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Brook handed little Abingdon to her father and took Cayton’s daughter—Addie, apparently—from Stafford. Then with a discreet motion to Whitby, they left the room with the little ones, the constable hot on their heels.

Brice angled toward the door, prepared to follow them out without being noticed. A mourning husband no doubt didn’t want a near-stranger privy to his grief. Though frankly, most mourning spouses he’d seen hadn’t made such a show in the presence of any near-strangers. But who was he to judge?

He moved silently.

“You needn’t leave, Nottingham.”

Blast.
Feeling doubly awkward now, he pivoted a few steps from the door and saw that Cayton had sat up again and was merely leaning forward, elbows on his knees, and rubbing his face. Brice cleared his throat. “I don’t want to intrude, my lord. I thought perhaps you could use some time alone with your cousin.”

Cayton didn’t so much as glance at Stafford. “My cousin, try as he might, cannot understand. You may. I’m told you just married—was it for love?”

To keep himself from bristling, Brice slid his hands into his pockets. “Not exactly.” But it wasn’t for money—not like Cayton. Though heaven forbid he say something so callous now, when the man was obviously eaten up. Was it just with grief, or was guilt at play, as Stafford had suggested?

Cayton looked up, their gazes locking for perhaps the first time in their very limited acquaintance. Brice’s feet propelled him back to his chair. Not just because of the raw pain in the man’s eyes that demanded a listening ear but because of the gentle nudge in his spirit that told him this was as much why he’d felt he should come to Whitby Park as to tell the Staffords about last night. He sat.

Eyes bloodshot, heavy circles under them, Cayton swallowed. “You’ve only been married a few weeks?”

Brice nodded. And began to pray, silently and intently, for this man and his motherless daughter. “A bit over a fortnight. And I only knew her a few days before that.”

Cayton nodded and leaned back against the cushion, letting his eyes slide closed. “Obviously our stories aren’t all that similar. Everyone knows I married Adelaide for her money. But we’d known each other most of her life. And she . . . she loved me. She’d always loved me . . . and I had cared for her—though I barely remembered she was alive a few years ago. Once I met Lady Melissa . . .” He shook his head, his larynx bobbing when he swallowed.

Brice had never paused to think how Adelaide must have felt. Married to the man she’d long dreamed of, knowing he was in love with another. Perhaps some people would glory in the victory, all feeling aside. Based on the one time he’d met the late Lady Cayton, he did not believe she was that type of person. “That part of the story I know. I was there, in fact, when Lady Melissa discovered your engagement.”

Cayton’s lips pulled up in a sickly imitation of a smile. “Yes, I recall how she flaunted being on your arm in Hyde Park that day, flirting as if her life depended on it. As if I weren’t well aware that it was Brook you were courting, not Melissa.”

A strange unease squirmed to life. “I wasn’t courting Brook.” He had been happy to let London think so, at the time—but Stafford’s own cousin? Shouldn’t he, of all people, have realized that Brice had never pursued his cousin’s wife like that?

“Right. Of course.” Cayton shot a look to Stafford.

Stafford, the insufferable oaf, only grinned.

Brice leaned forward. “I’m not saying that just because Stafford is here, as he well knows. I’m not nearly daft enough to want to chase that woman around all my life—much as I adore her. It was merely convenient to let society think me pursuing her.”

Cayton stared at him. “You surely realize that’s not what anyone thought then, and it’s not what they think now either.”

Leaning back again, Brice drew in a sharp breath. “What do you mean, what they think now? It’s obvious to anyone that the Staffords are in love, and why would Stafford and I be friends if . . . ?”

The slanted look Cayton sent him stopped him. The man breathed a laugh. “You can’t be that naïve, sir. Everyone thinks you and Brook . . . and that my dear cousin is too besotted a fool to notice. No offense intended, cousin.”

“Could have fooled me.” Stafford’s amusement with the situation had given way to a glower.

