Chapter 29
May turned to June, and Nathaniel moved into the crofter’s cottage once repairs were finished.
Sometime in June, Lucy told her in no uncertain terms that it was abundantly clear what she and Nathaniel were up to, so she might as well go openly to him.
As Lucy put it, it was blatantly ridiculous for a grown woman to sneak around like a thief in the night, and everyone would get more rest if she just stayed with him till morning.
Most nights she did after that. She floated through some days in distracted reverie from the night previous.
The physical passion between them was natural as breathing; she could not imagine it better.
It had ever been thus between them. It was so much more than that though.
She loved him: wholly, irrevocably, past the point of caution.
But they never spoke of the future. She was a coward, perhaps, but she was afraid to hope for too much. For the first time in his life, his future was his own and not determined by duty or obligation, just his own free will.
June turned to July, and still he stayed.
The shed and pen for the animals were rebuilt.
She’d already added a few chickens, and she hoped perhaps next spring to add a cow.
Nathaniel regularly lent a hand with the stake nets out in the bay, hauling in fish.
If he wanted, he would have work there come autumn and beyond.
They never discussed it in those terms. But he stayed. And she loved him, heart, mind, and body.
It was the third week of July when she admitted to herself another truth: she carried Nathaniel’s child.
They had not been cautious, nor had they ever spoken at all of consequences save for that long-ago conversation in Paris.
Perhaps he assumed after what she’d said at that time that she was unable to conceive; certainly nothing had come of their lack of prudence in October.
She’d thought it unlikely herself, almost impossible, even when her courses began again in January.
She’d been married to Jamie almost six years without a child.
She had always wanted children, sons or daughters to love in the ways her parents had her and Lucy.
Jamie’s death had engendered an acute loss of hope with regard to the possibility of motherhood.
But now she had missed her monthly when it should have come twice.
The last one had come between the time Nathaniel arrived and when she’d gone to his bed a month later.
At first she assumed it was just another inexplicable cessation in her cycle like the one of eighteen months after Waterloo.
If she was more fatigued, the long nights in Nathaniel’s bed were sufficient explanation for that.
She’d had a morning or two with some very mild nausea but no lasting malaise, nothing at all like some women experienced.
Her figure remained unchanged, except for a growing fullness and sensitivity in her breasts.
And didn’t that latter make her blush, the ways it had revealed itself . . .
Finally she acknowledged to herself that beyond certainty, she carried Nathaniel’s child, although as yet she’d felt no quickening.
And she was fiercely glad for it.
Lucy, too, knew. She was unsure how long Lucy suspected or when she knew for sure, given she herself had not carried the certainty for long, but she’d caught Lucy looking assessingly at her.
It came into the open between them one day when she rose from her embroidery and quite without conscious thought cupped her hand over her belly, invisibly shielding new life behind it.
Lucy did not miss the gesture. “What will you do?”
Her first instinct was to deny it, but really, there was no point, not with Lucy. “I do not know yet.” Although she had only a few months more before the truth would become obvious to all and sundry.
“You’ve not told him, have you?”
“I have not,” she replied.
“Will you? You love him.” The second was not a question.
“I do,” she said softly.
“And yet you’ve not told him?” Lucy had laid her knitting on her lap, her eyes sharp.
“We’ve never spoken of the future. He came here with his life at loose ends after France. He didn’t come intending to stay.”
Lucy tsked exasperatedly. “He came at loose ends, as you say, months ago.”
It was indisputably true, but . . . “I do not wish to ask anything of him he doesn’t want for himself, regardless of my own feelings. His life has not really been his own, ever, till recently. And he has never said anything at all about his future, let alone if he might envision it here.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “The man says very little at all when not drawn directly into conversation or provoked into response. A wall of solitude unto himself, that one would be . . . if he wished it. I do not think he wishes it.”
When she didn’t respond, Lucy looked at her so intently that she dropped her gaze, unable to meet her sister’s eyes.
