A Groom of Her Own (Scandalous Affairs Book 1)

by Christi Caldwell

  Despite the chill in the carriage, perspiration slicked her palms, and sweat beaded on her neck.

  If her husband decided he wanted an heir, she’d have no right to refuse him. None that the law recognized.

  Something solid fell to her lap, and she glanced down.

  Caleb had returned her sketch pad, that leather book etched with three names—with one of them about to be rearranged.

  Claire Lorraine Poplar.

  Of their own volition, her tremulous fingers came up and traced the three names, lingering on the last. Soon that surname would be shifted out, replaced by a new one, a name that belonged to another that she’d be forced to take on as her own, because that was just something else a woman was asked, nay, expected to surrender.

  Her breath grew more labored.

  A warm, strong, solid hand covered her own.

  Claire locked her gaze on that appendage, familiar and caring, a lifeline. And she accepted wholly the warmth that came from that silent, compassionate show of support.

  “What if he isn’t?” she whispered, unable to care what it might mean for any attempt on his part at interfering in her decision. “What if he changes and…” Claire sucked in an uneven, noisy breath and forced herself to raise her eyes to his. “What if he hates my art and attempts to forbid it, and then…” She’d be even worse off than she was now.

  “Then don’t marry him,” he said with a quiet insistence. “You don’t know him well enough to say that he’s going to support you? Then you don’t marry him, Claire. You go home…”

  You go home…

  This time, her lips trembled in a shaky smile. “Then what? Hmm?” She quirked an eyebrow. “What is my fate beyond this? Everything for a woman is uncertain.” She looked Caleb square in the eyes. “You see, Caleb, you resent that you have to share your art and take certain jobs in order to feed your artist’s soul. But I?” She removed her hand from under his and pressed that fist to her breast. His piercing eyes followed that movement. “To my very soul, I hate that a craft that I love is something forbidden me. And this? This is something, as a male artist, that you can never understand.” Claire smoothed her palms down her cheeks. “So am I, even with my fiancé’s promises, nervous? Nervous that he’ll decide to cut me off from creating?” Or worse…? “Yes, but as a woman born without choice because of my gender, I’d be a fool not to entertain the possibility.”

  With that, she opened her book once more and let herself be lost in her latest work.

  Chapter 13

  Caleb and Claire didn’t speak for the next hour.

  Unlike before, however, this silence hadn’t anything to do with the argument that had resulted following his interference at the Rotted Rooster. That tension between them had since been put to bed.

  This silence, instead, was born of everything she’d shared.

  All these years, he’d carried certain and specific resentments, all surrounding his life and his craft.

  He’d not thought of his being required to put his work on display in the way she’d spoken of.

  He’d not seen his privilege.

  He’d not seen it as being a choice, one that allowed him to freely create art.

  Having to put his art on display in galleries for people to gawk at had represented just one more thing he was being forced to do. He’d inextricably linked that to the powerlessness he’d known after being impressed. Then, he’d been forced to do the work of the British navy, and when he’d refused to create the maps they required or sketch the damned images of the lands they intended to take over, he’d found himself thrown into the prison below.

  But ultimately, he’d been sprung from that prison, freed to live his life, with the only constraints being those financial limitations that necessitated his sharing his artwork.

  Unlike Claire…

  He stared openly at her.

  Claire, who only that morn had been absorbed in her sketch, now sat with the book closed on her lap as she stared forlornly out the window.

  The lead pane revealed every sadness contained within the contours of her heart-shaped face.

  Claire, who when they completed this journey would move forward, just as she’d said, and commit herself in name, body, and soul to some English fellow, whom she didn’t altogether know if she could trust. Worries that weren’t cynical, but rather, realistic in that they were born of knowing the unpredictability of man.

  Hell, he knew that better than anyone.

  He stared at her visage reflected in the glass. She’d rested her chin atop her fist and watched the jagged rock landscape, melded with a faded green, pass by.

