Love Comes Softly (A Regency Rogue Novella Book 1)

by Rebecca Ruger

  “I think you are intelligent beyond the capabilities of this hamlet,” he told her. “I think, however, that it is foolish to imagine yourself in love with someone you’ve known so briefly, someone who lives in a world so very different from the one you inhabit.”

  With this she stepped back, out of his reach, staring at him as if had indeed spoken meaner words. The threatening tears were now a path down her blush colored cheeks. “Oh, I see. It isn’t specifically that you doubt that I do love you, my lord. It is only that you do not return the sentiment.” This came sorrowfully, as if they spoke of death, which perhaps they did.

  Christian said not a word, having it not within himself to lie to her further, nor to lead her on with half-truths. He watched in mute regret as she backed further away from him, separating herself from him with more than simply the distance and silence between them. When she’d reached the frame of the still open door, she stopped only for a moment.

  “I bid you farewell then, my lord,” and she turned and ran from him.

  The earl stared at that open doorway for quite a long moment, being then unable to move from that spot, nor able to relieve himself of the that last look upon her face, that sad and haunted look of utter disenchantment.

  Chapter Five

  Isabelle ran the entire distance between Makesly’s place and her own home. She ignored her brothers, heading out of the cottage to God-only-knew what endeavor, though the slingshots in their hands bespoke of ill toward something. She entered the house and took straight to the stairs, finding on that second floor solace in her own company in her bedroom.

  Not solace, actually; she’d likely find little of that anytime soon. She flung herself upon her bed as she had never done before and cried silently into her overstuffed pillow.

  How had this happened? She wondered. What had she done wrong? Confusion reigned as she tried to sort through several of her interactions with the earl, dissecting each episode, looking to find fault.

  The door to her room opened and Aunt Ester walked in.

  “Oh, you poor dear,” crooned her aunt, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, her chubby hand rubbing gently Isabelle’s back. “Your first broken heart, I daresay.”

  Isabelle turned onto her back, unabashedly showing her tear-streaked face to her beloved aunt. “Why doesn’t he love me, Aunt Ester?”

  “Who’s to say he doesn’t?” She asked kindly.

  “Um, he did.”

  “Did he say those words to you, Belle?”

  “Well, no, he didn’t actually say, ‘I don’t love you’ but he couldn’t have made it any clearer,” Isabelle pouted.

  “Now, love,” Aunt Ester cautioned, “a man will often find himself put to sixes and sevens when he encounters a true love. It seems to be in his nature to struggle against it at first. A woman, on the other hand, embraces what the good Lord has given us.”

  “That doesn’t help me at all, Aunt Ester,” Isabelle told her, her frown slight as she tried to figure out exactly what her aunt was trying to say to her.

  Aunt Ester wiped at her niece’s cheeks, erasing the trail of tears. “When I met your dear Uncle Herb, he had it in his head that he wasn’t ready to settle down. He fought against his own feelings for me, though I knew them to be great—”

  “But how did you know how he felt?”

  Aunt Ester’s face took on a sudden youthful glow while remembering. “Oh, love, that was easy. He used to stare at me, quite baffled by my eccentricities and affectations, but in his eyes there was always a smile. When I walked into a room, those eyes of his sharpened and shone with pleasure—he, himself may not have been aware of this, but I was. It thrilled me so. And when he stole those first kisses, he was gentle and slow, allowing me to stop if I wanted to—which, of course, I did not,” she admitted and giggled like a woman half her age. “A man does not show such care and concern if there is no feeling at all.”

  “I must have misread him, then,” Isabelle considered aloud. “I thought... well, I thought all of that might have been true, but I... I guess I just haven’t the experience needed to read so practiced a man.”

  “Experience in reading people starts not with your first love,” Aunt Ester pointed out. “You’ve read people all your life, Belle. If you thought he acted as if he loved you, then it is something else that took him away.”

  “He’s not coming back, Aunt,” Isabelle sadly confided.

  “But you will heal, love,” her aunt promised her.

  “It certainly doesn’t seem that I might.”

  Aunt Ester smiled fondly and pushed a wayward curl off Isabelle’s face. “But you will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And still we live and love.”

  Isabelle only nodded, not really sure if she believed this or not, but as Aunt Ester seemed so sure of this, she allowed that anything was possible. It was just that at this moment, this pain seemed rather unbearable.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE difficult indeed for Isabelle. She found herself vacillating between vowing never to love again and wondering if there were any chance at all that the earl might possibly return after all.

