The Secret Love of a Gentleman (46 page)

John was already in the hall, as were Kate and his mother, and behind him he heard his sisters coming down.

He wished none of them to see or touch Caro before he did. So here was another of the emotions that Caro engendered in him with a strength that was irrational—possessiveness.

Rob’s father had always been like a dark, guardian angel at their shoulders. Perhaps Rob would be like that over his children. Or perhaps he would be like George with a bloody new toy and become obsessed with it. He laughed out loud as he mocked himself and tried to hurry his leg.

Caro walked through the door into the hall with Mary. She was wrapped up in the same cloak and bonnet she’d worn when she’d come to him.

Her gaze passed quickly over those in the hall then lifted, looking for him. She smiled broadly when she saw him coming downstairs. He grinned at her. If he’d been fit and healthy he would have run and lifted her off her feet when he reached the hall.

Instead she walked towards him as he descended the last few steps. In his mind he greeted her with a kiss. But he could not do it in reality before his family. Her eyes were gilded by the light in John’s hall, and they soaked up his features with a visible thirst.

Forgetting everyone about him, he pulled the ribbons of her bonnet loose and lifted it from her head. “Was your journey good?”

She nodded, but her smile fell, leaving only a slight lilt at the edges of her mouth. She was nervous.

“Let me take your cloak too.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you a list of all you need to buy in town?”

“I do not wish to spend your money.”

“It will be your money too once we are wed. What is mine will be yours, and I have enough. I neither gamble nor drink heavily, as you know, and as I have not really wished to be supported by John, I have a sum saved. I also do not even feel guilty spending it anymore, because, as my father pointed out, John’s money was my grandfather’s and therefore should I not deserve a share as I was equally his grandson?”

Caro’s smile lifted again. “You are a little different from what you used to be. You seem more confident.” The words were whispered, as the rest of his family fussed over Mary and Drew and the children.

“Perhaps. I have travelled a little bit of a journey since I fell from my curricle. I was forced to become dependent on my family, and learned to know myself a little better as I lay in bed reflecting on our conversations in the summer and the autumn. Like you, I suppose, I found my freedom to become myself.”

She smiled more truly then, with no nervousness in her eyes.

“Caroline, how lovely to see you again.” His mother came to welcome her.

He gave Caro’s cloak and bonnet to a footman, then turned as his family fussed over her. His mother hugged her. “We are very happy for you both, Caroline.”

His father stepped forward and did the same, pressing a parental kiss on Caro’s cheek.

John greeted her then, and she dropped a shallow curtsey. “None of that. You will be my sister, so we must be informal. Katherine and I are also very glad for you, and you are very welcome here. We shall take good care of you until the wedding. Katherine has been eagerly looking forward to taking you shopping.”

Kate hugged her too.

“We may exhaust you, though, I’m afraid,” his mother said, “We have arranged all sorts of visits with trades people to obtain everything we will need. We have so little time, and Rob is insisting we do everything properly.”

Caro glanced at him.

His extravagance was for both of them. He wished Caro to have a day to remember, but he wished it for his mother too.

But when his mother would have led Caro upstairs he caught Caro’s arm. “Wait.” He let his family walk on ahead, then took Caro’s hand and walked with her, at his slower pace. “The announcement has appeared in the paper.”

“I know. Drew showed me.”

“Are you still happy with the idea?” he asked as he took the steps. He did not use the banister, but clasped her hand tighter when he put his weight on his weaker leg. It held.

“I am, but I am terrified too. The future still scares me.”

“The future will not be terrifying. It will be as it was in the summer.”

She glanced at him. “You have always known what to say to me.”

There was that swelling in his chest. Love. To help her like this and have her so close were things his body had craved. That thirsty feeling of the summer was now something deeper, something within his gut and his chest rather than his throat.

“I have been terrified of facing your parents again too. They have not shown it, but I am sure they must not approve.”