  Even if he turned the carriage around and headed back to London with her, against her wishes, he knew her stubborn spirit. She’d eventually find her way to whomever she’d gone and fallen in love with.

  This time, instead of the visceral jealousy that had slithered about at the thought of some white-faced, limp-handed lord handling her, Caleb saw the details he’d previously neglected to note. The worry she had. The words she’d spoken.

  What is my fate beyond this? Everything for a woman is uncertain.

  Those weren’t the words of a woman in love. They belonged to a lady who had resigned herself to the course she’d set.

  Caleb shot a hand up and knocked hard on the roof.

  His driver navigated carefully along the high road, guiding them down the rise until they reached a lower, less-steep portion of the roadway through Malham.

  The moment the conveyance had come to a full stop, Claire frowned. “I forbid you from turning this carriage back, Caleb. I am doing this.” With or without his assistance.

  It was precisely as he’d known.

  Reaching past her, he pressed the door handle and shoved the panel open.

  A blast of cold immediately buffeted the carriage, whistling fast.

  Claire gasped and drew her cloak closer. “N-never say you intend to a-abandon me here,” she sputtered with outrage.

  He chuckled. “Not this time, sweetheart.” Not ever again.

  Between everything he’d learned about her and everything they’d shared with each other since the Rotted Rooster, he’d never be able to go back to the way he’d viewed her.

  Caleb jumped out, and the moment his feet found purchase, he bent them, stretching them to adjust his blood flow to the change in positioning. During the time he’d been impressed, he’d spent so many hours locked up in cramped quarters that his muscles still paid a price for the misery inflicted upon them. In the distance, the winter wind howled a mournful wail, echoing from the nearby caverns. He lifted his arms up toward the heavily clouded white sky.

  Claire ducked her head out. “Did you need to stretch?” she called down.

  “Yeah.” But that wasn’t, however, the reason he’d stopped the carriage.

  Shaking his forearms out once more, he reached a hand back toward her, gesturing her forward with four fingers.

  Clutching her sketch pad in her right arm, Claire eyed his hand warily.

  He chuckled. “Never tell me you’re going to turn shy now, Claire Poplar?”

  That challenge served the purpose he’d intended. Tilting her chin up at its usual mutinous bend, she held her palm out.

  Ignoring that offering, Caleb caught her around the waist, pulling a little squeak from her lips.

  When her feet touched the ground, he lingered his hands there, on those points just above her generously curved hips. And God help him, something so innocuous should send a wave of hungering rippling through him, bringing him back to the previous times he’d held her in his arms.

  Her lips parted the tiniest fraction, enough that a little puff of white from her breath melding with the cold fanned the air. Her mouth, kissed from the cold, had a greater shade of red in that pouty flesh. And God, how he wanted to taste her. Again. He hungered to claim her lips, lick that seam, and lash his tongue against hers.

  And it was the first time he understood or appreciated the struggle his
brother had spoken to him about upon his return, when he’d revealed his marriage to Caleb’s fiancée. God help him, that temptation of sin that came from wanting what you oughtn’t was one he now understood all too well.

  It took a physical effort, but he managed to release her.

  Caleb offered her his arm instead. “Come on,” he said gruffly, angling his head, urging her to follow him.

  “My, you grow more gallant with every exchange, Mr. Gray,” she said teasingly, and it was different than their usual sparring, and he relished this newfound levity between them. This time, there was no hesitancy in the hand she placed upon his sleeve.

  His muscles rolled under her touch, so innocuous, and yet, everything, since she’d come undone in his arms, had become keener. Sharper. He struggled for a levity it was hard to feel under his body’s every awareness of her. “Yeah, don’t go around telling anyone and ruining my image.” He followed that playful rebuke with a wink.

  He led them onward to the large open field down a small incline that emptied out onto an expansive field.

