Page 49 of Crying Wolfe
“Everyone takes and takes from me, Rosaline…”
She shuddered against him, and he drew her closer, cupping her head as her very nearness was like a balm on a raw wound.
“Everyone but you.”
CHAPTER10
Later that night, with a heart heavier than the arm her husband curled around her body, Rosaline snuck out of bed. After checking to make certain Eli remained sleeping, she crept through the darkness of Hespera House feeling just as furtive as she had the first time.
Though she and Eli shared a sleeping chamber, she’d the use of her own suite of accommodations, including a dressing room, receiving parlor, and washroom. Done in the colors of blond sand and turquoise, the rooms adjoined each other with arched and wide intricate doorways the same dark wood as the floors.
Padding into her dressing room on bare feet, Rosaline struggled to quietly move several heavy trunks of her things yet to be unpacked. These contained what she’d rather the servants not manage, such as keepsakes, diaries, a few documents, and, to her everlasting shame…
Her trove of plunder.
With adroit motions born of obsessive repetition, she extracted each one, lining them up like the monstrous little memories they represented.
Her first, a monogramed pen of her mother’s, taken at age eleven, when Rosaline had asked her father to bring her back to London with him, and her mother had slapped her in front of everyone for her impertinence.
She’d not known at the time why her question distressed her family. The hurt and confusion had rippled through her with devastating physical discomfort. Nothing she tried alleviated it. Not counting her way up Fairhaven’s many staircases. Not going through the house and turning on every single lamp. Not even reorganizing her wardrobe and all her cupboards, much to her maid’s dismay.
When called back to her mother’s parlor, this time to be punished for the lights, she’d fixated on the gleaming pen on the secretary. Staring at it had quieted her mother’s shrill sanctions and presented a way to ease this untenable suffering.
When she’d swiped the pen and walked out without anyone noticing, an ever-present weight lifted from her chest, and whatever befuddling sensations coursed through her, diminished to a distant hum.
From her finishing school she’d taken exactly six things. The headmaster’s pipe, Coreen McHugh’s hair ribbon, Miss Danbury’s sextant, a package of unidentified seeds from the gardener. And, to her chagrin, a small candle from the oratory. The owner of each item had done something to her, whether on purpose or not, to ignite that burning, stinging sensation and send it crawling across her flesh. She’d felt as if she’d a rash over her entire body. Not to mention the repetitive ringing in her ears, loud enough she couldn’t believe others didn’t hear it, as well. The thoughts and fears she couldn’t escape, sometimes a whisper, other times a storm, screaming at her to take. Take.Take.
Anything.
Until she did.
Counting the older treasures as habit insisted she do, Rosaline reached into the wooden box where she kept her most recent acquisitions, and extracted what she’d been searching for.
A little bowl, no larger than a teacup dipped in metal she was beginning to fear was partly gold.
Marriage to Eli had been a miraculous turn of events, and the past weeks had been some of the happiest and most carefree in her life.
And yet, something about the event had triggered her horrid compulsion. She’d taken enough of his things that she’d had to dedicate an entire box to Eli.
This one full of happier memories, like the cufflinks he’d worn on their wedding day. One of his hair combs. A pearl-handled razor. Several bullets from his pistol. A gold paperweight. And a gilded letter opener with his name engraved upon it.
Elijah C. Wolfe.
He’d a middle name she didn’t know.
They’d still so much to learn about each other… Even during the lovely conversations they’d shared over the past couple of weeks, she’d never learned of his tragedy until tonight.
He didn’t know about this, her most horrendous flaw.
And he could never learn of it. Not only because it put her entire future in danger…
But because it would cause him pain.
All her life, Rosaline had done her best not to hurt anyone. Had tried to take things that were easily replaced, or not likely to be missed at all.
After the vulnerability Eli had trusted her with tonight, she’d done nothing but obsessively worry about this particular box. About him finding out just what sort of person he’d married.
And hating her for it.
