She could have known by now who he was. She had sensed earlier that he was about to tell her everything. Why had she not wanted him to do so? Her reluctance had taken her by surprise. Was it that she was enjoying this fantasy? As long as she had never seen his face or heard his name, as long as she knew nothing of his life except what pertained to Rebecca, she could make him into any man she wanted him to be. Had she idealized him? Was he quite as wonderful in real life as she thought him?
Perhaps she did not want to know the reality. A real-life man was a complex person. If one lived closely with a real man, one had to adjust to his ways, learn to accept him as he was, with all his faults and annoying habits. The adjustment with Eurwyn had taken a year or more—perhaps all five years of their marriage. A close love relationship was something that had to be worked on every day of one’s life.
Maybe she was enjoying this fairy-tale romance into which real life had not yet intruded.
But she wondered if it must soon face the test of reality whether she wanted it to or not. She had just been doing mental calculations. She had been avoiding the same calculations for a few days. Her suspicions were quite correct. She was four days late. It was not a great deal of time and probably meant nothing at all. She remembered being five days late once fairly early in her marriage, but the sixth day had shattered her hopes with the indisputable evidence that she was not pregnant. This time she was only four days late.
For a moment she felt the dizziness of panic. But she would not give in to it. The chances were that she was only late. And even if it was not that, even if there was a child in her womb, he would not abandon her. He had told her that. And he had told her she could always communicate with him through Aled.
She believed him implicitly. If he had said he would not abandon her, then he would not, even though to do so would be very easy. How would she ever find him if he did not want to be found?
But she trusted him. He had withheld truths from her, but he had never lied to her. He loved her. He had told her so, and she believed him.
She rubbed her cheek against his bare chest and sighed with contentment. She allowed herself to relax into sleep.
Matthew Harley was cursing himself for a fool. It was almost dawn. He had spent most of the night out on the hill below Marged Evans’s farm, chilled to the bone, watching for something that even at the start he had been far from sure would happen.
He had just about impoverished himself lately, paying out bribes—two to the constables who had accompanied him in his pursuit of Ceris and knew the truth of that night’s events, and one to a footman at the house. The two had been paid because he had made a fool of himself over a mere tenant farmer’s daughter. The third had been paid because he desperately wanted to get revenge on someone for all the troubles that had come into his life lately. And who better to avenge himself on than the Earl of Wyvern himself?
He was sure that Wyvern was also Rebecca, incredible as the suspicion seemed.
And so he had a footman spying for him at Tegfan. And tonight Wyvern had slipped out without a word to anyone. It was impossible to know where he had gone, though Harley would bet his last penny that tomorrow would bring the news of another gate or two having been pulled down—by Rebecca and her children. Harley pinned all his hopes on witnessing Wyvern’s return and somehow seeing the evidence that Wyvern and Rebecca were one and the same person.
But where was he to wait? Outside Tegfan itself was not good enough. By the time he arrived home, doubtless all disguise and all evidence of Rebecca would have been shed. From which direction would he be likely to come? There were as many possibilities as there were directions.
But it was not difficult for Harley to decide which one he would gamble on. The last time he had seen Wyvern coming home in the early morning, he had been