“He could have gone anywhere in the wide world this spring,” Lucy said, “after concluding his work. He came here, to you. And here he has stayed, for months now.”
When she still didn’t reply, Lucy sighed. “He came here for you, Issy,” she reiterated. “Whether he has said it explicitly or not.” She picked her knitting up again. “Do you want his child?”
She was very near tears; that happened easily now. “Yes.” Envisioning his child held in her arms squeezed her heart and brought an ache to her throat. She had at times pictured young Nathaniel as he must have been, a quiet, solemn-eyed, dark-haired boy. Would their child resemble him?
“Wanting the child is one burden less, then. You have decisions ahead of you. And only a few months in which to make them, I think.” Lucy’s gaze was fully directed on her knitting again. “But you should tell him.”
“And how have you come to be such a devil’s advocate to your elder sister?” She allowed humor to warm her voice. It was a transparent attempt to redirect the conversation, and they both knew it.
Lucy smiled, shaking her head slightly. Her needles began clicking again. “Someone needs to ask you questions if you will not ask them of yourself.”
Even prior to Lucy’s blunt probing, hope had already been tentatively unfurling in her heart, sweet and fragile as an early spring blossom.
Nathaniel had never said that he loved her, but his every action towards her, every word he did speak, was tender and precious.
She couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—keep from him much longer that she carried his child.
Even so, she still couldn’t find the words to tell him that she loved him—or perhaps it was that she lacked the courage to speak it aloud.
He was, despite his background and the tasks to which he’d been put based on skills he’d acquired, gentle at heart.
She had the impression he did not see himself that way, but it was true.
It was in his touch, in the care he took with her person, in his contemplative nature, and in the quiet contentment when he laid his head on her breast, relaxed in her arms before he slept.
He’d been used for war from a young age, had been set to tasks she could not even imagine in the years after Badajoz, but it had not defined him, nor had it stripped from him his true nature.
She did not want him to stay only because of their child, although he would.
She wanted him to stay for her, if he did, and for himself as well.
She wanted— Well, it was not within a person’s power to confer peace to another.
It was something one must find from within.
But she wished to create peace for him, should he care to accept it. A place to find his peace.
And an as-yet unwritten future, together.
It had been raining since sometime during the night, not a violent gale but no light drizzle either.
It was not a chill rain; Nate had left the window open, allowing the freshness and soothing patter of millions of droplets to permeate the cottage.
Inside, he and Isobel were warm and snug, tangled up with one another in the bed.
She slept curled in his arms; she’d fallen asleep shortly after they finished making love.
He hadn’t. He was ordering what he wanted to say to her when she woke. Where to start.
It was everything that he loved. Her warmth, her kindness, her deep compassion. Her intelligence. Her quiet, sometimes mischievous, humor. Her laugh and her dimple and the way she delighted in teasing him. The way she understood him, knew him, even as he was relearning himself.
It wasn’t only the intense sexual chemistry, although there was that too, from the very start in France: the way she fit against him like their bodies were meant expressly for one another, and the way that moving with her, in her, was solace and rapture both.
He wanted to lie with her and sleep beside her every night.
Hold her as she slept and wake beside her early in the morning just for the pleasure of watching the first dawn light touch her face.
He wanted, too, the gift of years to watch silver strands thread the black of her hair. He’d never before envisioned himself living to old age or having reason to want it. Now he wanted it so intensely it had the power to stop his breath.
All this he wanted to tell her when she woke, but for all his facility for learning and speaking languages, he’d never been adept at verbally expressing emotion.
He found no elegant words, but in the end, he didn’t need them. Isobel woke and stretched within his arms before sleepily setting a hand along his jaw.
He laid his own atop it. He looked into her eyes and said simply, “I love you.”
She made no reply at first but tears welled; he’d have been alarmed were not joy also suffusing her face .
. . and had he not already been secure in the knowledge that she loved him as well.
Putting it into words was a formalizing of it, maybe; they had never said it aloud to one another, but it was in every look, every touch, and it was past time to acknowledge it. To look towards a future together.
