B00Y3771OO (R) (14 page)

Eloise must appear the lackwit with her body half-inside, half-outside of the carriage and the cold rain battering away at her head and stinging her eyes, but she grinned. “You came.”

Lucien swiped his hand over his face and mouthed a silent prayer. He lowered his arm to his side. “Get inside your damned carriage.”

Her smile dipped and she bristled at his commanding tone. Why, she was not one of the servants in his staff, answering to him. She was—

“Now,” he bit out.

Eloise hastily scurried back inside, which had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his angry charge and more to do with the rain. Yes, it was simply an effort to remain dry.

The carriage dipped under his weight as he hefted himself in after her and what had previously been a comfortable, generous space shrunk with his towering figure.

The shock of his presence now absorbed, Eloise registered the absolute chill stinging her skin. She folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself. “L-Lucien,” she stammered, her teeth noisily chattering.

His eyebrows dipped.

“Wh-what…?”

He cursed and reached for her. “You are going to catch your death of a chill.”

They registered his words as one. Their bodies stilled. She held her palm outstretched. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered softly.
Sorry for so much.
For the losses he’d known, for her scheming to reunite his family, for his lost arm, for the years he’d spent in London Hospital, for the loss of their friendship…

Lucien managed a terse nod and then the regret in his eyes lifted, replaced with his earlier outrage. With another black curse he opened the door. “To an inn, man.” With that brusque command, he closed the door hard behind him. The carriage rocked forward and resumed its ghastly swaying.

How effortless he assumed command. He would forever be a man of the military. “An inn? Lucien, we must continue on.” His father’s death was imminent.

He ran a methodical glance up and down, from her tangle of wet, blonde curls to her damp skirts. “Surely you do not intend to travel the remainder of this Godforsaken journey as you are?”

As if her chilled body required any further reminder of her present state, a shudder raked along her spine. She rubbed her forearms to drive back the gooseflesh dotting her skin.

Lucien shrugged out of his wet cloak and tossed it to the floor. “Here,” he ordered as he removed his jacket.

“What are you…?” Her words ended as he effortlessly scooped her onto his lap. And just like that, the nauseating rocking of the carriage, the cold of her body, all faded, replaced with rapidly spreading warmth that just came from being in his arms.

The carriage hit a rut in the road, proving her a liar. Her stomach lurched. She swallowed past the wave of nausea, willing herself to not make a humiliating fool of herself by casting the contents of her stomach at his feet. Another rut. She groaned.

Lucien tipped her chin up and when he spoke, his tone emerged gravelly. “What is it?” he asked, as he worked his gaze over her face.

She managed a shaky nod. The carriage swayed and she closed her eyes, concentrating on her breaths, willing the nausea to abate even just a bit.

He brushed his knuckles over her cheeks and she fluttered her lashes, forcing her eyes open. “You still become ill in a carriage?” There was a wistful note to his words, as though a piece of his past had just revisited him in this moment.

Eloise gave her head a slight shake. “N…” Her stomach pitched. “Yes,” she finished on an agonized moan.

Lucien rested his still damp, cool palm against her cheek and turned her gently into his chest. The cool sensation eased some of the nausea, made it bearable so she could focus, if even just a bit, on how absolutely right being in his arms was—a coming home. “You would brave this just for my family.”

I would brave this all day, every day just for you.
“Yes.”

He fell silent and this was not the hostile, tense quiet she’d come to expect of the man who’d taken on employment with the marquess. Rather, it was the peaceful, companionable silence they’d once known. Two friends who knew each other so very well they could finish one another’s thoughts.

A fierce wind battered at the carriage door and the conveyance swayed. She bit down hard on her lower lip.

Lucien stroked soothing circles over her back “Easy,” he whispered into the crown of her hair.

She sucked in another slow breath. He leaned away and she made a sound of protest, but he merely yanked off his dampened cravat. “What…?”