Brice blew out a long breath. “Define ‘everyone,’ if you please, my lord.”

Here Cayton paused, obviously trying to sort through memory no doubt clouded with lack of sleep and recent grief. “I think I’ve heard the musing from multiple sectors—and I assure you, Stafford, that I always try to inject reason and assure them that you’re no fool, and that you’d sooner shoot Nottingham than let him near your wife if that were a danger—but I believe most of it originated with Kitty.”

Of course it did.

Stafford transferred his scowl to Brice. “And you do realize, I hope, that you just took your new wife into that viper’s den, where her ears will be filled with such nonsense.”

“She’s with Mother and Ella. No one would dare say such things around them.” Would they? He kept his focus on Cayton. “Though I can guess at how it would make a wife feel to hear rumors about her husband being in love with another woman.”

Cayton’s face twisted with pain. “She never asked me about it. Certainly never called me out.” He looked down at his hands. “She just . . . tried. Tried to be what I wanted. Tried to make me love her. But you can’t just make yourself love someone.” His gaze flew up again, begging for agreement. “Can you?”

“I don’t know.” Brice was certainly no expert on love. He’d never experienced it, not the kind Cayton spoke of. But he could see where Stafford wouldn’t be the one to ask—he and Brook had fallen in love the good old-fashioned way, with generous amounts of fighting and running from the truth of their affections. No convincing of themselves required.

Brice, though . . . He felt affection for Rowena, certainly. And the more he looked at her, the more beautiful he realized she was. The more he wanted to take her into his arms—if she would allow it. The more he
wanted
to love her. But was wanting to love enough to make it so?

He sighed and said again, “I don’t know. But I have to think that even if we can’t force a feeling to bloom, we can choose it. Love is not just a
thing
, after all, it is an action too. We can act in love. We can be faithful to love. We can carry it out until our hearts catch up.”

It was true—it
must
be true—but Cayton didn’t look convinced. He just stared into middle space and shook his head. “I tried. Perhaps not at the start, but at the end I did. When I realized she was with child, and when she grew so weak with it . . .

“I know what the gossips are saying—that it was all part of my devilish plan to rid myself of her. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t.” He pushed himself to his feet, though he swayed a bit upon them and looked as though he might keel over at any moment. “She’d told me that she was healthy enough, that the doctors assured her of it. They hadn’t, but I didn’t fathom that sweet Adelaide could lie. I didn’t. She . . . All she wanted was a child.”

This must be a conversation Stafford had already had with Cayton. He didn’t look surprised or distressed. Just moved to clap a hand to his cousin’s shoulder. “And she got to hold her. She got to see how beautiful she is, how perfect, despite being early. Her last day on earth was one of the purest joy, Cay. Cling to that. She loved you, she loved your daughter, and she knew
you
would love your daughter. You needn’t kill yourself proving it. Let the nurse do what you’ve hired her to do and for heaven’s sake, man,
sleep
.”

Cayton shook him off, staggered to the window, and leaned against the frame. “I told her I loved her—Adelaide—there at the end. I said it because I
did
love her, in a way, and because she wasn’t recovering from the blood loss and I didn’t want her to die thinking herself unloved. But she didn’t believe me. She looked me in the eye, smiled that beatific smile of hers, and said she knew I didn’t, but it didn’t matter. That I’d been a good husband, and she knew I’d be a good father.”

Brice flinched, glad Cayton was turned away so he couldn’t see it. But it wasn’t the late Lady Cayton to whom his mind went—he could barely even recall what she looked like. No, it was Rowena’s face that surfaced in his mind’s eyes, with her luminous silver eyes that harbored such hurt in their depths.

Who did she have, right now, to love her? Lilias Cowan, who no doubt had acted out of love, but who had nonetheless had a hand in forcing her away from all she knew? Her father, who would raise his hand to her? The stepmother who, whenever Brice had seen her, had only sneers for her stepdaughter?