“I love you too.” She whispered it, no matter that it was only the two of them in the cottage with only gently tapping rain beyond.
He drank in the quiet splendor of the words; there was no sweeter gift than this woman’s love, unless included with it was the privilege of having care of her for the remainder of their lives.
“You were married to a good man,” he began. “Your Jamie. A better man than me.”
She had laid her cheek against his chest after speaking, but at his words she lifted her head sharply.
“I know a piece of your heart will always be his,” he continued, “but if you would consider the possibility of another marriage, I will do my best to honor the memory of his love for you by loving you myself.” He’d phrased it awkwardly, trying to tread respectfully, but Isobel was smiling.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Oh,” she said drily, “I’ll do better than consider it.
I will marry you.” Her face was lit with gentle mirth.
“Although you may love me of your own accord, if you please. Jamie would not begrudge it. And I demand it. As for the question of you being a good man . . .”
She pushed him fully onto his back, rising onto her knees to straddle his hips.
It was not a sexual move despite their nudity; her face was quietly intense as she leaned forward to catch his right hand.
A fingertip found the scar that ran along the underside of his smallest finger.
She traced it into his palm, pressing a soft, open-mouthed kiss there, before turning his hand over, brushing next across the scar that bisected the back. Marks of his time with the Rifles.
“I’ve always loved to watch your hands,” she said abstractedly.
“Nearly from the first. I’ve never before been so fascinated by another person’s hands.
” She laughed. “But yours draw my eyes time and again. Such an odd thing to notice, to so strongly attract me.” Her smile faded but her eyes remained soft.
“But I’ve decided why it is. They are the extension of you, of your strength. ”
“Aye.” Where was she going with this? “They’ve been weapons in their turn.”
“It’s true you’ve spilled blood in war. In your other work as well, I think, although you don’t speak of it.
And at least once with anger in your heart.
Yet these hands have never hurt me. Nor will they ever,” she said fiercely.
“A ghràidh, my love.” She guided his hand to her breast. “Yours are the only hands I’ll ever want on me. ”
Placed so, it was instinctive to stroke her, as she’d no doubt intended.
Hypnotized, he allowed himself to be drawn into tracing figures across her silken skin, caressing warm dips and mounds of breast and hip and waist. She sighed with pleasure, the soft sounds low in her throat that guided his hands and never failed to raise an answering response in him.
But when he might have shifted her weight, melding her to him once more, she gathered in his hands again, bringing each to her mouth before saying, “So easily you might have forced control in our every interaction in France, stripped away my freedom to make choices for myself. Although I suppose it must be stated that you did pin me to a wall on one memorable occasion.”
“Aye.” His amusement was quiet, more in his chest than in his mouth. “I gave you little choice that first night.”
As ever, she caught his hidden amusement and smiled.
“True enough. But from that hour on, you gave me the freedom to choose in every decision of import, whether related to our separate missions and shared interests or in matters more personal. Even against your own instincts in some cases. You may believe I know my own mind”—her voice held a shade of warm irony, and he let the smile touch his lips—“in choosing you. For you are a man infinitely worth choosing. And I will choose you again and again, always.”
Her words gutted him in the best possible way. She still had hold of his right hand; with the other, he cupped her jaw. Ran his thumb along her cheekbone.
“Your hands comforted me at a time when I was weary and without hope. They grounded me when all else felt chaotic and unreal. And they sheltered me in sleep. Waking, they demonstrated that there was life left for me to find.” She pressed his palm just below her navel where her belly, sweetly curved, sloped smooth and inviting.
“And your hands will hold new life soon. Our daughter.” Her dimple appeared.
“Or our son. It is my feeling only, that we’ll have a lass. ”
With understanding came wonder, burning cleanly through his chest. It ignited; he knew a sudden, vehement desire to make love to her again, to take ultimate possession of this woman of strength and beauty and boundless love, although only inasmuch as she already possessed every part of him, heart, body, and soul.
But first . . .
He stroked his thumb over her belly reverently. “When?”