Page 14 of Crying Wolfe
They paused in front of her room, and Morley opened the door to a chorus of meows. He promptly shut it again, standing with his hand clenching the latch for several breaths.
Whirling on his heel, he examined both Emmett and Rosaline for a brusque and tense moment before announcing, “I am going to find my wife and get some bloody sleep.” He put a hand on Rosaline’s shoulder, doing his level best to comfort her. “Don’t fret overmuch. We’ll talk in the morning.” With that, he marched into the shadows, leaving Emmett and Rosaline staring after him helplessly.
Emmett turned to her with an expression of helpless chagrin, his hands plunged deep into his pockets. “Did I hear…cats?”
With a sigh, Rosaline opened her door and allowed him to trail her into her room. The lamp was still lit, and a chill hung in the air from the window having been open for so long.
Pru had seen the fire fed and somehow secured the window shut and had drawn the drapes.
Drifting on legs she didn’t own, Rosaline made it to the bed just before her knees lost their starch, and she landed with a heavy plonk.
“Look how charming they are,” Emmett exclaimed, crouching to gather a brawling pair into his hands and chuff at their attempts to gnaw on his fingers. “Where’s Beatrix? Did you leave her in the barn?”
“She died beneath a carriage wheel weeks ago,” she answered without inflection.
A fortnight ago.
The span of time she had left until she was a married woman.
“You didn’t tell me.” Emmett sank across from her, allowing the wrestling match to resume on her coverlet as he intervened a few times, dragging the feline attentions from each other with a trailing finger.
“You already had so much on you mind,” Rosaline said. “I didn’t want to give you unhappy news.” In truth, she’d been overwhelmed by the myriad of changes in their situation, and the family seemed all too happy to allow her to escape to her lonely room for entire days on end.
She, the youngest of the Goode brood, hadn’t Emmaline’s beauty or charisma, nor was she a lone male heir in a litter of females. She was ordinary, small, damaged Rosaline with dowdy ash hair, eyes too big, and a proclivity best hidden from the world.
Nova, the other black kitten, clawed her way up the bedclothes and climbed into her lap, loudly demanding affection.
Rosaline stroked the delicate down beneath Nova’s chin, her vision blurring somewhere in the middle distance. Focused on nothing. Seeing everything.
Should she be crying tears of terror? Celebrating good fortune? It was apparent Lucy and her mother would have thrown Emmett over in a moment for a chance to shackle a man named for Midas.
But all Rosaline could think of was how that story ended. How the golden touch became the greedy king’s nightmare.
Emmett put a hand on her knee, squeezing it reassuringly. “You don’t have to do this, Ros,” he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard.
Rosaline blinked his features into focus. The thick umber waves of disobedient hair he always forgot to have barbered regularly. The boyish blueberry eyes magnified by his spectacles, gloomier than they ought to be. Observant and gentle and endlessly clever. The brackets around his mouth deepened not by age, but by years of fathomless misery and mistreatment. When so many would turn their pain into bitterness, like Emmaline was wont to do, he redirected his into a compassion so vast it strained credulity.
If there was a heart more tender in this world than hers, it was Emmett’s, and she couldn’t be the one to bruise it.
“Of course, I have to do this, and I should. The entire debacle is my fault.”
He pushed his spectacles up a patrician nose. “Perhaps this is a sign. Would it be so very terrible if we were exiled back to Fairhaven and lived the rest of our days in scandalous seclusion?” The hope in his question broke her heart.
“No,” she answered. “It wouldn’t be terrible for you or me. But for them…” They both looked toward the door, the one that led down hallways of rooms belonging to seven Goode siblings in all, though most of them resided elsewhere at the moment. Rosaline’s care stretched beyond the walls of Cresthaven. “Now that you’re a Baron, Emmett, you’ve responsibilities to your tenants and to those in the employ of the shipping company. You’ve a fortune and a legacy to look after. You can’t run from that any more than I can run from the consequences of what I’ve done.”
His gaze was unbearably bleak. “What if I’m not meant for a legacy, Ros? We all know the fall of the Goode name could at any time be discovered. And the fault would be mine.”
“That won’t happen.” Rosaline leaned over to grasp his hand. “We’ve buried it. You’re marrying a great beauty. No one will know.”
“We’ll know.”
Shedidknow.
Knew that Emmett felt affection for other men, rather than women. He’d developed an attraction to a friend at the age of nine and had been institutionalized for it. Once he’d convinced the doctors he’d been cured, they’d returned him home at the age of sixteen, a sad and broken boy. Lonely and troubled, afraid of any sort of connection with other men, friendly, filial, or otherwise. Over the years, it’d become apparent his predilections hadn’t changed, but he’d zealously masked them.
Emmett had turned somber and introverted beneath the scathing control of their uncle and steward, who’d somehow erased any record of his incarceration. However, they were all aware that the recent death of their uncle might yet prove disastrous. In the event that damning paperwork was ever uncovered, it was imperative that Emmett marry and produce an heir.
So he could deny who he really was in order to maintain his freedom.