Lucien pressed it against her forehead, his hand firm and reassuring against her skin. “There,” he encouraged. “Does that help?”

Barely at all. And yet to say so would result in the loss of his touch. “Yes, it helps.” She laid her cheek against his chest and closed her eyes. His heart thumped hard and steady beneath her ear. How many years had she spent worrying after him, waiting for that dreaded note informing her that Lucien had perished in battle? The pain of that loss would have destroyed her. And so, the Eloise Gage who’d hovered on the threshold of girlhood and woman would lie abed bartering with the Lord. And on her most fearful days, the Devil. In the end it seemed the Devil had won. “I missed you.” Her whispered words filled the carriage and, as though nature protested her bold utterance, thunder rumbled in the distance.

“I missed you, too,” he said, startling her with the quiet words that rumbled up from his chest.

Eloise battled past the nausea and leaned back. “I venture you didn’t even give me a single thought.”

A twinge of guilt reflected in the stormy, gray irises of his eyes. She glanced away. She’d not have falsity from him. He stroked his thumb over her lower lip and she stiffened, looking at him once more. “I won’t lie to you, Eloise. I didn’t think of you in a romantic sense.” She winced and her body burned with mortification, driving back the previous chill. “But I did think of you. Many times I shared stories of you and me…” He paused. “And my brothers as children. Those moments, for what it may be worth to you, took me momentarily away from the horrors of war.”

Those words should be enough and, to a more worthy, honorable woman, they likely would be. Eloise, however, was grasping at all things horrid because selfishly, she wanted more of him.

“What happened to you after I left?” That question seemed dragged out of him, as though he feared an answer, but at the same time, required that piece of her past.

Eloise shifted off his lap and reclaimed the seat opposite him. His mouth tightened. Was it displeasure? Regret? Did a part of him crave her body’s nearness the way she craved his? “What you might expect of a young lady,” she said with a small shrug. “I went to London. Had a Season. Made a match.” Her heart hitched. “My father died shortly after you left.” She folded her hands upon her lap and stared at the interlocked digits. The threads holding together the fabric of her life had come undone as neatly as if they’d been plucked and pulled from an embroidery frame.

Lucien leaned across the carriage and rested his hand over hers, comforting, reassuring. She stared at the calluses, rough and coarse. Not at all the hands he’d possessed as a young gentleman. “I am so sorry, Ellie. I should have been there for you.”

She managed a smile. “It is fine,” she said. At one point it hadn’t been. At one time, she’d been empty and aching and alone in her grief. As much as she’d loved and missed her husband and father, life had eventually moved on, taking her with it. Eloise found the courage to continue. “My husband and I returned to London not long after…” Lucien’s wife and child had succumbed to their fevers. He gave her a searching look and she amended what she’d intended to say. “He died not even six months after we’d returned to London.”

Lucien wiped his hand up and down his cheek then rested it over his lips.

How much loss she’d known.

After he’d returned to find himself a widower, also mourning the loss of his child, he’d languished in a hospital, willing himself to die, contemplating the days and ways in which he could at last end his infernal existence. Yet, Eloise had reentered the world brave and resilient. Admiration built inside him for the woman she’d become. “What was your husband like?” Hopefully the faceless man had been worthy of her.

“Kind,” she answered automatically. Good. For if he hadn’t been, Lucien would have haunted him in the hereafter. “He was also generous. We became friends and after you’d…”

After he’d left, she’d craved that companionship they’d once known. She didn’t need to speak the words.

She colored. “We were friends,” she settled for.

An insidious, dark emotion roiled in his gut and threatened to consume him. He balled his hand hard at his side. If he wasn’t already bound for hell for the crimes he’d committed against too many in the name of war, he’d be going there now with the envy twisting away at his insides for the man who’d wed her.
Why
should he feel this green snake of jealousy, unless…?

“We didn’t have the overwhelming love that clouds all reason and judgment.” She shook her head, speaking with a woman’s maturity. “But we talked. He cared about my opinions. He listened to me.”

