“I see,” she said. “I suppose if I were to ask to speak with the person who laid out Hobson’s body and placed it in the coffin, that person would also be gone.”
“Yardley did those things, miss,” he said, “with his lordship. His lordship was quite broken up over what had happened.”
Fleur set her napkin on the table. She had lost her appetite.
In the stables it was the same story. No one knew where Hobson had been taken for burial. Yardley had taken him. And Flynn had taken his lordship the following day. No one remembered Hobson’s ever saying where he came from.
Finally she went back to the house and into the morning room, which had always been her favorite. Cousin Caroline had never liked it because the direct sunlight gave her the headache, she claimed. And Amelia was rarely up in the mornings. So it had always seemed like her own room, Fleur thought, wandering to the window and looking out at the neat squares of flowers and low clipped hedges of the formal gardens.
There seemed to be nothing she could find out. What was more frustrating, she did not know what there was to find out.
She knew almost the whole of it. She had killed Hobson—accidentally. Matthew had had his body taken back to his own home for burial. Matthew had also planted Cousin Caroline’s jewels in her trunk and made sure that someone else discovered them there. Even if she could talk with Annie, there was really nothing she could do to prove that she had not put them there herself.
Perhaps she was foolish after all not to have fled to London when she had had the chance. The servants had a way of looking at her as if they rather expected to glance down and find that she was swinging an ax from one hand. When Matthew came, it would all begin. Or rather, it would all come to an end. And despite Daniel’s and Miriam’s protestations of the night before, she doubted that anyone or anything could save her. She was quite unable to prove her innocence.
But, no. She could not do any more running. She was where she had to be.
The quiet resignation of the thought did not last more than a moment. A carriage had appeared through the trees of the driveway in the distance—a carriage approaching the house.
Her hands turned cold suddenly and she could feel her heart pounding painfully against her ribs and in her ears. Her face turned cold. There was a dull buzzing in her ears.
She turned from the window and sat down on the edge of a chair, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her back straight. She concentrated on not fainting.
And she concentrated on calming herself. She had five minutes at the longest. He must find her quite calm. He must not find her cringing and pleading.
And she must not—even if he were still prepared to offer it—accept any sort of proposal from him. She must not. Please, God, she prayed silently, give me the strength not to lose my integrity or myself. Please, God.
She did not get up again or look out of the window even when the sounds of horses and carriage wheels drew close. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply.
She rose to her feet when the door opened and he stepped past Chapman and into the room.
It took her a few moments to realize that he was not Matthew. At first her eyes would not relay the message to her brain. And then she felt all the breath shudder out of her.
“I thought you were Matthew,” she said. “I thought that was Matthew’s carriage. I thought he had come.”
But he was not Matthew. He was everything that Matthew was not. He was safety and comfort and warmth. He was home. He was everything in the world that was hope and sunshine. He took a step toward her and opened his arms to her, and she was in those arms without ever knowing how the distance between them had closed.
“Oh, I thought you were Matthew,” she said, feeling his arms close warmly about her, feeling the powerful muscles of his thighs against hers, the broad firmness of his chest against her breasts. Smelling that cologne fragrance that was peculiarly his. “I thought you were Matthew.”
His breath was warm against her ear. “No,” he said. “It’s just me, love.”
She touched his shoulders, felt strength and firmness there as he murmured comforting words. And she looked up into the dark, harsh face that she had thought never to see again, that she had been trying not to think of at all. She reached up a hand to touch his scar, so familiar to her eyes.
“I thought I would never see you again,” she said. The wonder of it was there to her sight, in her fingertips, in her body, in her nostrils. The wonder of it. Not yet in her brain. Only in her senses. And deeper than her senses. His face blurred before her eyes.
“I am here,” he said.