Page 443 of From Rakes to Riches

There was movement next to her in the bed and she froze, slowly opening her eyes.

He had stayed through the night.

She watched in astonishment as he sat up and stretched, his short hair tousled. She heard the bones in his back creak, watched as he looked over his shoulder at her. And then he smiled, and there was a pillow crease across his cheek that she could have gladly kissed.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “I have an early appointment.”

She let him go, still too amazed to put anything into words. But that had always been her problem. She was a writer at heart.

Of course she couldn’t sleep. She rose and put on her dressing gown, and tried to distract herself by imagining what it could possibly mean that David had finally slept all night with her.

She would have to distract herself by thinking about her next endeavor. During the reception, it had come to her that every fear she faced turned out to be manageable. She needed to host a bigger event, one where David would be at her side, showing all of society that he was back for good. She would host a ball, an event to overshadow any memory of a scandal.

There were so many lists to make! She sat down at her desk and spread her journals around her and stared at them, but she knew deep in her heart that her excitement wasn’t real, that she would use planning a ball as just one more excuse not to do something about her real problem.

Her marriage.

She needed to know how David felt about her. Why was she so afraid to say,I love you?

Maybe because there were so many other words left unsaid. Her mother had been right; as long as those forbidden words remained between them, there would always be a shadow of darkness in their marriage, a place both of them were afraid to go.

She had a chance for the kind of life she’d always dreamed of, back when only the fantasy of Willow Pond offered glimpses of a glowing future. Fantasy was all she had as a girl—and the reality of Tom, there on the written page.

If she couldn’t speak the words, maybe she could write them, and reach David the way she’d always reached Tom. She opened their childhood journal to a fresh page and began to write.

She had to tell the truth to him—to David—even if he rejected her in the end.

23

David arrived home before luncheon and admitted to himself that he’d only done so because he wanted to be with his wife. Her mother was in the library with his father—again!—and they both looked up when he leaned inside.

“Is Victoria here?” he asked.

Mrs. Shelby lowered the book she’d been reading aloud. “I have not seen her since breakfast. Have you tried the music room? She spends several hours a day there.”

He hadn’t known that, and he felt like the worst of husbands. “I’ll look, thank you.”

But she wasn’t in the music room, or anywhere else in the town house. When he found Anna just sitting down to luncheon in the servants’ hall, she came to her feet.

“Milord?” she said in a questioning voice, following him out to the corridor.

“Do you know where your mistress is?” he asked.

“Surely somewhere in the house, milord. She wouldn’t go out without me.”

Nodding, he let her go back to her meal. He went up to Victoria’s bedchamber and stood uncertainly, feeling worry creep over him. Where could she have gone?

And then he saw their old, battered journal left on the table by the door to his room. Instinct made him pick up the notebook and open to the final page. It was dated that day, surely written just that morning.

“David, I’m writing this to you because as usual, words fail me. I hope as you read this, you’ll understand why I did what I did, and forgive me. I just wanted to cause you no scandal.”

Inside David, worry exploded into fear, for the rest of the page was blank. Where had she gone, after writing such a thing?

He ran back down through the center of the town house, startling servants on every floor. In the library, he found only his father, and was about to leave when the earl called him back.

“Did you find Victoria?” his father asked.

“No.”

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