She’d deserved that and so much more. So, why did Lucien hate the late earl as he did?

“When most gentlemen treat their wives as property and mere chattel, he entered into a contract that w-would see me…” Her words caught. “That
did
see me cared for.” She looked at him, emotion bleeding through her eyes. “He loved me,” she said on a shattered whisper. “And he deserved more. The man he was, good, kind, and everything wonderful, he should have known that love.” Eloise drew in a ragged breath. “I didn’t love him,” she whispered those four words, spoken more to herself.

At her admission, some of the pressure eased in Lucien’s chest, somehow freeing and terrifying all at the same time.

She dropped her gaze to her tightly clasped hands. “The guilt of that will follow me until I leave this world to join him.” She fell into silence. The steady patter of rain upon the carriage roof filled the space. The ping-ping-ping echoing the haunting admission she’d made.

Ah, God. The world was awash in guilt. All these years, he’d lived under the weight of remorse for having failed Sara and his son. That Eloise should know a like guilt, ripped at him. Lucien leaned across the carriage once more and touched her knee. She lifted her head up. “You can’t carry the guilt of that, Ellie,” he said quietly. Loyal and loving as she’d been, he’d never known Sherborne, but he’d wager what remained of his black soul that the other man would not want that for her. “You were a good wife to him while he lived. Faithful,” he ventured, knowing with the intuitiveness of a person who’d known another soul almost as long as he’d been on this earth that she’d never betrayed her husband.

Her lips twisted in a dry smile. “He may as well have had a dog then.”

How did she not see her worth? How could she not realize that whatever years she’d given Sherborne had likely been the happiest the man had ever known? Lucien knew that because some of the most joyous moments in his life had been beside her in the fields of Kent. “Loving you as he did,” he murmured, “he would want you to be happy.”

Eloise met his gaze square on. “And what of Sara? Would she not want the same for you?”

At her words, he went whipcord straight. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “It’s not the same,” he said roughly.

Eloise arched a blonde eyebrow. “Isn’t it?” She was relentless. “Do you not carry the same sense of guilt—?”

Lucien raked a hand through his hair. “It is different.” Eloise had been there, steadfast and devoted at her husband’s side when he’d drawn his last breath. Where had Lucien been? Away, fighting a madman because he’d been too weak to gainsay his father’s wishes.

She spoke over him. “And her loving you as she did, do you believe she’d want you to have never spoken to your family again? To languish away in a hospital with no one but strangers to care for you—”

“The marchioness is a good woman,” he said, his voice increasing in volume. The Marchioness of Drake, with her tenacity, had pulled him back from despair and he would be forever indebted to both her for her kindness and the marquess for his offer of employment.

Eloise scoffed. “Come,” she said. “This isn’t about the marchioness being a good woman.” Help him, she applied the same dogged determination to an argument that she had to spilikens when they’d been mere children. “This is about you being the coward.”

Her charge shot through him. “I beg your pardon?” he asked on a silken whisper that would have terrified most men, let alone a mere slip of a woman like Eloise.

Then she’d never been like any other woman he’d known. “A. Coward.” She enunciated the two words as clearly as if she schooled someone on a foreign language. “Your father insisted you join the military, your wife died, as did your son,” she said with a ruthless pragmatism that made him flinch. “You lost your arm.” Eloise ran her otherworldly, blue-green gaze over his face. “And I am so, so sorry that those things happened to you,” she said, this time her tone soft. “But they happened, Lucien, and you cannot change them. You cannot change them by pretending your family doesn’t exist or by hiding away in the marquess’ home as a servant. Not one thing you do will ever restore any of what you lost.” She paused. “Except for your family. That is the one matter within your power to heal and fix.” Eloise cursed. “If you weren’t so damned stubborn to see to it.” She sank back in her seat and folded her arms across her heaving chest.