Her stepsister, who she wouldn’t see again until they could convince the Lochabers to send her to them for a visit. His family, who were trying to bring her into the fold, but who were still more strangers than friends.

Then him. He had the advantage over Cayton—he wasn’t in love with anyone else, wasn’t trying to move past it. His heart was his own, and the Lord’s. And God had instructed him to marry Rowena, to protect her. Love would come.

But what if it took longer than he anticipated? Or longer to convince her? What if this Fire Eyes business came to a head in a more dangerous way than he was aiming for, and Rowena was caught in the middle? What if she were hurt or killed? How would he live with himself?

No better than Cayton was.

“You can let this eat you alive, Cayton,” Stafford was saying, pulling Brice back to the present and away from that nebulous future, “or you can let it make you stronger. You can turn it over to the Lord, turn
yourself
over to the Lord, or keep flailing about like a drowning man when you know well that’s where salvation lies.”

Again, Brice got the impression that this part of the conversation had been said before. Stafford looked determined as he said it. Cayton weary. The earl sighed and rubbed at his face. “But I don’t know how to be like you. It’s never made any sense to me.”

“Then let’s pray it does. Let’s pray right now that your heart is opened and your mind made clear on who God is and what He wants from you and for you.”

Cayton lowered his hand and stared at his cousin as though he were a hydra. “You want to pray for me—
here
? Now?”

Stafford just grinned. “Actually, I meant to make Nottingham do it. He has an uncanny way of knowing just what to pray.”

Brice had a feeling he wouldn’t be making it back to Delmore in time for tea.

Sixteen

A
scream shattered the peace of the afternoon, but it wasn’t the sudden sound that made Rowena’s heart gallop—it was its sudden ceasing. A scream, with so many guests in attendance, could mean only that someone was startled or saw a mouse or slipped on a stair. But that quick silence . . . Rowena knew that silence. It was the kind that came with a hand over one’s mouth, with the stones cutting off one’s air. It was the sudden silence of pain.

She wasn’t the only lady who stood, all thought of cards forgotten. But she was the only one whose hands shook, probably the only one whose stomach heaved. The others looked curious, nothing more, as they rustled from the rooms in their afternoon silks and linens, chattering about who may have fallen and if any ladies weren’t in attendance.

A warm hand touched her arm, and she looked over into Ella’s questioning face. Rowena tried to summon a smile, but it wouldn’t come. How could it, when she kept hearing her own strangled screams echoing back at her?

Her mother-in-law had come up on her other side and now took her elbow. “I’m sure it’s nothing, dear. Someone probably stubbed a toe or took a tumble.”

Rowena couldn’t work any words past her tight throat. She nodded, though even that felt wobbly and strange. They filed out of the drawing room amidst all the others, but once in the main hall no one seemed to know where to go.

Then came a second scream from one of the ladies near the stairs, and this one kept going until it became a ringing in Rowena’s ears. The group shifted, and she saw the shoes. Black, serviceable. Then the stockings, revealed by a skirt bunched up far too high. Bloodied. Then the figure prone on the ground.

Gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come, Rowena had to spin away. Still, the image had burned itself onto her eyes. The ripped gown, the skin already bruising, mottled, the head lolling against the floor. Was she dead? Unconscious?

Was that how
she
had looked after Malcolm attacked her? Limp and lifeless? It’s how she had felt. How she still felt far too often.

A cacophony descended, swirling about her with buzzing voices and frantic screams, with a flurry of skirts and pounding feet, and then the arrival of masculine legs. Scores of them, it seemed, all encased in black or grey trousers, all looking the same. Rowena gripped the step she sat on, not sure when she’d come over here and sank down upon it. Vaguely aware of Ella’s red hair at her side.

One of the ladies sashayed back toward the drawing room with a dismissive wave of her hand that snatched Rowena’s focus. “It’s only a maid.” Disdain oozed from her voice. “I don’t see why everyone is so upset.”