jerked awake. He lay still for a moment, drifting back to reality—sweating, heart pounding, hot blood racing. He had dreamed of Rachel. He could not remember the details of the dream, but the feeling was clear—the same mingling of excitement and pleasure, underlaid with sorrow, that was always there when he dreamed of his wife.
Being with Rachel was a different thing entirely. The same feelings were inside him, but amplified many times more and shot through with the thrum of nerves and uncertainty. In his dreams, at least he was able to talk to her without turning into a stiff priggish fool, as he did in real life. In dreams he was able to kiss and caress her to the point of thunderous, pulsating lust. The sorrow came as his mind swam back to the surface of consciousness and reality seeped in.
It was always worse after she had been here for a visit. Then the dreams would come frequently and with intensity. They tended to fade with her absence. It was easier to live without her, as he had discovered after they had been married for a year or so. Great as the joy was in being with her, the pain grew to an excruciating point, until he could no longer bear living with her, being with her every day, aching with love and passion for her, yet never fulfilled. Never truly being her husband. It was an almost unbearable thing, to love her as he did—and to know that she did not love him in return, that she never had and never would. To know, in fact, that since she had married him, she had lived her life in muted sorrow, aching, as he himself did, for someone she would never have. He knew how she felt; he wished with all his heart that he could take that sorrow from her. He also knew, worst of all, that it was he who had condemned her to that life.
With a sigh, Michael pushed aside the covers and got out of bed. The caress of the cool air on his overheated skin was pleasant, and he did not put on his dressing gown as he walked to his dresser and poured himself a glass of water from the carafe that stood there. He drank it thirstily, then strolled over to the window and pushed aside one edge of the heavy velvet drape to look out into the night.
His bedroom looked out upon the sweep of driveway and trees that led up to the front of the elegant house. Beyond lay the view of hills that typified the beautiful Lake District of his home. It was not daylight yet, but the dark was lightening, so that one could make out the dim shapes of trees and shrubs in the gray light. It would soon be dawn, he knew, when the light would turn golden, then burn away the mists. There was no point now in trying to go back to bed and sleep. He supposed that he should put on his dressing gown and slippers, and light a candle. Start his day.
But it seemed a pointless effort to him. There was nothing in the day before him but loneliness and the ache of loss. It would be so for many days more, he knew. Experience had taught him that. The house was still too full of memories of Rachel, too alive with her presence. Hope still rose in him crazily that he would turn a corner and see her there, or that he would hear her laughter ringing down a corridor. She had been here longer than normal this time, almost three months, and Gabriela had been with them, too, so that there had been the sound of a child’s laughter in the house, as well, a sound missing from here for many, many years.
Rachel had been happier, he thought, than he had ever seen her—at least since their marriage, that is. She had been pleased for Dev and Richard, glad that they had finally found love in their lives. She loved both her brother and brother-in-law deeply, and their unhappiness had further dampened her spirits. Conversely, their joy had brightened her own emotions. And Gabriela’s presence had also brought her happiness. The girl was lively and bright, and somehow her being there had made everything smoother with Rachel and Michael. It was hard to maintain formality with Gabriela around, laughing and chattering, throwing herself with enthusiasm into everything around her.
It had brought home to Michael how much Rachel would have enjoyed children—another thing of which she had been robbed by marriage to him. He had wanted to give her children, had thought that he would. That had been back in the early days, when he had believed that she would grow to love him someday, that the depth and intensity of his love would eventually warm her heart to him. He had thought they would have a normal marriage in time, with intimacy and its natural result: children. He had lived in a fool’s paradise, not knowing that the woman he loved had already given her heart to another man.
He had been naive not to see that she was in love, he supposed. He had known too much about books back then and not enough about the heart of a woman.
He had been almost thirty when he met Rachel, far too old to still know so little about love and courtship. He had grown up quiet and bookish, in chosen opposition to his father. His father had tainted the Westhampton name with scandal. An outdoors man with huge appetites, the former Lord Westhampton had lived exactly as he pleased. He had eaten and drunk to excess, never counting it a good evening unless he went stumbling and belching to bed. He had been wild in his youth, gambling, drinking and wenching, and his ways did not change much when at last Michael’s grandfather forced his son into marriage.
Michael had been more like his mother, a quiet, intelligent woman who loved books and knowledge far more than the usual feminine pursuits of clothes and parties. Michael had seen the pain in his mother’s eyes, and he had known that his father was the cause of it. He had hated his father for his excesses and his bullying, and he had vowed never to be the sort of man his father was.
Michael had learned to ride and shoot and hunt; he had been taught the manly art of boxing, as well as the more gentlemanly art of fencing. His father had insisted on his learning these things, which to him constituted the education of a British gentleman, and Michael had learned them as he did everything, with quiet determination. But while he did not have it in him to do any less than the best he could in such sports, he did not love them as he loved the education of his mind. His happiness lay in books and in the quiet hours he spent reading and puzzling out the mysteries of the universe. He had a thirst for knowledge that equaled his father’s thirst for liquor.
He despised his father for his loose, hedonistic ways, for the shame he had brought upon his family’s name and the pain he had brought to his gentle wife, and he had vowed early on never to be like his father. Where his father was prodigal, he was wise with money, recouping the family fortune that his father had tried his best to throw away. Where his father was greedy, he was abstemious. And where his father blustered and roared, he kept his temper in check. Michael was controlled, intelligent and circumspect. He enjoyed his time at Oxford and made friends among the men of letters and science whom he met there. After his father died—from a broken neck in a fall off a horse one night as he rode home inebriated—Michael spent most of his time in solitude at the family estate in the Lake District, reading, restoring the estate and corresponding with those of like mind.
The only time he had veered from his quiet life had been during the war, when Sir Robert Blount—a friend of his who worked in the government—had begged for Michael’s help in catching a ring of Napoleon’s spies operating within England. His friend had asked Michael to try his hand at deciphering the coded messages that the spies were using, knowing that such puzzles were precisely the sort of thing that Michael enjoyed. He had soon broken the code, and had found himself being drawn more and more into the game of intrigue. He told himself that he did it only for patriotism and for the intellectual challenge, but he knew, with some degree of shame, that he enjoyed the excitement and danger of it, as well. There was something elementally satisfying in using his wits and physical skills to defeat his opponents, a certain giddy pleasure in escaping danger. He discovered that he had a heretofore untapped talent for disguises and accents, that he was able to mingle with people of widely varying classes and places without being detected. His unobtrusive demeanor and his attractive but unremarkable looks made it easy to disappear into any crowd.
After the war ended, his life settled into its former quiet routine. It bothered him a little that he missed the excitement of the intrigue; the love of danger reminded him too much of his father, and he hated to see in himself anything of the former Lord Westhampton.
He was
