Page 69 of A Bride By Morning
“I remember. He wrote articles while you were away.” A smile touched her face. “When I saw him at balls, he always asked me to dance.”
His lips tightened—but just as quickly, the expression was gone. “When I was in Moscow and was able to read my letters securely, he spoke about you.”
That surprised Lydia. Other than the infrequent dance, she barely knew his brother. At six years Gabriel’s senior and eight Lydia’s, he seemed so much older when they were children. By the time Lydia was introduced into society, she had regarded Thomas St. Clair as a welcome acquaintance—but one that never came without a pang of hurt. Thomas, after all, had so closely resembled Gabriel.
“He did?” she asked.
Gabriel dipped his head in a nod. “He demanded to know why I hadn’t come home and done right by you. Shortly before the accident that killed him and Father, he’d threatened to propose to you himself if I didn’t return to England.”
Lydia’s heart slammed against her ribcage. Perhaps she might have answered in the affirmative if she’d received that offer. She’d been so angry with Gabriel for leaving her, for ignoring her letters and breaking his promise. Five years ago, she might have been furious enough to marry Thomas.
“Did you reply?” she whispered.
“No.” The word was curt. “His letters, too, went unanswered. To maintain my cover in Moscow, I could have no family, not even under my past identity. So I burned every letter, even yours.”
“They were silly,” she said, trying to speak around the stabbing pain beneath her skin. She thought he’d ignored her. “Nothing of substance.”
“I said I burned them,” he said softly. “I never said I didn’t read them.”
Lydia’s throat felt as if it were lined with sharp edges. She looked at Gabriel for the first time since he entered the room, but his stare remained fixed on the painting. The square of his jaw was taut, a muscle working beneath. His beautiful features were so severe, so utterly different from Lord Montgomery’s performance. As if he were encased in ice.
“You read them,” she echoed, her words barely above a breath.
“Sometimes, I would nearly tear them in my haste to break the seal,” he said. “I read each one three times. The first to hear your voice in my mind, as I worried I was forgetting it. The second, to imagine you writing it. To picture all the ways you had changed in my absence. And the third . . .”
“The third?” she prompted. She grasped her hands to still them, to stop herself from reaching out to touch him. She did not wish to break the moment.
“The third was to memorize it.” Though his voice was faint, the baritone slid across her skin like a brush of fingertips, a revelation. “So I could read your letters in the privacy of my mind in Moscow and remember what I left behind in England. And then you stopped writing.”
Lydia’s heart constricted in the grasp of a fist. Her eyes clouded over with tears. For years, she wondered if those letters went out into the world and were dropped to the bottom of an abyss. Later, she wrote more out of routine than the anticipation of a response. She’d imagined each one became a joke at the Home Office:Poor, poor Lydia Cecil. Writing yet again, after years without an answer. A bit pathetic, isn’t it?
“I never even knew you received them until the Duchess of Hastings’ house party,” she said.
His jaw tightened at the reminder of the disastrous game of croquet the year prior.I have no letters to return to you. I threw them out with the rubbish.
“Each one spoke to me as if I were still this man,” he said, motioning to his portrait. “Sometimes, I thought of responding. But then I wondered if you would immediately tell your childhood friend was gone, and the man in his place could not love you the same.” Then, as Lydia tried to think through a reply, Gabriel abruptly asked, “Do you miss him?”
Her childhood friend. The one in the portrait, whom he viewed to be a stranger.
Lydia did not look at the painting now. Instead, she focused on Gabriel, this man who had been a fundamental part of her life for so long. Her heart had been his for almost as long as she’d been alive. “I no longer think in terms of your past and your present,” she told him. “You’ll always be Gabriel St. Clair to me. Just as you are.”
And I love you.
But she did not tell him those words. As much as she longed to say them, they stuck in her throat like a barb. She worried that confessing her feelings might make him pull away from her until he retreated once more behind that icy wall she could not penetrate.
Gabriel’s gaze dropped. “But I am not only Gabriel St. Clair, am I? Alexei Borislov is the reason you’re in this gallery, instead of enjoying the freedom to wander the gardens. And Alexei Borislov is why you’ll never be safe with me.” Before Lydia could reply, he gently grasped her hand, tugging it toward him. Then he lifted it and pressed a soft kiss to the back of her wrist. “Goodnight, Lydia.”
As he walked away from her, Lydia found herself able to speak. “Will you take me to Moscow again?”
Gabriel paused. She noticed the tension in his shoulders. “Not tonight,” he said, and then he walked out of the gallery.
Lydia stared at the door long after he’d shut it. She felt as if Gabriel were slipping through her grasp like fine sand. As each grain tumbled between her fingers, thoughts fomented and coalesced into a plan.
If he did not take her to Moscow, she would find a way to bring him back to England.
33
Gabriel folded the telegram and tossed it onto the table in his bedchamber. The messenger had brought it earlier in the day while Gabriel was out patrolling the grounds with Callihan, and by the time he finally sat down to read it, night had fallen, and Gabriel’s nerves were frayed.
