The desire for an heir was strong in men, was it not? That primordial need to pass on to the next generation?
“I have a younger brother. He is my heir.”
Under the bed covers, she lifted the hem of her nightgown to her waist and slid her hands over her naked belly. She could feel a slight, unfamiliar roundness there but nothing more. She explored her abdomen with her hands, poking gently, looking for she knew not what. There was nothing to discern yet, no matter how desperately she wanted to feel her baby.
Suddenly, she knew what she wished for. She wished she was months from now, swollen with the child. She wished that she could feel the babe turning and kicking inside her. She wished to touch her body and know her child was there.
She wished not to be alone anymore.
On the third morning after his arrival at Weartham, Gil breakfasted alone. Again. Rose was taking breakfast in her room. Apparently, she was too ill in the mornings to eat much of anything. Gil suspected that the real reason for her non-appearance was that she was avoiding him.
Although she had been quarrelsome and challenging during their first encounter, in the two days that followed she had mostly been coolly polite. Deferential. The very essence of a good and dutiful wife, at least on the rare occasions when she was in his presence.
They were leaving for London tomorrow. That gave Rose plenty of excuses to evade him. There were numerous visits to be paid, friends to be bid farewell, discussions to be had with Will Anderson about the running of the estate for the rest of the year. To Rose’s obvious irritation, Gil had insisted on sitting in on those discussions, claiming he was interested in how Weartham had been run over the last five years. He knew she was dying to point out that he’d had no interest in the estate until now, but she managed to resist, merely murmuring her agreement.
He sat behind the desk as they talked, forcing Rose to sit on the other side with Anderson. He noticed that when Anderson addressed any remarks to him first, it made Rose irritable, and so he played up to it, directing all his questions at the other man, even though Rose was plainly capable of answering them all. He derived a strange satisfaction from angering her with his refusal to acknowledge her part in running Weartham.
Apart from the meetings with Anderson, he left her to do as she pleased.
Pathetically, he was starving for the sight of her. But he refused to dog her footsteps. And besides, the desire to see her and be with her was at war with another part of him, a part of him that wanted to thrust her violently away from him, that wanted to repudiate her, fiercely, and with every fibre of his being.
She was Eve, and she was not Eve. She was the perfect wife: beautiful, accomplished and pregnant with his heir. And every time he looked at her, he felt sick to his stomach to remember how he had all but declared his love to her. He reminded himself of it several times a day. And of his foolish, excruciating belief that she had reciprocated his feelings.
It seemed as though his body remembered her as Eve. It yearned toward her. When she walked into a room, his eyes sought her out. Once or twice, he had raised his hand to touch her in some small way, and then he would remember and would have to put his hand in his pocket or let it drop uselessly to his side. It was disorienting, like waking from a dream.
Altogether it was just easier to let her avoid him and to occupy himself with other things. He had not been to Weartham in five years. There were account books to be gone through and the estate to be ridden over. His questions during Rose’s discussions with Will Anderson were not entirely idle.
When he had finished breakfast, Gil went to the library. The account books for the previous year were sitting on the desk where he had left them yesterday afternoon. He opened them, trying to concentrate on the painstakingly recorded figures and entries. But somehow, this morning, he found it difficult to think about anything other than Rose. She was distant with him, and he was the same with her. How could they live together like this? He wanted her in his bed, wanted her with a fierce ache, but he had not been to her bedchamber, not that first night nor either of the two following. Instead, he had retired to his own guest bedchamber and lain awake, staring at the ceiling. Remembering.
It was odd how well he remembered his bride now. He’d been watching her, on and off, and to his amazement, he had been able to detect the girl she had once been. That girl had been a pale, colourless shadow of the woman she now was, but she had the same soft grey eyes, the same facial structure. It was true she had changed a great deal, but even so, it seemed incredible to him now that he hadn’t recognised her at all.
When he had tried to picture Rose on his journey up to Weartham a few days ago, he had been unable to recall precisely what she looked like. But now that his memory had been prodded, he found he could remember the seventeen-year-old reasonably well, her sad little face, pale under a dullish cap of short brown hair. And those distracting marks—livid then but all gone now. Except for the odd, puckish little scars. He remembered kissing one on her shoulder blade…