Page 10 of The Winter Husband
“A name I will not earn.”
He knew that. He wished she’d stop throwing it in his face. “I’ll call you ‘Chepewéssin.’”
The skin around her eyes tightened. She hadn’t grown any fonder of that nickname, it seemed.
“I’ll answer to Marie.” She raised the wine. “Will that suffice…Lucas?”
“It’ll do.”
Cedric arrived to set a bowl before each of them, a thick slice of bread in the bottom. The servant then ladled a soup of peas, leeks, and game, fragrant with sage. Leaving a loaf of bread, yeasty and warm, on the table, the servant slipped out of the room. Lucas glanced at the hearty fare, and then he looked up at the woman in blue sitting across from him, a woman with ribbons braided in her hair and cheeks so flushed they practically glowed.
He stirred up a spoonful of beef and a safe question. “You must be used to finer food.”
She put her wine aside. “Have you forgotten that I just spent weeks in jail?”
Patience.“I meant before that.”
“Before that, I spent months on a ship eating hardtack and salt pork.” She picked up her spoon. “And beforethat, I lived in a Paris orphanage.”
“And before that?”
She flashed him a look. He shouldn’t be goading her. But he still couldn’t square the faint marks of shackles on her wrists with the dainty way she stirred her stew. He’d broached the subject with Philippe, asking him to discover more about her—how long she’d been in the orphanage, who her people were, why she’d done what everyone claimed she’d done—but Philippe had eyed him with a knowing grin, misunderstanding Lucas’s interest, so Lucas had dropped the subject flat.
“If you must know,” she began, a twinge of wariness in her voice, “I come from Aulnay, north of Paris. You would never have heard of it. No one has ever heard of it. We lived under my great-uncle’s generosity in a small manor house surrounded by wild roses. It had a lily pond in the back garden under an oak tree.” She paused, spoon halfway to her lips. “Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed that all up.”
He could see her, somehow. A little girl sitting on a bench under the shade. A mischief-maker darting away from her governess to scrabble up the branches.
“And you, Lucas?”
He frowned. He’d dug for information, but he hadn’t meant to start a conversation. “Until recently, I was a soldier in the Carignan-Salières Regiment.”
“So you’ve already told me. And before that?”
“I was a foot soldier back in the old country. I fought in Flanders in La Tour Company, now disbanded.”
“And before that?”
He took a hard look at her. She didn’t flinch.
“Before that,” he said, drawing out the word just to let her know there were limits to his patience, “I was the third son of a Balleroy family that had pretensions to aristocracy and not an acre of land to prove it. Before I was born, we’d transferred the last of our lands to those to whom we owed many debts.”
He waited for more questions, fixing his gaze on the sweep of her lowered lashes.
“So that’s why the landholding means so much to you.” Shadows deepened in her lovely neck as she drew a deep breath. “That’s why you’ve taken these outrageous steps to secure it for yourself.”
No.
But let her believe that.
“It’s a reasonable explanation.” She raised her brows. “You could have told me that before.”
He shrugged. The less said about this subject, the better.
“Tell me more about what it’s like,” she said, “this land you want so badly that you’ll marry a penniless orphan.”
“You’ll see it soon enough.”
Her nostrils flared. She had a temper, this one.
