The Earl of Morrey (The League of Rogues #13) - Lauren Smith Page 0,58
under terrible circumstances, he was content. No, more than content—he was happy.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.” She gathered her long hair at the nape of her neck and tied it up with a rose-colored ribbon that matched her gown. She looked so much younger with her hair styled like that. More like a girl of sixteen than a married lady of twenty. It only increased his urge to protect her. She started to lift her valise, but he gently nudged her aside and carried it along with his own down to the coach.
The ride north took another two days as they left England behind. At night, they collapsed into bed at an inn, and despite Adam’s desire, he didn’t have the heart to stir Letty awake simply to satisfy his lust. Instead, he held her in his arms, whispering to her about his life, and she whispered back—sharing of themselves in matters of the heart and mind rather than their bodies. He grew closer to her, reveling in each moment that his wife opened her heart to him.
Letty was a woman who believed in love, the kind that made poets dream and lovers sigh. Yet she was not a silly girl with nonsense in her head. She was a true romantic, but he could tell she had tempered that longing for love some time ago, holding her deepest dreams within. He understood, in a way. The marriage mart was not always seen as a place for love. The very name announced the mercantile or even mercenary intentions some went into marriage with. It wasn’t a place where love matches came often. Perhaps that was why she had passed two seasons without a marriage proposal.
As he watched her sleep in his arms, he brushed his fingertips over the curve of her nose and the winged arches of her eyebrows.
“Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.”
She stirred at his recitation of Lord Byron’s words but didn’t wake. Adam continued.
“I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.”
“Adam?” she asked, her eyes still closed.
“Yes?”
“I do so like Byron. Do not stop.” She moved a hand to rest above his heart, and something sweet and pure caught his breath as he held still. “Please.”
“Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes. Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.”
She sighed dreamily. “I like that one. Tell me another.”
“You are you and I was I; we were two, before our time. I was yours, before I knew; and you have always been mine too.”
He thought back to the day when she’d first come to see him, to seek answers about Gillian. He had been struck by her then, and not simply for her beauty. There had been something else, as though she was a piece of him that had long ago been parted and had only just in that moment been brought together.
She had looked upon him with the same baffled recognition, but he had done nothing. He had been polite and kept his distance. Love and marriage did not belong upon a path to vengeance.
Adam settled back in the bed, resting his head upon the pillow as he watched the moonlight sweep over the room before the clouds covered it and drowned them in darkness.
* * *
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternalspace,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.
* * *
His heart had been cloaked in a starless sky, but Letty shone through the heavy clouds, burning away at his harsh need for revenge. He could not hold on to his anger and hate, not when this woman held love out to him.
Someday he would face a choice—her or his duty.
By the third day, Letty was thoroughly sick of being in a coach.
“May we stop and stretch our legs soon, Adam? I am going mad being trapped for so long in here.”
Adam nodded. He opened the coach window and told their driver to stop at the next inn which wasn’t far. They were traveling roads that were familiar to him now, and Letty was grateful that he knew what stops they would be coming to soon.
“It won’t be long. We’ll have an early dinner at the Crown and Thistle.”