  But she did not sulk, as Aunt Ester certainly would not allow for this; and, too, it wasn’t in her nature to do so. She went about her day as she always did, before the advent of the earl into her life. She rose early with the sun, greeting the coming of full autumn. The temperature chilled, the leaves completed their turn to full color and soon began to drop haphazardly from the trees. She watched, only half-interested now, as the blooms of summer faded entirely, closed and quiescent for the coming winter. The skies seemed to gray more frequently; the sun set earlier in the evening.

  From a perch at the window seat in her bedroom, she watched the sun settle over the far end of the valley, the bright oranges and pinks of early autumn turning now purple and red as the season came upon them fully.

  After several weeks she managed, on several occasions, to think of the earl not at all. To be sure, he still visited her thoughts daily, but not with the hourly frequency that he had first attended her.

  She returned one day in late autumn to the cottage to ready herself for dinner and found a horse tied to the garden gate at the front yard. Excitedly, forgetting that great hope only paved the way for greater disappointment, she dashed into the house, expecting somehow to find the earl within.

  Indeed, her letdown was tremendous then when she spied only Walter Barth, the miller’s son, seated at their dining table. While Isabelle could not determine immediately whether Walter had come calling of his own accord or whether Aunt Ester had somehow induced him to accept an invitation, it was apparent that he was here specifically to pay court to Isabelle and that Aunt Ester thought him a respectable choice as far as suitors went.

  Even pushing aside the fact that he wasn’t very tall and his extremely straight and thin brown hair didn’t wave at all around his head and when he did smile at her she didn’t feel giddy all the way down to her toes, Isabelle thought him not a good idea also because just a week before she had caught him threatening Timothy with his riding crop when her brother had—albeit purposefully—untied Walter’s mount from the post before the Saturday marketplace. The earl would never have done that, even if Timothy had likewise given him good reason.

  But she sat through dinner politely and when it was done, she asked immediately to be excused, claiming a rare ache about her temples. When Aunt Ester came to her room that evening she very kindly asked her not to accept or invite another call from Walter. With a sympathetic smile and a soft kiss to her cheek, Aunt Ester granted her this.

  When Aunt Ester left Isabelle, the door opened again, this time admitting little Molly. As any of her siblings rarely visited her bedroom, Isabelle could now only imagine that her sister was here presently to cause some mischief. Pulling herself upright against the pillows at the top of her bed, Isabelle watched warily as Molly climbed up at the foot of the bed.

  “Are you sad, Belle?” The child wanted to know.

&n
bsp; “Just a little,” Isabelle confided.

  “I was sad, too, when the earl left.” Molly crawled closer to Isabelle at the top of the mattress, snuggling her head against her sister as she hadn’t done in years.

  “You were? I didn’t know you were that fond of the earl,” Isabelle stated softly, rubbing the blonde ringlets at Molly’s temple.

  “I liked him. He was fun. He let me ride his horse.”

  “He did? When was that?”

  “One day he was coming to see you. We were following him from Makesly’s place, but I think he knew the whole time,” she said, idly twirling the ribbons beneath Isabelle’s bodice. “He hid on us and jumped out at us when we were looking for him. Me and Katie screamed really loud. Then we all laughed, and he put me and Katie up on his horse and we rode her all the way to here.”

  “That was very nice,” Isabelle commented, feeling another rush of tears at the thought of the earl’s kindness toward her sisters.

  “I wish he didn’t have to go,” Molly said then. “I don’t think he wanted to.”

  “Why would you think that?” Isabelle asked.

  “‘Cause me and Katie followed you when you went to say goodbye to him,” Molly confessed without guile. “We were peaking in through the open door and we saw him hug you and then you ran off and then he just stood there for a really long time. Then he moved and I thought he was going to shut the door, ‘cause it was still open, but he picked up a bottle of something and he threw it hard and it smashed all over the wall. I don’t know who had to clean that up. Then he did close the door, he slammed it real hard.”

  “Probably guilt,” Isabelle mumbled ungraciously.

  “Probably not,” Molly surprised her by saying.

  Chapter Six

  The third Sunday after the earl had left Sudbury, Isabelle sat in the Throckmoton’s pew at church, listening to the vicar give yet another of his tedious sermons, thinking not at all of the vicar’s tired words, but rather of the Earl of Somersby. She recalled how he had sat there across the aisle from her, squeezed into Mr. and Mrs. Fairhaven’s pew, next to their son, Theodore, and how he had rolled his eyes in silent and amused horror over the length of the good vicar’s sermon that day. And she had smiled at him, thinking he was incredibly handsome with just that one loose curl dangling down upon his forehead. Then she’d laughed outright—which she’d had to cover with an abrupt clearing of her throat—for the young Fairhaven lad had then picked his runny little nose and had wiped it on the earl’s beautiful jacket but the earl knew none of this because he was busy making eyes at Isabelle.

