who was both moral and ethical.
She loved him. She did. She loved Taris Wellingham with an ache. The realisation hit her like a lightning strike.
My Lord, she had fallen in love. Hopelessly! Desperately! Completely! And she dared not tell him any of it.
Tell him and risk the end of a friendship.
Tell him and see pity where respect now stood.
Tell him and know that he would never love her back.
Her stomach heaved in a new bout of rising nausea and she swallowed heavily.
She needed time to regroup, to understand the implications of what was happening between them and to protect herself.
‘I would like to rest now…’ She left the ending unfinished and saw the flick of uncertainty as he realised she wanted him gone.
But he went. Without anger or shouted words or recriminations. A different man completely to Frankwell.
Taris walked around the gardens, not trusting himself on a steed at this time of night. He would have liked to have saddled up Thunder and run across Falder with the wind in his face and the stars at his back just like he used to. He would have liked to gallop to the highest hill above Fleetness Point and shout at the sky. Shout with anger and pain and agony, not for himself but for Bea. For a younger Bea. Trapped. Fearful. Silent.
But tonight he could only walk fast around his mother’s garden, the fence along the edge keeping him to a pathway, coriander, rosemary and thyme pungent when his cane brushed the heads of the cuttings his mother had nurtured.
Behind him he heard footsteps.
‘You look like a man who is wrestling with demons.’
Ashe’s voice.
Taris shook his head. ‘Not demons, but truth.’
‘An even trickier adversary.’
The wind in the elm trees on the ridges wailed across silence.
‘Emerald thinks that Mrs Bassingstoke might be with child. Could it be yours?’
Taris looked up, trying in the greyness to see anything of his brother’s face and failing. He remained silent as Ashe kept talking. ‘Beatrice reminds me of Emerald. She has the same steely determination and the same vulnerability.’
‘Her husband hurt her badly.’ Taris hadn’t meant to say it but the secret was too new and too raw to keep in.
‘Hell.’ His brother’s shock underlined his own, making him feel better.
‘She spent twelve years married to a bully. Now all she wants is independence.’
‘A difficult ask.’
‘I know.’
‘Tread carefully, then, for I like her and Emerald is determined she wants to keep her.’
Taris knocked on Bea’s door and she answered it very quickly. He felt the heat of her room against his face and smelt violets.
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes.’ No hesitation in her assent. He heard the rustle of her nightwear as he followed her inside. Satin, probably. He wished he might have been able to run his hands across the garment and know. But he stood still instead.
‘We need to talk, Beatrice-Maude.’
‘Because you would like me gone?’ Fear threaded her reply.
‘Gone? Lord, Bea.’ He reached out, palm up, and was pleased when he felt her fingers steal into his. A contact. Drawing her closer, he could feel the satin was cool and her hair tickled against the bare skin on his hand. Long and heavy, she had let it down for slumber. The thought made him take in a sharp breath and he scarcely knew how to start.
‘When we made love at Maldon, Beatrice, I did not protect you against the possibility of a baby.’
‘With my history it does not matter.’
He smiled into her hair and wished that he could look into her eyes. Really look.
‘I think that it might have mattered…’
She pulled back, but he did not let her go.
‘Marry me.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I cannot marry you.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘Last time I married a man who did not love me I learnt the mistake of that.’
The air around them was charged with question.
‘Love?’
The way he said it was like a dagger to Bea’s heart. Love was not something to be considered or questioned. Love was simply a knowledge, unconscious and untempered.
She felt the nails of her fingers dig into the skin on her forearm.
Love me. Love me. Love me.
But as the silence lengthened she knew that he would not say it, could not say it.
‘I have enough money to disappear, to make a new life. You need not feel hemmed in by a simple mistake.’
‘Mistake?’ he countered. ‘You think this child is a mistake?’
‘This child?’
‘Our child.’ His hand fell to her stomach. ‘You must have known.’
Bea shook her head.
‘Your sickness in the morning…’
She shook it again. ‘No, that can’t be. I am barren.’
‘With your husband that might have been the case, but with me…’
‘Pregnant?’ She could not go on. The word quivering between them like a barely believable truth!
‘Ahh, sweetheart.’ He stood, not touching, but only a breath away. ‘You did not know?’ Gentle sorrow tempered his question. ‘I thought that you must have known.’
‘I thought I was ill.’ Tears blurred her eyes, but she willed them back. ‘I would not hold you to any promises.’
‘It is too late for that, I think, with a new life growing.’
His finger ran up her arm and then across her cheek and settled on the soft skin of her forehead. ‘Where in all of this lies the place for compromise? Is it here?’ His hand fell lower. ‘Or here?’ he questioned, as the beat of her heart began to thud. ‘Anything could be possible…’
She should have said nay. Should have loosed his hold and stepped back. Should have said that the joining