“They would rather I was older, but they understand that love cannot be chosen. They know we did not plan for this to happen, and they already think of you as a member of the family.” His beast of possessiveness quietened as her fingers gripped his more firmly, but perhaps he was holding hers too hard due to the pain from his leg.

“This is the first time I have walked upstairs without using the banister. If I am bruising your hand you must tell me,” he whispered, as his family turned towards the drawing room.

“I would not tell you even if you were, because I am glad to help you, but you are not anyway.”

~

Rob caught hold of Drew’s elbow as they rose from the dinner table. “Might I speak with you?”

Drew looked back and smiled at him. “Of course.”

“I mean privately, before we join the women. We can go down to the library.”

Drew nodded.

The dining room was full. His wider family had come to John’s to take dinner in an informal celebration of Rob’s engagement. He’d had his shoulder slapped a dozen or more times, and received various inappropriate comments from his cousins. He’d wished to throw a punch at them on three occasions, but he knew his cousins well enough to realise that if he responded, the teasing would become worse, so he’d left them to their foolishness.

But as he’d eaten he’d been watching Drew and the words Drew had spoken to Caro in the autumn had been stewing in Rob’s head.

They descended the stairs in silence. The lower floor was full of shadows as the candles burned on the upper floor only. There were none lit in the library, but the window shutters were turned back and the room was full of moonlight. It reached across the floor in wide strips.

“What is it, little brother?”

It was a name Drew had used for Rob for a long time, ever since he’d married Mary, yet tonight it kicked. “I wish to tell you that you had no right to tell Caro what to do in the autumn. The things you said about me were wrong. You should have let her do as she wished and left us alone. We would have been engaged that week, and she need not have endured worry.”

Drew lifted his hands, palm outward. “I meant no offence. I was merely thinking of what was best for you both.”

“She had complete faith in me until then, and now she is not certain. She fears that I will have a change of heart, and that is only because you put that in her mind.”

Drew’s hands fell and his gaze met Rob’s. He was a dark shadow, with the moonlight behind him. “Then I am sorry. That was not my intent.”

“But you’re intent was to meddle, and it was not for good, Drew. You ought to have spoken with me if you were concerned, not to Caro. Fortunately things between us have been resolved regardless. But I wish you to know, in future do not doubt me, and do not stir up emotions that will make Caro afraid. She has endured enough fear, she needs to be able to feel confident.”

“I know.” A repentant pitch hung in Drew’s voice. “I did not say to her what I did from an ill intent.”

“I know.”

Drew laughed. “Well, then, you have truly grown up, and now I am reprimanded by my sister’s future husband.”

Rob did not think Caro’s sadness or fear amusing.

“Come,” Drew clasped Rob’s shoulder, “let us join the women. I shall not misjudge you again. You are truly ready to be old.”

Rob let Drew lead him from the room, but he was not sure the statement was a compliment. “I may be engaged to your sister, but I am not old, and nor is she. She may be older than me, but she is still young.”

“And obviously very charming, to have won such a level-headed man. I am glad for Caro, and I am glad for you, if you are truly content with it, Rob.”

Rob stopped walking and Drew’s arm slipped from his shoulder. “There is still doubt,
if
, such words will hover in Caro’s mind. You know how she is. There is no if. This is what I want. To be with Caro and to build a home for us, a place she can be certain of. You have no more faith in me than she does.”

“I do, it is just our history is different to yours. Doubt, a lack of belief in people, has been bred into us. It is only proof of the opposite that takes it out.”

“You will have proof.”

“It is Caro who needs it, not I.” Drew smiled, and turned to begin climbing the stairs.

Chapter 42

It was almost as if the peace of the past few weeks in Caro’s cottage had never existed. The pace of life in town was sweeping those weeks away. It was so much faster, overwhelming.

Mary took Caro shopping for clothes and encouraged her to buy far more than what she needed for the wedding. She said Caro should “buy anything bright and pretty that makes you feel happy, so you might walk into your marriage as though it is spring.”

