraid.”
He shifted his position on the sofa to face her. “And yet, here you are, helping women going through something you’ve endured. Every time you walk through the doors of Hope House, you face your pain. You’re not weak, Cassie. You are stunning.”
He lifted his hand and with the ridge of his knuckles, brushed her cheek.
She turned into the touch unthinkingly, only wanting to feel the comfort of it.
Just as she had the evening in his clinic.
And like then, the reckless desire for Grant to kiss her erased every other thought in her mind.
His lips were so close, the fullness of his lower lip mesmerizing.
She couldn’t draw her eyes away from his mouth, or her imagination from how it might feel to kiss his lips.
The senseless, imprudent yearning for him to fit them against hers overrode all reason.
But unlike Cassie, it seemed he wasn’t without reason.
Grant dropped his hand from her cheek and launched to his feet, breaking the spell. He cleared his throat roughly and pulled on the points of his waistcoat before fidgeting some more by smoothing the deep green fabric with his palms.
Cassie’s legs quaked as she, too, got to her feet. Her mind reeled and her cheeks flushed. “I should go.”
“Yes, it’s late,” he replied swiftly. Grant stooped to pick up the copy of Debrett’s that he’d tossed onto the floor. “We’ll speak to Hugh tomorrow. He might know something regarding Mr. Youngdale.”
As he led her from the study, back through the surgery and into the corridors toward the kitchen, he stayed a few steps ahead. Telling him the truth had been bewilderingly easy, and his response, even more puzzling. He’d been supportive and kind. And yet, he’d pulled away before he could kiss her.
Gracious, she was such a fool. Why would he wish to kiss her now that she’d admitted to having a child out of wedlock?
To being ruined? It was the very reason why she’d never allowed herself to become close to any man.
Intimacy would be impossible. Her brother wanted her to marry, but the moment any husband saw her bare stomach, he would know the truth.
The baby had left marks on her skin. Unassailable evidence.
She would be betrayed on her wedding night, and the man would know himself to be betrayed too.
While Grant may have been sympathetic, it had likely altered whatever attraction he might have felt for her.
Even if it was a frivolous and fleeting attraction.
They entered the mews lane outback just as Patrick was driving past the entrance to it. He turned and drew up to them. Grant opened the door for her.
“Cassie,” he said as he helped her onto the step. She forced herself to look at him. In the dark, at least he couldn’t see her blushing. “Thank you for trusting me.”
She nodded, but as he shut her into the carriage and told Patrick to carry on, she feared it had changed everything. And she wished she’d kept her damn mouth shut.