Page 57 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
“You know I can’t discuss—”
“You can’t discuss what? My case? My life? You realize this is my innocence to prove and if I knew what was happening, I might have a chance to help.”
“It simply isn’t—”
“How would you fare, husband, under similar conditions? Locked in this infernal house with nothing to do but worry about the future. Treated like everyone’s terrible secret. It’s cruel.” Her voice became ragged on the last words, and her eyes shimmered with unshed tears.
Morley had felt pity in his life. Shame, regret, sympathy. But not this strange amalgamation of all of it.
“You’re not a prisoner here,” he soothed. “But it’s safer for you if you’re out of sight until things…settle. I thought we agreed it’s the right thing.”
She made a noise of irritation and scrubbed at her eyes to erase a forthcoming storm.
Hesitantly, Morley reached out and placed his hand on her ankle over the counterpane. Her bones were so delicate, so small beneath his hands.
“I sympathize,” was all he could think to say. “In your circumstances I’d likely go mad.”
She blinked at him, and her face relaxed a bit, some of the frustration draining into acceptance. “Then…why must I be left in the dark?”
“Because that is where I need you,” he answered more vehemently than he’d meant to.
At her pained flinch, the explanation burst from him like a geyser. “Don’t you understand? I cannot stand to be in the same room with you—wait.” He held up his hand against her unspoken pain as her eyes went owl round. “That is, I cannot be in your presenceandpossessed of my wits at the same time. You’re like…a tune in my head I cannot rid myself of. A torrent, or a whirlwind, spinning me until I cannot see my way forward. I can’t have that now. I need to be objective. Unemotional.”
“Unemotional?” she echoed slowly.
“Especially when the stakes are so high. When I want—” He caught himself just in time.
To see that she’d stopped breathing, her stare rapt and absorbed.
He’d said too much.
“When you want what?” she whispered.
“I meant to say…when the outcome has such a monumental effect on the life and future of everyone.” He slid closer toward her and she moved her legs to give him room. Leaning forward, his hand drifted toward her until it fit over her abdomen. “Of the three of us.”
She covered his hand with her own, and Morley suddenly found himself a prisoner.
His shackles silk rather than steel.
Even through her nightgown and the bedclothes, he could fell that her firm stomach had a barely discernable curve to it.
They each let out an identical breath, wondering at the life beneath their hands.
“Somehow I’m going to prove to you that I’m innocent,” she declared with the resolution of a royal. “If I do that, would I be worthy of you then?”
Awash in a tide of foreign and frustrating sentimentality, Morley pulled away from her, unable to stand the intimacy and not take it further. “This isn’t about that.”
“It is to me.”
He threaded his fingers through his hair, yearning to believe her. If only so he wouldn’t have to face the dark part of him whispering that her innocence mattered not.
That he’d fall for her, regardless.
“Please, let’s not talk of this now. I’m too…where in God’s name is the doctor?”
“I assure you, I’m well. The table took the hardest tumble, I all but glided to the floor.”
He turned his back on her, going behind the screen to lift the table back to its position. The furniture was a heavy piece, the top pure marble.