Caro had laughed at that, yet a new marriage, a new life, it was a new beginning for her.

Rob’s mother had helped her write all the invitations and then choose flowers for her bouquet and flowers for the church and to adorn the hall for the wedding breakfast. Everything was to be evergreens, including holly, and her bouquet was to be daffodils and tulips.

Then they had considered, with the Duchess of Pembroke’s chef, how they might have the bride-cake decorated.

Mary had also convinced Caro that it would be cruel not to allow Rob’s younger sisters to act as bridesmaids, and so a colour was decided upon, and a modiste called to measure all of them and agree the style of their dresses.

They’d visited a fabric warehouse to choose the material and swathes of cream silk would now decorate the walls in the ballroom for the wedding breakfast too. In an odd twist of fate it was the warehouse where once she’d met Drew, when she’d been with Albert. It had been there Drew have first told her he had the money to help her leave Albert. It was there her life had begun on the path that had led to Rob.

Her life was a whirl of activity, and if society called on her, to find out about her impending marriage, she did not know because she was never free to be able to speak with callers. She was caught on the crest of a wave, with everything progressing at such a rate of knots she could neither stop it nor control it.

The best time of the day, though, the time she had come to look forward to, was when Rob called to dine with them. They had not attended a single entertainment in the week she’d been here, and so in the evenings they’d sit beside each other at the table and then next to each other in the drawing room as his family talked, or played the pianoforte, or cards.

They’d not spent much time simply talking about themselves in the summer, and so it was good to have time to come to know him better. He talked mostly of the future, of what he’d learned of the property he was taking on, and how to manage the stock and the land, and how he planned to socialise and make a name for himself before the election came. Yet he asked her mostly of the past, not of her first marriage but of her childhood. He asked her about all the things she wished for, as if he planned to make all her wishes come true.

She only wished to be with him and for their child to be born healthy.

They could not be physically close in anyway, because they were among his family constantly, and yet she still felt a physical connection. If he touched her arm a shiver of awareness skimmed through her body, like a ripple on a lake.

She longed for him to be in her bed, not intimately, she would be too worried about the child, but at least to be held by him. But Rob was not staying at John’s, so he could not creep down to her room.

She wished he would find a moment to pull her about a corner and kiss her, though, as he’d done in the summer. The lack of kisses made her fear that he was already growing out of his love for her, as Albert had done. The thought hovered at the back of her mind, and in the depths of her heart, no matter how much she tried to push it aside.

~

Caro stood before the long mirror in her room as the maid secured the buttons at the back of her dress. It was the evening their wedding celebrations were to begin; there was a ball. The Duke and Duchess of Pembroke were hosting it here, to celebrate and say farewell to Rob.

She and Rob were to be married the day after tomorrow at twelve and then they would attend the wedding breakfast here, before beginning their journey north.

The whirl of the last few weeks had suddenly seemed to stop spinning today, and she’d spent the afternoon alone, in her room. She was afraid. Terrified. That Rob would cease to love her. That she would lose the child. That she would not cope with this evening. This was not who she was. She wished to be the person who had been happy in her cottage. Yet she still longed to be with Rob and have their child. Only she wanted to be alone with Rob.

We will be soon.

“You are ready, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Caro turned and smiled at the maid.

She had to walk downstairs alone. Her hands shook as she left the room.
You have courage, Rob told you so, and he is right.

The hallways here were so oppressive, with giant gilt-framed portraits and domineering marble busts of numerous previous dukes, who glared at her. She could hear voices downstairs. The servants setting up, the family had agreed to meet in the drawing room. Of course, all of Rob’s extended family had returned to London for the wedding, and they were numerous. They filled the house before they even began receiving guests.

She breathed heavily, remembering her old fears.

She only had this night to survive, and then one more day, and the morning of the wedding, and then there would only be Rob.