hand across her damp cheeks.
Silently, Geoffrey held over a kerchief, and with a murmured word of thanks, Lydia accepted that monogrammed article and wiped away her tears. “I was once a hostess,” she murmured softly. “I’d plan events for Chombley, and my days were so filled.”
“Did you… enjoy doing that?” he asked. Because that did not fit with the woman he’d once known who’d despised those stiffly formal affairs. Who’d spoken about the fun and light events they’d one day host as husband and wife. “Hosting those affairs?” he clarified.
Her features pulled. “Not at all. I didn’t particularly like hosting them, but they became… comfortable. Something I was used to doing. A routine that became so familiar that it also became so comfortable.” Coming up onto her knees, she angled herself on the sofa so she faced him. “Did you ever have anything like that?” she asked. “Something that you had to do, or took part in, and it filled your days, and you didn’t stop to think about whether or not you enjoyed it anymore? Or didn’t enjoy it?”
He nodded. “I know something of that. That was what these types of affairs”—he gestured to the doorway—“became for me.”
“Exactly.” She sank back on her haunches, and the fabric lining that gave her skirts body crunched noisily. “That was the same with me and Polite Society’s events.” As she spoke, her words came so quickly she tripped over them, as if she couldn’t even manage to slow the speed with which those thoughts came to her. “But they were part of my life, and my time was consumed by them so that I didn’t really think any more about if I enjoyed them, because there was just so much to do. And there were my children. First, they were babes, but then time just goes so quickly, and then you find yourself with daughters having their debuts, and you’re helping them find happy unions, and your sons aren’t wed, but they’re living their own lives, and with them all grown up, they have lives of their own, and I… I don’t even know who I am anymore, Geoffrey. I was a wife. I was a mother. But I don’t know what I ever was outside of the two, and now that I’m neither, what am I?”
*
Lydia’s heart hammered in her breast.
Where had those words come from?
And more, how easily they’d come.
It is the man seated beside you. Because you were always able to talk to him in ways that come so naturally.
Whereas, with her late husband, there’d been a period of… growth and learning. It had taken her some years before she’d felt any around Lawrence.
“Forgive me,” she said, embarrassed, swinging her legs over the side of the sofa. “I don’t know where all that came from.”
Geoffrey shot a hand out, covering her palm with his. “Don’t apologize. All that came… from everything you’re feeling, and you shouldn’t make apologies for anything you’re feeling, Lydia.”
She stared down at the top of his hand, sun-bronzed as it had always been from his love of riding and the way he’d loved to shuck his jacket and shove his shirt-sleeves up. And then, from a place she didn’t see coming, Lydia turned her hand over so his palm lay atop hers, and his fingers slipped through hers, twining like a perfect piece of ivy that had found its hold.
“There,” she murmured. How right it had always felt to have his hand in hers? That was something else that had remained a constant.
They sat there with their silence. Comfortable and neither rushing to fill it, and Lydia found herself laying her cheek along the back of the sofa and staring at him. “What happens to time?”
“It goes.”
“It goes, and I ofttimes fear how much quicker these years will pass and worry that I’ll be left with the same questions and regrets about who I am, Geoffrey,” she said quietly.
He shifted on the sofa, the leather creaking under the slight movement of his powerful form, and she thought he’d go. That, with her maudlin talk, she’d at last managed to scare him away. But then he lowered himself slightly to match her body’s positioning, his cheek resting against the sofa’s curved back so that he perfectly faced her. “You’ve spent your life being the perfect hostess and wife and mother. But in those years, Lydia, you should have also never neglected to think about what makes you happy. You find that, and you live for that.”
“Live