Pru stared at him, doing her best not to appreciate how the cut of his vest hugged his narrow waist, flattering the width of his chest and shoulders, the breadth of his back.
A back she’d once clung to in spasms of bliss.
Her fingers curled at the memory.
He was right there. So close to her. She could reach out to him and touch the body that’d once rode her like an untamed stallion, wild and rhythmic and powerful.
His lips had tasted the most secret parts of her. His eyes had burned with lust. His features softened with worship. Tightened with pleasure. Tortured with hunger.
And now?
Nothing. He was so remote. So empty. Bleak.
Where are you? She wanted to shout. To throw things. To rant and rave at him until he bloody cracked the mountain of ice between them. Who are you? What have you done with my lover?
He turned abruptly, as if he’d heard her silent screams. But the question in his eyes quickly flickered out, replaced by that infuriating civility.
“It’s a chilly night,” he said. “I’ve had a bath sent to your room.”
So thoughtful. The ponce. “Thank you,” she gritted out.
He nodded, looked as if he might say something else, and then thought the better of it. “Good evening.”
He left her in her puddle of her own frustrated loneliness, possibly to pine for the woman who’d gotten away.
Chapter 12
Morley let himself into the nursery and shut the door, leaning against it for several breaths.
With all he had on his mind, one simple fact existed in the world, crowding out all others.
His wife bathed only paces away. She’d lowered that soft body into the steaming copper tub and slicked soap across creamy, unblemished, aristocratic skin. Her breasts would lift above the water as she washed her luxuriant hair. Her thighs would relax apart, her hands perhaps finding their way between them to…
The bundle he’d clutched in his hand crumpled beneath the clench of his fist, and the product inside provided a much-needed distraction.
He tore the package open with uncharacteristic lack of ceremony, and went to the rocking chair, crouching to place the intricately carved train engine next to the doll.
He fantasized about the train given locomotion by a chubby little hand. A boy, perhaps. But maybe a girl. He and Caroline had spent hours playing trains with some charity toys they’d found at the church once.
So long as he capitulated to Caroline’s demand that the conductors fell in love with the women they’d rescued from the marauding bandits, then she was a fair hand at the battle, itself. Just as bloodthirsty as any outlaw.
He touched the gold of the doll’s hair and took a moment to keenly miss the girl with whom he’d shared a womb. She’d be an aunt now, probably a mother, too. They’d each be forty in a year, or so he thought. No one had ever told them their precise birthday, but he’d pieced it together as well as he could.
Caroline.
How different the landscape of so many lives would be if she’d lived.
Morley might have still been a rifleman in the army, but it was unlikely he would ever have considered the beat at The London Metropolitan Police.
So many others would have carved a different story in the book of fate if not for the choices he’d made.
Perhaps their lives were arguably better for the path Caroline’s death put him on, but what he never expressed to his friends was that, in his darkest moments, he’d have taken it all away from them just to have her back. To give her the chance at life. To leave him any kind of family.
So he wouldn’t have spent the past twenty odd years so acutely alone.
Perhaps, he’d often reasoned, if she’d been there, he’d not be so bloody broken.
He’d become the man he pretended to be. A better man.
Today, this moment, was the first time he shrank from that thought.
If it had all gone differently, he might have married young. He might have even sired children.
But not this child.
Not whomever quickened within the womb of his lovely wife.
His hand went to his heart to contain an extra little thump at the thought.
Children were born every day. Thousands upon thousands of them. It was no great happening or miracle. But he couldn’t shake the feeling his entire life had led up to this. This child.
If Caroline had lived, this child might never have come to be.
And, for the first time, while he still mourned her loss, he couldn’t