Page 91 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“Hatfield?” Surprised, Lizzie half-turned, and Luke gave a low grunt as her elbow caught him in the stomach, wrenching the air from his lungs.
“Good God,” he wheezed, affecting a tortured expression she thought was just a touch too dramatic for belief. “I hadn’t considered that sharing a bed might turndangerous. Any other bits of me you’d care to maim?”
“ButHatfield,” she insisted, shoving herself up on her arm. “It’s impossible. The house isn’t livable. And—and haven’t you got some country estate somewhere?”
“Unfeeling wench,” he grumbled. “I have got a country seat, in fact, but it’s far to the north and it is a drafty, wretched old manor house that’s more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t spend more time there than I absolutely must. But Mr. Crain mentioned your letter in the regular course of his correspondence, and I thought to hasten the renovations. If all goes to plan, the house will be habitable by Christmas.” He nudged her back down, deftly smoothing out the covers she’d rumpled, and his arm settled once more over her waist, notching there as if it had found the perfect position to rest. “We’ll invite Imogen and her husband, of course. What do you think?”
“I think you’ll be bored to death inside of a week.”
A soft snort near her ear. “You could shoot me again. That might liven things up a bit.”
“Don’t joke about such things,” Lizzie groused, turning her face into the cool fabric of the pillow.
“I don’t think I’d mind so much, so long as you nursed me back to health,” he mused absently. “It’s quite nice, you know, to have someone to take care of you. I missed it, once I’d recovered. You sitting by my bedside, stroking my hair.”
“As you threatened to have me hanged. Plagued my household with complaints and incessant demands. Manipulated me.” Those threads of resentment still lingered, but there was something inside her thatwantedto let go of them.
“You found me at my very worst,” he agreed easily. “I was…selfish. Cold. And you—you made mefeel, Lizzie, when I had been so devoid of it for so many years.” There was something akin to awe in his low voice. “It was like standing near the heat of a fire after so long out in the frost. I thought it was something I could capture and keep in my pocket, something I could avail myself of from time to time whenever I was in need of a little warmth.”
She thought of those rare dinners he’d attended when first they’d come to London, how his presence had always been something of a surprise—perhaps even to himself. How scarce his presence would be thereafter, at least until the next time had chosen to grace their table. A man perpetually straddling the edges of her tight-knit family.
“But I always wanted more of it,” he said. “Ineededmore—and the more I needed it, the more I forced myself to stay away. To control that need before it could control me.” A sigh feathered across the back of her neck. “And I think…if I had just accepted it, you would have made a place for me.”
She would have. There had been a place for him even in Hatfield, one that he had earned a bit at a time. One that had felt comfortable and natural. Perhaps ithadbeen real, after all. Perhaps London had been the aberration, and he had only needed a reminder of who he was meant to be. Not to reform, but torevert. To cast off the shackles of the past which had bound him, and return to form.
“I would like to go to Hatfield for Christmas,” she found herself saying, whispering the words into the darkness that shrouded her side of the bed.
“I hoped you would.” There was a measure of satisfaction in it, but something deeper—contentment, she thought. As if he’d achieved something that was just as much for himself as it was for her. “Go to sleep, Lizzie,” he said, and she felt him shift, felt his arm lift, felt his fingers slide through her hair in slow, gentle strokes. And it was every bit as nice as he’d claimed.
∞∞∞
Luke’s hand drifted over his pocket for the third time in the last half hour. Lizzie would not have noticed, except that each time he did it, a tiny furrow appeared between his brows and his attention was diverted—which was problematic, as he was meant to be teaching her how to hold her own at a gaming table.
In the course of an afternoon, they’d learned that she was rubbish at piquet and whist, and had fared little better at hazard. Vingt-et-un had been a sort of last resort, though she’d still lost more than she’d won.
“If you keep touching your pocket,” she said lightly, “I’m going to have to assume that you’ve got an extra card tucked away in it.”
He jerked, startled from his reverie, his eyes briefly widening at the accusation. “I haven’t cheated,” he said, his words rushing together as he hastened to reassure her. “I swear I haven’t, it’s only that—” Abruptly he cut himself off.
“That I’m dreadful at gambling?” Lizzie suggested.
“Notdreadful. Merely…” His hand moved in strange gesture as if he were trying to snatch a more flattering—and less truthful—word from the air.
“Dreadful,” she said again, dryly.
Luke smothered a short laugh in his hand. “Yes, all right, then. Youaredreadful at it. Enough so that there is no need to cheat to win.”
Then what had he got in his pocket? Lizzie sighed, shoving her cards back across the table toward him. “You may as well give it up. I simply can’t keep the odds in my head as you can.”
“I’ve had quite a lot of practice. You’ll do better with a bit more experience.” Luke scraped the cards from the table, collecting them once more into a full deck. “I’ll be satisfied if you learn only enough to recognize a cheater. Which is not to imply that Mrs. Knight does not run an honest establishment, but that theTonhas got rather a few too many cheaters within its ranks. I shouldn’t like you to fall victim to any of them.”
“At the very least, I have learned that I must inspect both sides of any coin in the future,” she said—and perhaps only a few weeks ago, they might have been offered sharply, with censure. But hehad, thus far, kept his promise, and the time since he had given his coin into her keeping had been…pleasant.
Harmonious, even. Each day she saw a little more of the man who had been hiding beneath that thick layer of grief and detachment. Each day she believed in him a little more, each flip of the coin earning back a fragment of trust. For most things, she did not even have to ask—he was present more often than not, no longer lingering at the outskirts of her family, but thrust into the thick of it. He quizzed Jo on the declension of Latin nouns and the conjugations of Greek verbs; he wrote letters to Georgie at Eton. He had interceded with Mr. Wycombe’s father, ensuring that when Imogen and her husband returned from their bridal trip that their return to society would be a smooth one. He even spared time for Willie, finding a sort of accord between them, as if they had reached an understanding of one another that she could hardly comprehend.
He hadn’t had so much as a drop of spirits in weeks. There was none to be found in the house, not even so much as wine—and when she’d asked, he’d said he’d done with pickling himself. That he had spent enough years in wallowing and stewing, and that he didn’t intend to waste more.
You terrify me, he had said, not too very long ago, and she thought he still was that, at least a little. She sensed his relief every time she brought out the coin he’d given her—because it represented the distance he had once placed between them shrinking in on itself, an inch at a time.
