Page 64 of His Forgotten Bride
“I—” Gabriel cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?”
“Arden, isn’t it?” Westwood inquired. “It’s an older title than Westwood by a fair few decades at least. Imagine that,” he said, directing his musings to his glass of whisky. “Outranked by a child.”
“That’swhat troubles you?” Gabriel scowled, tunneling his hands through his hair.
Westwood polished off the remainder of his drink and set the glass aside, stretching out in his chair. “Leighton,” he said, “you reallymustlearn to get out of your own head.”
With a feral-sounding growl, Gabriel shoved himself out of his chair and stalked the length of the library, his agitation giving him to pacing. “Outof my own head?” he snapped. “My God, I’ve spent years trying to getintoit.”
“And much good it has done you, so I can see,” Westwood said. He watched Gabriel pace, as if he sensed that he required the advent of motion to release the tension that threatened to splinter him from the inside out. “You’re notwrong,” he said, “to be overwrought. But it is a bit shortsighted.”
Wheeling about, Gabriel seethed, “Shortsighted? Do tell me how I have been so.”
Instead, Westwood stretched out his legs, crossing one ankle over the other, and heaved a sigh. “I spend a great deal of my time in parliament,” he said, presumably by way of explanation. “I’ve done my fair share of arguing and pontificating, explaining and cajoling. But the long and short of it is, Leighton, that I could argue until I’m blue in the face, and if I haven’t turned my thoughts toward the opposing view, nothing will be won. Nothingcouldbe won, because without understanding there can be no compromise, no agreement.”
Unbidden, Claire’s words traipsed across Gabriel’s mind.And give you another stick to beat me with? No, thank you, my lord.
They had the effect of a pinprick against the growing bubble of his anger, and it popped and dissipated as quickly as it had risen.
“I didn’t try to understand her,” he said softly. Oh, there had been moments here and there where he had had an inconvenient bout of sympathy, but always he had let it recede into insignificance when he recalled his own suffering, his own pain.
Tangled within his own emotions, he had never truly considered Claire’s.
Defensiveness rose to the fore, a longstanding habit ingrained in him. “She kept my son from me,” he said.
“How could she do otherwise?” Westwood countered. “What choice was she given?”
Of course there had been no choice. For a moment he closed his eyes and cast himself back into the past, imagined Claire as she must have been—frightened, alone, abandoned. How could she have known any different than she had been told? She had left Newsom Manor with only her shame and a bank draft, both given to her courtesy of his father.
“I didn’t know,” he said, rather lamely. “I didn’t know about any of it. And when Ididknow, I had thought it was too late. Sheletme think it.”
“I, I, I,” Westwood parroted. “My God, Leighton,listento yourself. By your own admission, she knew nothing but what she had been told. What was shesupposedto do? Trust you—the man whom she believed had betrayed her—with herchild?”
“Shedidtrust me with her child,” Gabriel snapped, throwing up his hands.
Westwood laughed lightly, with a mild shake of his head. “You idiot,” he replied, though the words were delivered in a nonchalant tone. “Perhaps shelearnedto trust you with her child, but would she have done so if her circumstances hadn’t forced her to it? What reason had you given her to do so?” He reached for the decanter of whisky once again, refilling his discarded glass. “It is so easy, Leighton, for you to sit here in your comfortable home, surrounded by servants to do your bidding, sulking before the fire in your fine clothes and drinking your finer whisky, contemplating every wrong that has ever been done to you. Has it even occurred to you that you were not the only one wronged?”
Taken aback, Gabriel stared at Westwood in shock. At last he admitted, “I suppose I have been…less than fair.”
Westwood snorted. “Less than fairis the least of what you’ve been, Leighton, and you ought to well know it by now. Pity,” he said, “because for a while there, I would have sworn you were improving.”
He had been. He knew he had been, and it hadn’t just been Matthew’s influence—it had been Claire’s. Before he had even known of Matthew’s existence, he had felt the sway of Claire’s good opinion. He hadn’t wanted to disappoint his guardian angel, the woman who had sat at his bedside and nursed him through migraines and drunkenness. Why had she even bothered with him? No one else had, and she had had more reason than most to let him alone.
But she hadn’t. He could still recall the cool press of her fingers on his forehead during her long vigil at his bedside. Despite what she must have thought of him, she had offered her companionship when he had had no one else.
She had helped carry him up the stairs the night he’d worked up the courage to open Mr. Bascomb’s letter, had offered her condolences—
He smothered a groan in his palm, squeezing his eyes closed. He’d told her, then, of his wife—or who he had thought she was at the time.Catherine.
Westwood had been right, damn the man. He’d been so wrapped up in his own misery, he hadn’t bothered to consider Claire’s.
“I told her everything,” he said. “I told her about…Catherine. The woman I believed was my wife.”
“At last he understands,” Westwood said, raising his empty glass in a salute as if Gabriel had finally been struck with the long-awaited epiphany he had expected.
She hadn’t known, then, of his affliction. She hadn’t known anything at all—only that when he had met her that first day in the kitchen, he had not recognized her. As if he’d cared so little for her that he hadn’t even recognized her face when she had appeared before him.
She couldn’t have known that Catherine had never been his wife. She couldn’t possibly have known that it had beenherhe had been seeking. She had believed he had married another woman, a woman he had mourned and missed, while he couldn’t be bothered to recall Claire’s face, much less her name.
