Page 97 of Lord Garson's Bride
Jane paused to rub the chestnut’s nose and whisper some nonsense. Garson was in such a bad way, he felt jealous that ahorse could make his wife smile. It was a talent far beyond his meager powers.
Guilt emerged dominant from the roiling stew of emotions in his gut. He’d promised to make her happy and instead, he’d broken her heart.
“Fenella and Anthony lent her to me.” She leveled a troubled gaze on him. “Fenella said you didn’t appreciate them offering me their help.”
As he led Lysander into a stall, Garson bit back a torrent of heated invective. “I was annoyed that they encouraged you to leave me.”
The understatement of the year.
“They didn’t. Don’t blame Fenella and Anthony for our problems. You and I both know things couldn’t continue as they had.”
His belly knotted with anguished denial, as he began to unsaddle Lysander. Jane sounded so certain that the decision to abandon him had been hers alone, and that she’d been right to make it. Perhaps she was. Even his jaded eyes saw that she looked in better form than she had in London. Still lovely, of course, but the brittle air had vanished. Whereas every time he glanced in a mirror lately, he felt like he’d aged another ten years.
Living with him had clearly come close to destroying her. How he wished he could change that. But he had a sick feeling that it was too late to make amends.
“When you’re finished, come back to the house,” she said. “The first door on the left off the landing leads to your room.”
Garson paused in unbuckling the girth and straightened to stare at her in shock. “My room?”
Had he mistaken what Jane offered him today? Was she inviting him to stay? His battered heart swelled with excruciating hope.
She retreated a pace. “I thought you might like to wash and have something to eat before…”
Bugger and blast. Hadn’t he learned by now that hope was always a mistake? “Before I do my duty?”
Damn it, there was no dignity in playing the deserted husband. This was worse than those days after Morwenna left him. But then, Morwenna had never worked herself into every facet of his life the way Jane had.
To do his wife credit, she responded calmly enough to his barbed question. “Yes. I’ll be waiting in the next room. When you’re ready, come to me.”
“You’ve got it all worked out, I see,” he bit out.
She didn’t wince. Her self-control started to worry him. In his more optimistic moments, he’d wondered whether seeing him after these weeks apart might weaken her resolution. After all, she claimed to love him. Surely she’d missed him, even just a little bit.
But he found no chink in this woman’s armor, no hint of indecision that offered him a chance to lure her back.
And despite repudiating her love, he ached for her return. He’d spent every day of the last month feeling like someone had taken a saw and amputated a leg or an arm. Yet now, in Jane’s presence, however unsatisfactory their meeting, he felt whole again.
Odd but undeniable.
“Next time, we can organize things differently, if you like,” she said with more of that deuced detachment, as if she discussed an afternoon walk instead of how she’d give herself to him. “Perhaps you’d prefer it if I came to your inn.”
“I’d prefer it if you came home,” he growled, heaving the saddle off Lysander’s back and setting it on the wooden barrier dividing the stalls.
“You know that’s not possible,” she said, and be damned if he heard any trace of regret in her tone.
“I know nothing of the kind.” Before she could argue, he went on. “Shall we dine afterward?”
There were already oats and water in the stall, so he took up the saddle cloth and began to rub Lysander down. Not that the short ride from Winchester had tired the magnificent brute.
“Hugh, I thought you understood,” Jane said, eyeing him as if he might cut up rough. “After you’ve…finished, you have to leave.”
“What?” he asked, baffled. “When do we talk?”
She met his gaze, her eyes opaque. “We don’t.”
Garson dropped the saddle cloth and stared at her in consternation. “I want to know how you are.”
Her lips firmed. “I’m well.”
