Christmas Heart: An Historical Romance Novella (The Unmarriageable Series) by Mary Lancaster

Christmas Heart: An Historical Romance Novella (The Unmarriageable Series) by Mary Lancaster

Author:Mary Lancaster [Lancaster, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, romance, Medieval
Publisher: Dragonblade Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2020-07-17T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Three

She no longer spoke in a whisper, and she could feel his shock reverberating through the partition wall. Which gave her a certain amount of satisfaction.

And guilt. For the suspicion had been sudden, a familiar tone in his whisper allied to the rhythm of his words and the ease with which she had been speaking to him. And the abrupt if belated realization that the Villins would never have put a stranger in such intimate proximity to her.

And yet, she didn’t know. The maid or some other unknown servant could have given him the stable without appreciating her rank or his. And the voice in which he had uttered My wife is a wonderful woman might have sounded suspiciously like Alex, but it had hardly been clear. She could be entirely mistaken. Please don’t let me be mistaken…

“Harsh criticism,” her neighbor murmured through the wall at last. “Can he ever recover from it?”

The drumming of her heart was not simple anger. Somewhere behind it, her mind was singing, It is him! He came, he came!

“Perhaps,” she replied, much more calmly than she felt. “If he tells me what the devil he is doing.”

She could almost see the rueful, sardonic quirk of his lips, and a knot twisted deep inside her. Longing.

“In part,” he said quietly, “I think he was trying not to disturb you. In part, he didn’t know if you wanted him so close.”

“Because I left without him?” she asked.

There was a pause. “Yes.”

She wasn’t fooled. There was more to this. But his partial honesty deserved some of hers. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. But I was angry because—”

“Because he would not listen and would not understand.”

“Yes,” she whispered. And now she wanted to cry. She wanted the wall between them gone, and yet it was a defense. Her only defense. Although she yearned to touch him, to hold him, she was too confused, her feelings too jumbled.

She swallowed. “I should not have gone and left him with no more than a note. I thought… I thought he would easily catch up with me before Lincoln.”

“And bring you home? Or travel with you down to Sussex?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just wanted him to know… which was quite unreasonable when I didn’t really understand myself what it was I wanted him to grasp.”

“I think he grasps a little more now. At least enough to realize he needs to make less assumptions and to listen. And if you wonder why he didn’t catch you up more quickly, he spent all day tramping around the estate and didn’t know you’d gone until it was dark. You were always one step ahead of him.”

She swallowed, the painful knots beginning to loosen in her heart, her stomach. “Alex?”

“Yes?”

“Will you stop talking about yourself in the third person now?”

She heard his breath of laughter and couldn’t help smiling into her pillow.

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Silence filled the darkness, but it was no longer an unhappy silence. He said, “We should sleep and begin again in the morning.



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