  As the grounds grew more uneven, the terrain rougher, Caleb was sure to slow his longer steps. At his side, Claire adjusted the grip she had on her sketch pad, and he held a hand out to take that burden from her.

  As an artist himself, knowing how he guarded his work and how she valued hers, it was a testament to some great cosmic shift that had occurred these past couple of days that she so effortlessly entrusted that book to his care.

  “You know, if you’ve tired of traveling with me,” she said, slightly out of breath from the length of the walk they’d undertaken, “you could have just left me at the Rotted Rooster, like I’d wanted.”

  “Ah, but where would be the fun in that?” he said, keeping his expression deadpan, startling a laugh from Claire, and he joined in.

  Nor was that expression of mirth born of sarcasm or mockery as it had been for so long, emptied of all amusement after his capture so that he’d believed himself impossible of that sentiment. Only to find it again, with and because of the last person he would have ever expected.

  They reached the end of the field, Caleb and Claire each adjusting their steps, taking greater care, as they navigated an uneven footpath.

  “Oh, d-dear,” Claire said, her teeth chattering from the cold. “You’ve gone all serious again, which leads me to believe I need worry after…” Her words trailed off as they rounded the corner. “Oh, my,” she whispered, that soft exhalation leaving another little puff of white air from her lips.

  He might as well have been forgotten as her gaze moved over the huge gorge that was Gordale Scar. Jagged stone had seized the landscape, transforming it into some ancient-looking land of the gods, who’d laid a stone path up to the waterfall that rained down foamy white water high up at the center.

  “It is… magnificent,” she breathed.

  He touched his eyes on every plane of her face, the delicate point of her chin, to the high planes of her cheeks, to that lone freckle he’d not noticed until now, which graced the tip of a pert nose. “Yes,” he murmured, his eyes only on her. “Magnificent.” Odd how Caleb, with his artist’s eye, had failed to appreciate such a masterpiece before this moment, alone with her in this ethereal land.

  Perhaps that was all it was. Perhaps it was simply the majesty of this place and the intimacy of their being here alone together.

  And yet, as she pulled her gaze from the peak of Gordale Scar and her blue eyes went to his, those quixotic irises glimmering in that mix of greens and turquoise and azure, he knew the lie he fed himself.

  “I never knew such a place existed.”

  “I passed by here once.” The first and only time he’d visited property his grandfather had passed down to him. He’d taken one look at everything that estate… wasn’t and returned to London so he could put his work on display and live the life he wanted. The only memorable part of Caleb’s travel to his property had been this place he’d now taken Claire to.

  She’d returned to her study of the gorge, her eager eyes, her artist’s gaze touching upon everything—the limestone clints, the white tufa formed upon that stone, the gaps within the gorge that had created a sanctuary for the vast wildlife that dwelled in this mystical place. He recognized that eager glint, caught the way she flexed her fingers, eager to create, as all artists were wont to do.

  You’re no artist, Claire. You’re a pastel and paint miss who has no place in an art room.

  He flinched as those words he’d hurled at her came back to haunt him.

  Had he really been such a judgmental asshole?

  Caleb already knew the unequivocal answer to that silent question—he had. He’d judged, and he’d done so unfairly. And he didn’t expect that he could make amends, nor would it ultimately matter if he did or did not. She’d go on her way. He’d go on his. And this would be the last they ever saw of each other.

  The truth of that left him peculiarly hollow.

  He felt Claire’s stare slide back his way, and equally unnerved by that turbulent emotion and the lady’s penetrating stare, he stretched out his hand to get them moving along. “Wanna explore?”

  “Do I…?” Her eyes widened. “Yes!” she blurted, and taking his fingers in her own, she tugged him along this time.

  And this time, he let himself be led.

  “When my family lost the lands they’d stolen, their… our previous land reverted back to my brother,” she said as they walked. “It was moorland. Often rainy. Gloomy. Morose. Unforgiving. I quite loved it,” she said, surprising him. Her eyes sparkled as she spoke. “My sisters and I would sneak away at night and play hide-and-seek upon the moor, our laughter lost by the howl of the wuthering.”

