One Unashamed Night(30)

‘Good for you.’

A teary half-laugh ensued. ‘And I will read books in bed till after midnight should I wish to.’

‘Would you read them to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘In bed, you say?’

She laughed again. ‘Thank you for bringing me to your family home.’

‘Falder has a legend that insists those who love the place will always return.’

Return!

Bea smiled into the superfine of his well-cut jacket. Taris’s voice was soft and his hands were gentle, the firelight on his hair showing up the darkness.

A good man. A strong man. A man who walked his world with the certainty of one who was both moral and ethical.

She loved him. She did. She loved Taris Wellingham with an ache. The realisation hit her like a lightning strike.

My Lord, she had fallen in love. Hopelessly! Desperately! Completely! And she dared not tell him any of it.

Tell him and risk the end of a friendship.

Tell him and see pity where respect now stood.

Tell him and know that he would never love her back.

Her stomach heaved in a new bout of rising nausea and she swallowed heavily.

She needed time to regroup, to understand the implications of what was happening between them and to protect herself.

‘I would like to rest now…’ She left the ending unfinished and saw the flick of uncertainty as he realised she wanted him gone.

But he went. Without anger or shouted words or recriminations. A different man completely to Frankwell.


Taris walked around the gardens, not trusting himself on a steed at this time of night. He would have liked to have saddled up Thunder and run across Falder with the wind in his face and the stars at his back just like he used to. He would have liked to gallop to the highest hill above Fleetness Point and shout at the sky. Shout with anger and pain and agony, not for himself but for Bea. For a younger Bea. Trapped. Fearful. Silent.

But tonight he could only walk fast around his mother’s garden, the fence along the edge keeping him to a pathway, coriander, rosemary and thyme pungent when his cane brushed the heads of the cuttings his mother had nurtured.

Behind him he heard footsteps.

‘You look like a man who is wrestling with demons.’

Ashe’s voice.

Taris shook his head. ‘Not demons, but truth.’

‘An even trickier adversary.’

The wind in the elm trees on the ridges wailed across silence.

‘Emerald thinks that Mrs Bassingstoke might be with child. Could it be yours?’

Taris looked up, trying in the greyness to see anything of his brother’s face and failing. He remained silent as Ashe kept talking. ‘Beatrice reminds me of Emerald. She has the same steely determination and the same vulnerability.’

‘Her husband hurt her badly.’ Taris hadn’t meant to say it but the secret was too new and too raw to keep in.

‘Hell.’ His brother’s shock underlined his own, making him feel better.

‘She spent twelve years married to a bully. Now all she wants is independence.’

‘A difficult ask.’

‘I know.’

‘Tread carefully, then, for I like her and Emerald is determined she wants to keep her.’


Taris knocked on Bea’s door and she answered it very quickly. He felt the heat of her room against his face and smelt violets.

‘May I come in?’

‘Yes.’ No hesitation in her assent. He heard the rustle of her nightwear as he followed her inside. Satin, probably. He wished he might have been able to run his hands across the garment and know. But he stood still instead.

‘We need to talk, Beatrice-Maude.’

‘Because you would like me gone?’ Fear threaded her reply.

‘Gone? Lord, Bea.’ He reached out, palm up, and was pleased when he felt her fingers steal into his. A contact. Drawing her closer, he could feel the satin was cool and her hair tickled against the bare skin on his hand. Long and heavy, she had let it down for slumber. The thought made him take in a sharp breath and he scarcely knew how to start.

‘When we made love at Maldon, Beatrice, I did not protect you against the possibility of a baby.’

‘With my history it does not matter.’

He smiled into her hair and wished that he could look into her eyes. Really look.

‘I think that it might have mattered…’

She pulled back, but he did not let her go.

‘Marry me.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I cannot marry you.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘Last time I married a man who did not love me I learnt the mistake of that.’

The air around them was charged with question.

‘Love?’

The way he said it was like a dagger to Bea’s heart. Love was not something to be considered or questioned. Love was simply a knowledge, unconscious and untempered.

