Chapter 26 #3
Did he feel the same? He had kissed her only once, without the passion of some of their prior embraces. Memories of some of those still had the power to immediately cause hot cheeks even all these months later.
But it had felt significant, that kiss after they discussed Compton’s death, except he’d initiated no others since. Although neither had she, and in France most everything had happened at her invitation. Was he waiting for another?
She’d spent far more time than she ought in recent days, recalling those scenes out of time from France. She’d felt herself someone else there, but she’d come back to herself now. She was grounded again in the life and future that were hers.
But she was not unchanged by that week. Far from it, in fact.
Did Nathaniel have a place in her future? Did he want one? Was that why he’d asked about Jamie? Why he’d held off on kissing her again?
Or was he planning to leave? He was dutiful; he’d see through the work he’d agreed upon. But beyond that?
Truly, she would drive herself to distraction. And yet . . . How could she not think of him? Of how’d they’d been and how they might yet be?
She’d known since France, in particular since the night they’d come together after Le Repaire, that she would someday need to make a reckoning. She’d deferred it as long as she was able, but it had finally come due.
Lucy, too, had thoughts about Isobel’s future.
“He’s courting you, Issy,” Lucy remarked a week or so after she and Nathaniel had spoken of Jamie. “In his own reserved way.”
They were working together on mending. She looked up sharply at Lucy, but her sister’s face was still bent towards her hands. She still was not entirely used to Lucy’s new mode of speaking, at times abrupt and nearly always uncomfortably incisive.
“I do not think—” But she stopped. Was it courtship? It did not feel so. Then again, she’d not been courted in many years, and she’d been younger then and Jamie a different sort of man than Nathaniel. “Perhaps,” she allowed.
“He’d not have come all this way only to tell us about—France. Nor even only to assure himself that we are settled. How did he find us, incidentally? Has he said?”
“I think Mr. Quinn must have told him after escorting us to London.” She hadn’t told Mr. Quinn their destination for him to pass the information along to Nathaniel .
. . or had she? At the time she’d told herself it was only because Mr. Quinn was ensuring that she and Lucy had no further needs before he discharged his duty to them.
She had assured him that she had plans well in hand for the future.
A shaky plan, in that she and Lucy were both emotionally fragile at that point.
For her, everything had finally come crashing down all at once after she was safely away from France with Lucy.
If her grief-filled, gasping-for-air, crying jag in Amélie’s bathtub had been the initial small detonation, well, there were several much larger ones after leaving France.
“Nathaniel is a man to whom duty means a good deal,” she said to Lucy. “It would not be out of character for him to take such responsibility.”
“You know there is more to it.” Lucy made a small, amused sound under her breath. “But I will not pry. Both of you, it seems, would prefer to dance entirely around the subject.”
So Lucy had discussed it with Nathaniel?
They did walk together fairly often. She did not know the content of their discussions, but Lucy and Nathaniel had developed a friendship of sorts; it warmed her, seeing his darker head bent towards her lighter hair as they set out from the cottage.
Perhaps Lucy felt freer to speak of certain matters with him than she did her own sister.
Had it not been much the same for her, that week in France?
Even now, there were subjects she did not feel she could share with Lucy but which she discussed with Nathaniel, free of judgment and without risk of upsetting Lucy.
It wouldn’t surprise her if Lucy felt similarly about conversing with Nathaniel. His quiet strength invited it.
Very little moved Lucy strongly one way or another anymore. Outwardly, at least. She suspected it was not that her sister was incapable of deep emotion but had for some reason, conscious or otherwise, throttled her access to them.
She understood intimately, although the cause was different.
She’d done the same in the months after Jamie’s death.
Until she’d met Nathaniel, that was. She did little these days but dwell on matters relating to him.
It was rather exhausting. Lucy’s periodic insights often added new dimensions to her musings, not always welcome ones.
As she’d told Lucy, Nathaniel put great stock in both duty and honor. It was not duty that had passed between them last autumn, however. She’d hardly dared consider at the time what else it had the potential to be besides unthinking passion, but she did so now.
They’d scarce touched this past month save for that kiss.
She wanted to go to him but did not quite dare.