  She chatted so easily.

  The sound of all talk had once grated on his ears, yet another gift from his time on a ship that had been his prison. Her dulcet tones, and the ease with which she spoke about that which she loved, stripped away his usual discomfort with any and all discourse.

  She brought them to a stop some ten paces up their climb. “But I’ve never before seen anything like this.” She stretched a palm toward the jagged cliffs all about them.

  He looked about, taking in that same view she praised, the juxtaposition of the ragged, colorless gorge with the hint of green that clung to that stone. “It is pretty wondrous.”

  “It is,” she murmured, her gaze turned out.

  Plucking her sketch pad out from under his arm, she rushed off, picking carefully along the uneven earth before ultimately finding a smooth boulder that she turned into an earthen seat.

  Just like that, she was lost to him.

  Flipping through her pages, she stopped on one, and then she froze.

  Caleb was immediately there. “Looking for this, sweetheart?”

  Claire tilted her head all the way back, glancing at the small pencil she was never without.

  Happy surprise filled her face. “You brought it.”

  “Why else did you think I brought you here?” he asked gruffly.

  Her breath caught on a quick intake, and her eyes softened.

  In a way that caused his chest… to shift.

  In a way it had never before done.

  Because no one had ever looked at him the way this woman did now.

  Not even the woman he’d been inclined to marry.

  And now this one did, all because of a pencil. The reason for that glimmer of adoration only strengthened this ever-growing bond with a woman he’d no place being enamored of.

  “Thank you,” Claire said and plucked the little nub from his fingers and set her fingers to dancing upon that page.

  He was instantly forgotten.

  It was an absorption he’d once known and one he’d begrudged her and any other artist for. Why should what had once come so easily and joyously to him have become a chore in life, a stress and a struggle?

  Now, in these wilds of Yorkshire, away from the noise of London and stripped of his own preexisting opinions about
Claire Poplar, he’d a new glimpse, a new view, and a new feeling. There wasn’t the resentment there had been. There was an appreciation for someone who should love the craft so deeply. That wasn’t anything to be bitter about, but rather, to admire.

  As she sat there working, the wind whipped around them, angrily tugging at Claire’s skirts, nature demanding the lady’s attention and failing mightily against the pull of her work. That same wind also wrought havoc on the dark strands drawn back at her nape. Those loose tendrils escaped the knot there and danced across her face.

  Periodically, Claire paused to raise a hand and distractedly tuck the hair back behind the shell of her ear.

  And then it happened.

  Caleb went absolutely still as he felt it.

  A stirring deep down, familiar and yet at the same time foreign for how much time had passed since he’d experienced it. A hungering. A yearning to create, to put an image down upon a page. Her… He wanted to capture her, Claire Poplar, as she was in this moment in this ethereal-looking place, enlivened and absorbed by an image that she brought to life.

  His fingers twitched.

  He’d begun to despair at ever again knowing what this felt like. He’d begun to wonder if he would even recognize that desire within him if he’d ever found it again.

  But he did, and he wanted to hold on to… this.

  And he cursed himself for having left behind his own sketch pad, for not having even considered to bring the book that had been a greater sense of frustration than joy. When he’d ordered the carriage to stop, he’d done so in part to slow their journey to her beau, but in larger part to allow her… this.

  Exactly what she’d found in the gorge.

  As she worked, and he watched, time ceased to matter or make any manner of sense. Whether it moved with an infinite slowness or continued with a dizzying rapidness, it all rolled together. Until, at last, Claire snapped her sketch pad shut with a firm click that marked the end of the magic that dwelled in the place and restored the earth to its usual spinning.

  She glanced up. “It is time to go,” she said softly, with a return of the earlier sadness he’d seen in her eyes and heard in her voice. The same forlornness that had led him to stop them in this place and give her the time she’d had here.