The Secret Pearl(142)

He was standing in her parlor, his hands behind his back, looking dark and morose, looking as if he wished to be anywhere else on earth but where he was.

He had come out of a sense of duty, because he had said he would come. Adam and his damnable sense of duty! She hated him again, wished him a million miles away.

“You have not been troubled by Brocklehurst or his family?” he asked her stiffly.

“No,” she said. “I have heard nothing of Matthew, though rumor has placed him anywhere from South America to India. Cousin Caroline is here, but I believe she intends to visit her daughter for the winter.”

“And the Reverend Booth and his sister are still your friends,” he said. “I am glad.”

“Yes,” she said.

She wished with all her heart that Lady Pamela had not gone on the ramble. She wished that he could leave without further delay. She wished she could start living the rest of her life.

If only he had not allowed Pamela to go with the other children, he thought. If only there were some way he could leave immediately. He could take himself off to the village inn, he supposed, but if he suggested doing so, she would think that she had failed in hospitality.

“Thank you for the pianoforte,” she said. “I have not had a chance to thank you before. You intended it to be kept in the schoolroom, of course, but both Miriam and Daniel agreed that it would be safer here.”

“You know that it was a gift for you alone,” he said.

And he watched broodingly as she flushed and looked down at her clasped hands. Her knuckles were white with tension.

He remembered her hands touching him, moving lightly over the wounds on his side. He remembered her telling him he was beautiful. He remembered her telling him that she loved him. He felt an almost overwhelming sadness. He strolled toward the pianoforte and stood looking down at the keys. He depressed one of them.

“The tone is good?” he asked.

“It is a beautiful instrument,” she said. “It is my most prized possession.”

He smiled, and he glanced up at the vase standing on the pianoforte and the letter propped against it. He reached out and picked the letter up.

“This is my letter to you,” he said.

“Yes.” She got to her feet, flushing, and reached out a hand for it.

“Has it been there for almost a year?” he asked.

“Yes.” She laughed breathlessly. “It must have been. I am not a very tidy person.”

He glanced about him at the neat, uncluttered room. And he felt a quite unreasonable surging of hope.

“Why?” he asked her. “Why do you keep it there?”

She shrugged. “I … I don’t know,” she said foolishly. She could think of no reasonable explanation. How foolish he would think her. How humiliating if he should guess the truth. She smiled, her hand still outstretched for the letter. “I shall put it away.”

“Fleur?” he said.

She dropped her hand. She had told him just a little more than a year before that she loved him and always would. Should she be ashamed now that she had spoken the simple truth? Was pride to be guarded at all costs?

“Because it is not only the pianoforte that is my most treasured possession,” she said, fixing her eyes on the top button of his waistcoat. “That is too. I keep them together.”

“Fleur,” he said softly.

“I have nothing else of you,” she said. “Just those two things.”

She wished she could see that button clearly. She wished that he would not see her with tears in her eyes. But she was not ashamed of loving him. She had said she would and she did.

She watched the blur of white as he tossed the letter aside. She watched his waistcoat come closer. She felt his hands framing her face.

Her jaw was set hard. Her face looked as if made of stone. But there were the tears glistening on her eyelashes. And there were her words. And the letter, propped on top of the pianoforte almost a year after she had received it.

“My love,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. If she was to reject him, then so be it. But she would know that he had kept faith with her, that he still loved her more than life and would do so always.

He watched her bite at her upper lip, reach out with trembling hands to touch his waistcoat, withdraw her hands again.

“I love you,” he said. “Nothing has changed in the fifteen months since I told you that. And nothing will ever change.”

“Oh,” she said. She could find no other words and knew that she would not be able to speak them even if she did. She reached out to touch him again and found her hands to be as far beyond her control as her voice was.

But she did not have to find words. Or control. His head bent to hers and his lips touched her own and parted over them, and his hands left her cheeks, one arm to come about her shoulders and the other about her waist. She was drawn against the strength of him, and it did not matter that she was trembling.