Page 75 of A Bride By Morning
Raid last night in the East End.Accomplices captured. Bear on the run. Have you given more thought to my offer?
Offer? What offer?
“Lydia?” Gabriel’s lovely, fatigued voice reached her. She heard the blankets rustle. “Can’t sleep?”
Her eyes met his. He must have noticed something in her expression because his attention fell to the paper in her hands—and his entire body froze.
And that was when Lydia knew.
She knew what the offer was, why those lines of exhaustion had settled so deeply into his features. Why he had made her say all those things while he fucked her. Why he demanded her love and said nothing in return.
He was still abandoning her.
“Lydia.” This time, he spoke her name in a ragged whisper, almost like a plea.
“Where are you going?” Her voice was flat; she felt almost numb. “Moscow again? Or elsewhere?”
His gaze was searching. “I don’t know yet. The Syndicate has expanded beyond Moscow, but I know its hierarchy better than anyone. Wentworth will send me where he believes I’m needed.”
Lydia crumpled the note in her fist. “When are you leaving? Immediately upon Medvedev’s capture?”
Gabriel’s expression was bleak. “Lydia.”
“You cannot use the same script as ten years ago,” she continued. “You’ve fulfilled your promise, after all. Came back, married me. I suppose you made no vows to stay.” She gave a dry laugh. “I said I wished to keep you. I was a fool not to notice that you never said you wished to keep me back.”
She heard his soft exhale as he rose from the bed. Lydia flinched at his nudity, at the beauty of his form—a temptation even now. She was glad when he spared her by pulling on his dressing gown.
“It’s not about my wishes,” he said simply.
“Then what is it about?” Lydia snapped. “It’s certainly not aboutmine. If it were, we wouldn’t be discussing your departure. We would—” She broke off with a bitter noise, setting her hands to the table. “These last few days, while I thought you might have changed your mind about our marriage, you were making plans with Mr. Wentworth. Earlier, when you asked about my little cottage, you were so careful in your responses. I imagined kissing you in those gardens, and you knew you wouldn’t even be there.” Her shoulders bowed. “When you told me to say I loved you, you knew you wouldn’t say it back. So what future did you imagine when I foolishly told you of my little cottage, thinking you’d be with me?”
Lydia watched as the emotions played across his face—he seemed so open now. So vulnerable. But this was no victory for her; those sentiments came with shards of glass that cut her open.
“One where you were safe,” he said gently. “Where you could enjoy your little cottage without fearing a corpse beneath the roses, a sharpshooter in its trees, or an assassin in the dark. Do you need reminding of the last time we kissed in a garden?”
Lydia’s fingers constricted around the letter, feeling the softened edges of the paper. A future declared in so few words. She felt like a pebble being rolled inexorably with the tide, forever moving but never by choice. Decisions made for her. A life at the whims of others: Gabriel, her aunt, society. What about her needs?
“And my choice in the matter?” she asked him, her voice faint. She was so tired. “Did you consider it at all?”
A soft breath left him. “Perhaps I was otherwise occupied with your life.”
Lydia set the missive on the table, her fingers tracing its lettering, now faded from its harsh treatment in her hands, from the folds that had marred it before she’d ever set eyes on it. She wondered how many times he had read it and puzzled over the words. How long it took for him to decide their fates.
“I could die tomorrow,” she said, very softly.
Gabriel looked up sharply. “Say again?”
She lifted her eyes to his. “I could die tomorrow.” Her voice seemed to fill the expanse of the room; it pounded in her ears. But she did not relent. She came around the desk, her movements deliberate as she donned her own dressing gown, slowly settling it on her shoulders. “Perhaps you are the one who needs reminding, Gabriel St. Clair,” she said, belting the garment with a swift jerk. “All this time, you think of death and imagine your world of violence in Moscow and Kabul. You picture corpses in gardens or my life ended by a bullet in the forest. Not once have you bothered to consider that tomorrow, or a fortnight from now, or months into the future—perhaps when you are off on your next mission, attempting to spare me the danger of your presence—that the thing that kills me won’t be a sharpshooter’s bullet, but a derailed train.” He flinched at the reminder of his father and brother, two men killed so tragically. Lydia took that moment of vulnerability to continue, as relentless as a rainstorm battering his walls. “Or the same swift illness that killed my parents. Maybe what we just did in that bed results in a pregnancy, and nine months from now, I will die in childbirth.”
Gabriel took an abrupt step back, as if she’d shoved him. “Lydia.”
“You can’t stop me from dying any more than you can stop me from loving you,” she told him. How she longed to touch him, but she couldn’t let herself. Not now. “But you can choose to waste your years apart from me, living someone else’s life while you disavow your own. You’ve done it before, and I let you go.” Her gaze lowered to that scrap of paper on the desk. “But if you accept that offer, I won’t take you back next time. And I won’t waste my years grieving the future you rejected twice.” When he didn’t say anything, Lydia’s hand fell on the knob of the bedroom door. “Give me some time to myself before you seek me out. I can’t look at you right now.”
Lydia jerked the door open and shut it with a firmsnickbehind her. As she traversed the hall, she could not shake the desolate look on his face when she’d left. She had finally succeeded in shattering his icy shields—but that victory was meaningless. It came with no achievement. All she’d found behind the ice was the desolate landscape of their future.
Tears burned her eyes, falling freely down Lydia’s cheeks. Her breath scorched through her chest as she attempted to inhale, but her lungs wouldn’t fill. She panted against the pain in her chest—as if an arrow had struck her right through the heart.
She needed air.
