A Twist of Fate by Kelley Armstrong

Author:Kelley Armstrong [Armstrong, Kelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989046340
Publisher: K.L.A Fricke Inc

17

I am in my room, waiting to be summoned. Waiting for someone to come and tell me Mr. August wishes to speak to me. Or wishes me gone.

I made it back to my room undetected. Someone had been awake downstairs but had not left their room yet, and I’d escaped to mine. From my quarters, I cannot hear what is happening in the rest of the house, and I dare not sneak out to investigate. I do, however, leave my door open and pull the rickety chair over to sit beside it with my candle.

When they come, I will be ready.

They do not come.

I catch distant sounds, but none that indicate alarm, nor that the master of the house is up and calling for staff. There would be a flurry of activity for that—the nighttime appearance of an angry or agitated master of the house.

Nothing happens, though, and I can only draw one conclusion. August has decided he imagined me. He did not recognize me as Clara, the governess. If he did, he’d have ordered me brought to him or turned out of the house. He woke, drawn to the balcony, where he thought he saw his long-departed wife on the lawn. And he promptly decided he had not. He was imagining me or, better yet, still asleep.

So he went back to bed.

He saw me, fifty feet away . . . and went back to bed.

I want to flee. Grab what I can and run, and I can pretend that is the best course of action, but really, I just want to run. Run and hide and sob until I can sob no more.

I squelch that urge, but I must seriously consider leaving. I do not want August “discovering” me. That will seem as if I tried to trick him. I want to tell him the truth with an explanation, one that requires me stepping from the shadows of my own accord. I cannot take the chance that he yanks me from them. I dare not wish for a reconciliation—tonight proved yet again that was a foolish fancy—but I must reunite with my son, and to do that, I need the moral high ground. I will lose it if August uncovers my “plot” to wriggle back into my son’s life under false pretenses.

I have made such a mess of this. I can cut myself some slack with the reminder that I didn’t see another way. That I thought I’d considered all options carefully and logically, and if I did not, it was a failure of imagination or a lack of recognition that emotion would play a role. The point is that I did not rush in headlong. I considered my options, as carefully as I always do, and I made mistakes.

Had I foreseen myself sitting here, in this position, terrified of being uncovered, I’d have said to Hugh at the train station, “I am Rosalind Courtenay,” and worked with whatever came of that. Of course, that’s easy to say now.

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