with me. If you set any store by what I wanted, you wouldn’t have come here and cut up my peace like this,’ she told him disagreeably to disguise it.
‘I can’t leave yet, but the drunken, headlong boy I was back then was repellent and I promise you I’ve done my best to kill him off. I doubt anyone mourned him.’
I did, argued an inner Callie who refused to be silenced. I wept myself to sleep for the lack of him by my side every night for far too long. Until I realised he was never coming back and I was the one who told him to go, in fact.
‘Devil take it, but I’m a rogue to plague you when you’re as unwell as a person can be without being carted about on a hurdle,’ Gideon exclaimed and she couldn’t stop a wobbly smile at the sight and sound of him as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror at last.
There—he was her Gideon again; a quick-tempered and passionate young man who could turn her knees to water at the very flicker of that self-deprecating smile or a sudden urge to wild action that made living with him such a clash of surprise, dread and delight. ‘Come, Wife, let’s get you home before you drop unconscious at my feet for the second time today,’ he added masterfully and she frowned at him again, wondering if she could ever bring herself to live with a gentleman who was so used to getting his own way, then shocking herself with the idea she might like to try, if things were different.
‘If you arrive on her doorstep, Aunt Seraphina will have the vapours even if I don’t,’ she warned him, and he actually paled at the thought of her aunt, who hadn’t liked him even before he ran off to Gretna with her niece.
‘She has plenty of experience,’ he said darkly and turned towards his hitched horse.
‘You could simply ride away again, nobody would know,’ Callie suggested desperately. Being lonely and a little unhappy was a state she knew so well that the idea of changing it in any way looked strange and frightening from here.
‘We would, wouldn’t we?’ he said as if that decided the issue.
‘Yes,’ she admitted with a sigh, ‘so we would.’
Simply getting Callie to ride his horse while he led it caused an argument. Gideon wondered if they could stop carping long enough to put the fragments of their marriage together and called up all the patience he’d learnt during his years without her. He should have remembered that aspect of marriage better and the magical glee of loving her less, he supposed grimly. Still, they were talking, even if it was in snaps of irritation. The odd moment of rediscovery made this all seem heartbreakingly familiar then strange by turns and he almost wished he’d slung his unconscious wife across his saddle brow and ridden off with her like a pirate with a princess.
‘Comfortable?’ he asked after the silence had stretched so thin he couldn’t endure it any longer.
‘What do you think?’ she challenged. ‘You should have let me ride astride as I asked instead of perching me up here like a doll.’
‘And have half the yokels in Wiltshire looking at your legs? I think not,’ he managed to say as even the idea of it made him rampantly jealous.
‘I doubt they would bother when they saw the rest of me,’ she said with a sweep of her hand at her dusty person that set his steed dancing and set Gideon’s overstretched nerves on edge. He tried hard to rein himself in at the same time as he clamped a firm grip on the bit and forced the idiot horse to stop wasting its energy, as well.
‘They would. You look magnificent,’ he told her tersely and surely that wasn’t a pleased little smile she was doing her best to hide behind that hideous bonnet? ‘As a girl you were lovely, now you’re beautiful, Callie,’ he added and heard her snort of disbelief with mixed feelings.
If she thought herself an antidote, would it make his task as her jealous and fiercely protective husband easier? If he ever managed to win her back, of course. Yet if she was blind to her own attractions she would draw in wolves the moment she set foot in a ballroom at his side. So, on second thoughts, his life would be hell if she had no idea how potently her lovely face and fine figure and that firm disbelief in her own charms could affect a man. He groaned aloud at the idea of following her about like a possessive stallion for the rest of his life in order to make it very clear she was his mate and he didn’t share. No, that really was putting the cart before the horses and he had to hold back all this hope in case it crashed to the ground around him again.
‘Are you hurting in some way, Gideon?’ she asked innocently, and what was he to do with such an odd mix of naïveté and sophistication as his estranged wife?
‘It’s been a long day,’ he said with a shrug.
‘It’s probably about to get a lot worse,’ she warned as Cataret House came into view again and she was quite right, just not in the sense she thought.
‘Aye, your aunt never could abide me, could she?’ he replied as if that was all that troubled him right now when even the thought of her as his true wife again was rendering him unfit for any company at all, let alone hers.
‘No, she’s deeply distrustful of all men and, considering the one she was wed to for so long, I’m not at all surprised.’
‘So why did she marry Bonhomie Bartle, Callie? They never had children, so I doubt they were forced to wed for the sake of a child as my parents were. It always puzzled me what those two saw in one another as they seemed to hate each other every bit as much as my mother and father did.’
‘Grandfather told me she insisted on marrying him, although he begged her not to go through with it, so I suppose she must have loved him once upon a time. Nobody forced her to wed the man and I never knew what she saw in him, but why do any two people wed each other when they don’t have to?’
‘Because they want to spend the rest of their lives together, I suppose,’ he said and cursed his clumsy tongue when she refused to meet his eyes. Finally they had reached the sloping drive and he and his weary mount slowed in deference to the day and the incline and at least despair was having a dampening effect on his foolish manhood.
‘Mr Bartle was heir to a wealthy baronetcy, before his great-uncle took a young wife and began producing heirs in his old age.’
‘So they ended up poor and disappointed?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think either of them ever thought the world well lost for love.’
‘Perhaps not,’ he agreed and refused to make the challenge her averted gaze and tight fists on the reins told him she expected. But we did once, his inner idiot argued all the same and he told it to be quiet before it drove the rest of him mad.
‘Nobody will answer the front door, you might as well lead this unlucky animal to the stable.’
‘Where are your outdoor staff?’ he said with a frown at the sheep-cropped turf and the faintly down-at-heel air of the whole place.
‘Aunt Seraphina says the war has made everything so expensive it’s impossible to keep a handyman and a groom. We have maids and a good cook she insists we employ to keep our young ladies healthy.’
‘And her liking for fine dining has nothing to
