Page 47 of His Forgotten Bride
“But if I cling to the past, I cannot embrace the future. So I have to let you go.” The words were not as difficult as he had expected them to be. They ached, but it was good, necessary—a cleansing sort of pain. He closed his eyes. “Goodbye, Catherine. May we meet again someday.”
When he opened his eyes again, he was awake at last, alone in his own bed.
∞∞∞
“If I were you,” Westwood said, as Claire left the library, having dropped off a tray of gingerbread and tea, “I might think about hiring someone to test my food.”
“Whatever for?” Gabriel inquired, calmly collecting a slice of gingerbread.
“Your housekeeper,” Westwood replied. “She looks as if she could gleefully kill you. And I’ll bet she knows all the best poisons.” He considered his cup of tea as if it presented a credible threat to his continued good health. “I’d place my money on arsenic. Seems a likely choice.”
“Oh, that.” Gabriel rolled his eyes. “We’re simply having a…friendly disagreement.”
“Afriendly disagreement,” Westwood echoed incredulously. “With yourhousekeeper.”
“Is repetition the sum total of your mental aptitude?” Gabriel asked, scowling. “For God’s sake, man. I doubt there is a thought in your head that wife of yours hasn’t put there.”
“Probably not,” Westwood admitted, without even a hint of shame. “But she is cleverer than I am, and so that’s likely for the best.” As Gabriel had made his way through half a slice of gingerbread and shown no inclination to falling victim to any sort of ailment, Westwood snatched a piece up himself. “I do maintain you ought to see about getting yourself one.”
“Iamtrying,” Gabriel said. “That would be the nature of our friendly disagreement.”
Even Westwood was not so dim that he could miss the allusion. He choked on his gingerbread, washed it down with a healthy sip of tea, and said, “Really? Your housekeeper?”
Gabriel had prepared to launch a scathing rejoinder, but subsided as it occurred to him that it was not horror on Westwood’s face but interest. “Claire is…difficult,” he allowed. “She will have none of me.” Well,thatwas not precisely true—but he couldn’t help but think that to reveal the exact nature of their relationship to Westwood would hardly endear him to her.
Westwood snorted. “Are you certain you’ve made it clear you have made her an honorable offer? No woman in her position would refuse it.”
“This one would.” Though it made little sense. And Westwood was not a man to whom he could apply for advice in a matter such as this; he had gotten his wife not through gentle persuasion but on threat of scandal. Still, Westwood was currently the closest he had to what might, by some stretch of the imagination, approximate a friend. “I have asked and she has declined.”
“Hmm,” Westwood mused over his teacup. “Does she know of”—he pitched his voice low—“your affliction?”
“I’ve told her everything.” And what a relief it had been, the sharing of his burdens with someone upon whose discretion he could depend, a woman who would hold his secrets close to her heart and never betray them.
“Perhaps she feels your offer was made in haste, that to accept would be to take advantage of a man stricken by tragedy,” Westwood offered.
No. Not Claire—had she meant such a thing, she would have so said. Gabriel shook his head, scrubbing his face with his hand. “Nothing so simple as that,” he said.
“Then perhaps she fears living her life out in the shadow of your wife and child,” Westwood said. “That her own child might suffer for it.”
“No,” he said. “No, she knows better than that. And besides,” he added. “I have let them go.”
“Let them go?”
“Let them go,” Gabriel repeated, for lack of a better description. “I cannot bury myself in the ground with them. I cannot crawl back into the past to live in a time that no longer exists. They are gone, and I am not—and I’ve done a grave disservice to them in my failure to be the man I should have been.” He heaved a sigh. “While I hope I shall recover those memories someday, I can no longer make it my sole aspiration. I must continue on without them.”
Westwood blinked. “Do you know, Leighton, you sounded very nearly human just then,” he said idly. “One might almost suspect you had acquired a heart.”
∞∞∞
“Delicious,” Gabriel pronounced, reaching for a second slice of gingerbread. “Marry me, Claire.”
“No,” she said crisply. “And here is your tea, my lord. Pray take it elsewhere; the kitchen has grown crowded.” She shoved the tray into his hands with a pointed glance.
All around them, the flurry of activity that denoted a well-staffed kitchen in the midst of dinner preparations had come to a standstill. At least six servants had borne witness to his proposal, and each had come to a full halt, stunned into silence.
“Was his lordshipserious?” Alice murmured.
“Is shemad?” Sukey whispered back.
