Page 9 of Obsession: The Unspoken Sin
And he hated that knowing color in her beautiful face. He hated the conclusion she’d drawn, the one he’d wanted her to draw, for she saw him as a scoundrel, and he didn’t want her to see him in that light.
It shouldn’t matter. There could never be anything between them, given that she was Exmoor’s sister, but still, he didn’t want her to have that unfavorable opinion of him.
“I take it I will possibly be seeing more of you?” he ventured.
He’d already ascertained that speaking quickly about getting her out of here and acting high and mighty was destined to fail.
“No,” she murmured; sadness tinged her voice. Or maybe he imagined that with his own hope and ears? “I keep away.”
Her meaning couldn’t be clearer; she couldn’t be seen about.
“Yes, well, given we’re now occasionally sharing the same roof. I wouldn’t say it’s altogetherimpossible, either,” he ventured. “Would you?”
It wasn’t impossible. He consecrated his very life to getting her out of here.
“It is possible,” she conceded, but the look in her eyes told a different tale. She thought this chance meeting was the last meeting. It was anything but.
This was only the beginning.
As if she’d heard that unspoken promise in the air, Alice jumped. “I have to go,” she said, hurriedly gathering up her art materials. “I have an assignment to see to.”
Denbigh bowed. “Of course, Alice,” he called after her as she started to take her leave.
Alice looked back over her shoulder.
“It was so very good seeing you,” he said softly, meaning those words. He’d missed her more than he could say. More than was appropriate.
A tremulous smile formed on her lips.
“It was so very good seeing you too, Laurence.”
With that, she took her leave, and Denbigh stood there.
Suddenly, the immediate need to rip her from this place left him disconcerted. Not because he feared he couldn’t or wouldn’t, but because he’d gathered from their all too short exchange that she genuinely cared about her work here, relished her freedom, and had found a home. And when he took her away from this and brought her back to her family, where she belonged, she would also be stuck in a gilded cage, which she so hated. She would hate him forever.
And he could not bear it.
Chapter 4
As Alice made her way to the assignment Lord Wakefield had doled out that apparently took precedence over the Earl of Dynevor’s orders, her heart raced. Certainly, it was not frustration at the change in directions. Having multiple employers, she often found herself pulled in different directions. Given the current living quarters for patrons in residence was currently usable space that had already been largely completed with the exception of the finishing touches, it did make sense that if the situation called for it, she be moved here in the interim.
Yet her mind couldn’t get past one thought.
Laurence is here.
She couldn’t have been more stunned had the Lord himself returned and stood before her in the flesh. She’d been cut off from her family so long in self-imposed isolation that it had become second nature not to see them or think of them. It was easier that way.
In the immediacy of her decision to exile from the family, she’d been aggrieved for fourteen days straight. She had cried. She’d mourned their loss. She’d missed them. She’d wanted to return and decide that family reputation and everyone else be damned. Alice told herself she wanted to be with them more than anything, and that should have mattered most. But she hadn’t gone back to them because she wasn’t selfish.
Then, after a fortnight, the pain, though it hadn’t faded completely, had become dulled. It was as though fourteen days and nights marked the period in which a person could come to an acceptance that they would not see their family. And what remained was what was in front of one.
In Alice’s case now, that was the Devil’s Den, her new place of employment and home—and her daughter when she had Laurel.
Laurel.
Alice stopped in her tracks, so quick her sapphire muslin uniform and painting apron fluttered and snapped about her ankles. She closed her eyes.
Her daughter. The sole reason she’d given up the siblings and mother she loved, and the homes she’d grown up in, was because and for Laurel.