She felt the nails of her fingers dig into the skin on her forearm.

Love me. Love me. Love me.

But as the silence lengthened she knew that he would not say it, could not say it.

‘I have enough money to disappear, to make a new life. You need not feel hemmed in by a simple mistake.’

‘Mistake?’ he countered. ‘You think this child is a mistake?’

‘This child?’

‘Our child.’ His hand fell to her stomach. ‘You must have known.’

Bea shook her head.

‘Your sickness in the morning…’

She shook it again. ‘No, that can’t be. I am barren.’

‘With your husband that might have been the case, but with me…’

‘Pregnant?’ She could not go on. The word quivering between them like a barely believable truth!

‘Ahh, sweetheart.’ He stood, not touching, but only a breath away. ‘You did not know?’ Gentle sorrow tempered his question. ‘I thought that you must have known.’

‘I thought I was ill.’ Tears blurred her eyes, but she willed them back. ‘I would not hold you to any promises.’

‘It is too late for that, I think, with a new life growing.’

His finger ran up her arm and then across her cheek and settled on the soft skin of her forehead. ‘Where in all of this lies the place for compromise? Is it here?’ His hand fell lower. ‘Or here?’ he questioned, as the beat of her heart began to thud. ‘Anything could be possible…’

She should have said nay. Should have loosed his hold and stepped back. Should have said that the joining of their flesh was only a fleeting thing, ephemeral and unimportant. But she could not say that and mean it, as his warmth spread across her, increasing her desire, and the man who was the Lord of Darkness lifted her in his arms and took her to bed.


He was not there when she woke, the warmth in the sheets long gone. So she lay with her hands across her stomach, trying in the silence to listen, to understand and believe that another soul lay within her, waiting for its own chance at life.

A child. A Wellingham child. A child conceived on a snowy night when the old fetters of restraint had been washed away and freedom left in its place. She smiled and wondered if tears were the preserve of impending motherhood as a warm wetness ran down her cheeks.

Victory.

Finally.

And so unexpected.

Joy juxtaposed with worry. Would Taris now feel bound to her in a way he might not have otherwise?

She shook away the idea as nonsense. A family. Home. Unity. Love. She could not turn away from this astonishing second chance.


When she came downstairs after eleven o’clock she learnt that Taris had taken the carriage for Ipswich and would not be back again until the morrow.

Emerald had given her the news as she sat at her own breakfast.

‘Perhaps he had some business that could not wait to be attended to?’

‘Perhaps.’ The poached eggs on toast that she had selected were suddenly very hard to swallow.

‘May I offer you a piece of advice, Beatrice?’ Emerald’s look was measured. She waited until Bea nodded.

‘The Wellingham men are hard to catch, but very easy to keep. Once they love, they love well.’

‘Taris does not love me. He has never said it.’

She blurted the truth out like a green girl, though Emerald’s smile unnerved her.

‘Taris was an intelligence officer under Wellington. For years he scouted across Northern France and Spain under the guise of one from those climes and never once was he unmasked. Did you know that he speaks fluent Spanish and French and was one of the finest marksmen the army had ever seen?’ Stopping, she took a sip of strong black tea. ‘When he came to the Caribbean to rescue my husband from the clutches of a pirate colony…’ Emerald noted Bea’s surprise at this revelation ‘…he was the only man to have ever discovered their lair and the only man to leave it on his terms. The bullet hit him as he dragged Asher out into the sea and to safety.’

‘A bullet?’

‘His sight was damaged when he saved my husband and because of that I owe him everything!’ She leaned forwards. ‘Give him a chance to know what it is he thinks. Give him the same knowledge that I had to give to Ashe.’

‘The knowledge?’

That he cannot live without you.’

Bea pulled back. ‘I do not think…’

Emerald’s fingers covered her own.

‘Taris has a need to understand that the man he is now is the one you want, not the one he once was. He needs to redefine himself and only you can help him do that.’

‘By loving him?’ Finally Beatrice saw where she was going with her argument.