Page 62 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name and he was heartened by the fact. Then she readjusted her hat and was gone.
* * *
Eleanor lay down upon her bed when she got home and buried her head in a pillow.
My God, had that just happened? Had she truly been so very shameless? He had known what had transpired inside her for he had said as much and yet he’d stood there, composed and collected, watching on as she simply went to pieces.
Even now the echoes of what she had felt gripped her insides, sliding their treachery into the heated folds of her skin.
In penance or in vindication, she knew not which.
All she did know was that for years she had felt nothing, wanted no one, the emptiness and void of her life without Nicholas welcoming oblivion.
It was for Lucy that she had kept going, kept breathing, kept imagining that he would come back, alive and whole and loving.
Well, here he was, offering her his bed and his touch and his body. Not the love words yet, she thought with a frown, and remembered how distant he had been last time after she had allowed him everything.
She rolled over and looked up at the ceiling. Tonight she would go to his bed and know him again. Her hand came over her mouth, in both worry and in delight. But she would not falter, not now, when the world was being offered back to her, without condition.
She was twenty-four years old, soon to be twenty-five, and she had slept with only one man for one night in all her life. Him.
She felt breathless and light headed and slightly sick.
She had been thinner then, more girlish, but the long lines of eighteen had formed into softer curves at twenty-four. Would he like the change? Would he notice the small white marks of motherhood that had appeared across her stomach, muted, she knew, but nevertheless there?
She sat up, her hands held tight across her middle as the worry inside her grew. What if he did not love her in the same way? What if she got pregnant again and he left, this time for greener pastures and more beautiful women?
But the night was like a treasure offered, a place to start again, a way of reconnection that was as absolute as the desperation she felt for him. She would not give the chance of it up for anything.
Crossing to the mirror at her dressing table, she sat at the stool there. The woman who looked back at her was a stranger, for excitement pooled in her eyes and the streak of animation on her face made her look so completely different. Almost beautiful. When she moved, her smile ran into the rainbow edges of the glass and she saw herself a dozen times or more, stretching back into the distance.
Multiplied. Proliferate. That was how Nicholas Bartlett had made her feel right from the very first second of meeting him.
A small sound at the doorway alerted her to the presence of another and she turned to see her daughter there, three dolls all tucked in a basket that she held.
Opening her arms, she waited until Lucy was within them and turned to the mirror again, her child on her lap.
‘What do you see, Lucy?’
‘Me and my mama. You are smiling a lot, but your hair looks messy.’
‘I see my beautiful daughter and her three small friends.’
‘I see rainbows there—’ little fingers touched the bevelled edges ‘—and here I see your eyes. They are bright blue and mine are brown. Where does eye colour come from?’
‘From your mama and your papa.’
‘But mine is gone.’
‘No.’ Eleanor squeezed tight and looked at Lucy through the glass. ‘No, he is not gone for good, my darling, and one day soon you shall meet him and he will love you.’
‘All the way to heaven and back?’
‘That’s a very long way, but, yes, all that way and more.’
