Twilight had set around the villa, pale crepuscular light casting long shadows around the walls and tiled roof, clustering in between the even rows of lavender stretching out toward the horizon. I walked through these shadows after exiting my carriage, flexing my fingers and reminding myself to breathe.
Breathe breathe breathe.
Because Silas had every right to shut me out of his grief. He had every right to turn me away, even if his brother hadn’t died, because of how we’d left things.
I prayed that he wouldn’t, though. I prayed that he’d unleash his anger and his hurt on me, punish me and use me, make me suffer as he used my body to soothe the ache inside him—anything but shut me out.
Voices spilled out of the courtyard as I approached, happy voices. The heavy wooden doors were cracked, and so I could see the scene inside, lit by several hanging lanterns, and when I saw it, my throat closed with emotion.
There he was, my Silas, tall and handsome and already a little tanned from his two weeks here in France. He was dressed more casually than he hardly ever was—trousers and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow. A tie loosely knotted around his neck, loose enough to expose the dip of his collarbone and the jut of his Adam’s apple. A day-old beard roughened those sharp cheekbones and that even sharper jaw, and in the lantern-light, his blue eyes looked deep purple or black. He was laughing—an infectiously happy sound that resounded in my very bones—and my chest tightened as I realized that was so quintessentially Silas. Laughing in the face
of tragedy. Finding joy in pain.
He was chasing four small children, his laughs interspersed with chesty mock-growls, and his loping gait punctuated by low, long swipes of his arms. He was clearly supposed to a bear of some sort, and the children squealed with fearful delight when he drew close enough seize them, which he did often and then tickled them until they begged for mercy.
And in the corner, sitting on a chair, a stout older woman dandied a baby on her knee, and Silas would also occasionally stop to plant a kiss on the little one’s head with a gentle affection.
If the mere act of witnessing a scene such as this had the power to impregnate, then I would be pregnant this instant. Watching Silas in his element, with the people he cared about, made my face flush with happiness. Not the selfish kind of happiness I was used to, but that almost spiritual kind of happiness that you feel in response to someone else’s. I was happy that Silas was happy, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t currently part of that happiness.
But the thought came anyway. You don’t belong here.
And I didn’t. I was intruding. Silas had created a small island of joy for his family in the midst of all this pain, and who was I to invade that with my need to apologize? My need for resolution?
I would come back, I decided. Later maybe. Or I could send a letter…yes, that would be best. A short letter or an invitation to talk. That would be the polite thing to do, given the circumstances.
I turned, moving away from the courtyard door and back to my waiting carriage, and then I heard his voice.
“Molly?”
There was a pause between my saying her name and her turning back, and for a brief instant, I wondered if I’d imagined her face at the courtyard door, imagined the lantern-light glinting in her copper hair.
But then she turned and, after a moment’s hesitation, stepped through the door, her figure resolving itself out of the shadows. She was real.
She was here.
My Molly.
Something was swelling in my chest, something heavy and light all at the same time, and it took me a moment to recognize the feeling of simple, pure happiness. Thomas had only been dead a week, and the feeling was already so foreign and strange, as if it had been years since I’d felt it instead of days.
She’d obviously been traveling all day; her fashionably striped silk dress was noticeably creased and her hair was slightly tousled from the wind. But she looked more beautiful than she’d ever looked to me, set against the Provencal dusk, her normally fierce face shy and vulnerable as my nieces and nephews rushed up to her to ask her who she was, where she was from, if she had any sweets.
And when she bent down to say hello, her rumpled hair spilling over her shoulder and creating a swinging shadow on the swan-like curve of her neck, something other than my heart started swelling too. Fuck. That neck and that hair. How had I forgotten how painfully sexy she was? How irresistible? How effortlessly destructive she could be with just a casual flick of her hair or a smiling one-shouldered shrug?
Collecting myself—and discreetly adjusting myself—I stepped forward to rescue her from the herd of children.
“Come inside,” I said, offering a hand to her.
She slid her slender fingers into mine, her eyes raising up, sapphires framed in dark ruby lashes. The hollows and curves of her face were filled with shadows, and she looked sadder and wiser than when I last saw her.
“I don’t want to intrude,” she whispered.
“Please, Mary Margaret.”
She flushed, a flush that was barely visible right now, but that I knew would stain her chest as well as her cheeks. Perhaps she was remembering all the times I’d used her name as I’d fucked her, as I’d held her down and made her come again and again for me.
And now I was remembering too.
I angled my body away from the others in the courtyard and leaned in. “Either you can walk inside yourself or I can throw you over my shoulder and carry you in—and then spank you later for your impertinence. What is it going to be?”