  When the sermon today was done, the congregation stood as one, Isabelle being hustled to her feet by Aunt Ester, as she’d still been lost in thought. They sang loudly but quite carelessly from their hymnals, Uncle Herb’s baritone rising disharmoniously above every other voice.

  They exited the church shortly thereafter and Isabelle was aware of Walter Barth angling through the throng, making his way toward her. She’d managed to avoid him recently and now had to hurry her step quite a bit to keep out of his reach.

  “You want us to slow him down?” Donald surprised her by asking at her side, having seen the agitated glances she’d thrown Walter’s way. Timothy walked beside them as well, looking anxious for a positive reply from Isabelle.

  “Can you do it without injuring him, or incurring his wrath?” She inquired, so much against having to fend off Walter today.

  Her brothers smiled slyly, and shook their heads at her, as if to say she hadn’t enough faith in their abilities. She laughed at this and allowed, “Just stall him enough that I might reach the cottage without him at my side, begging yet again for an invitation to dinner.”

  “He was bloody pathetic last Sunday,” Donald remembered, now shaking his head with a bit of disgust. “Even Uncle Herb was staring at him funny when kept saying, all pitiable like, that he didn’t know what he’d do for dinner since his mama was gone to Marshfield for the week.”

  “He’s catching up to us,” Isabelle worried just as they made it through the door and out into the cool sunshine.

  “G’bye, sis,” Timothy called with a little shove to send her off. “We’ll handle him from here.”

  Without even sparing a glance to see where her aunt and uncle and sisters might be, Isabelle headed for the lane which would take her up the hill and back to the cottage. A few minutes later at the top of the hill, she dared a glance backward and saw her two brother’s playing catch with Walter’s Sunday hat, with Walter unhappily flopping about, trying to intercept their passes.

  Smiling contentedly, thinking those brothers of hers surely did come in handy, she headed toward home, but as she reached the garden gate, she decided instead to sit a while at the creek, just in case Walter should reclaim his hat and pursue her further. Taking then the path which led away from the back of the cottage, Isabelle found herself a few minutes later seated once again at her favorite spot.

  The sun was warm through the breezy air, and she removed her bonnet that it might shine upon her head. She saw two deer further down the creek, a doe and her fawn, though the fawn, having likely been born in the spring, was nearly the size of her mother. They watched Isabelle warily while she sat quite still that they might enjoy the cool water. They did, lapping up the running water, before ambling gracefully away and back into the trees.

  In her head was the last hymn she’d sung in church today and she found herself humming again this melody, putting her hands behind her, upon the edge of the rock on which she sat. She leaned back and tipped her face up toward the sun, thinking she would be sorry to see autumn leave Sudberry. She gave a brief thought to wonder if she would ever after associate autumn with the coming of the earl. She might try to separate the man from the season, she determined, that fall might remain her favorite time of year.

  She sat like this for a good amount of time; in fact, she thought an hour might have passed when she opened her eyes, supposing she ought to start back and help Aunt Ester with dinner. Likely, if her brothers had been unsuccessful and Walter had come calling for her, he’d be long gone by now. She stood and dusted off the skirt of her white frock, retying the ribbons at the empire seam beneath her bosom. When she looked up again, she saw a man atop a horse directly across from her.

  Her heart flip-flopped within her chest. Being that his broad brimmed hat set his face into shadow, it took her a minute to realize that it was the earl. Perhaps then, her heart may have skipped a beat, her hand rising to cover her chest while emotions raged within.

  He sat there, just staring at her, and she wondered for how long he had done so. He did not smile at her, nor acknowledge her presence in any way save for that penetrating stare. Befuddled by this silent inaction, Isabelle could only return the look. She thought him just as handsome as ever, looking powerful and large atop his magnificent black mount.

  “Hullo, my lord,” she called across the water, her voice, even to her own ears, sounding out a question. Why was he here? Her initial response might have been to shed tears of joy at his return but as he sat there silently she didn’t know what to make of it.

  Finally he spoke. “How are you, Isabelle?”

  “Oh, quite fine, my lord,” she answered with false assurance, as if her insides weren’t presently twisting in knots. “And you?”

  “Very well, thank you,” he replied but made no move to come nearer to her. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything at all about the damage done to the Hackenbush manor house at the other side of the valley, would you?”

  If she thought this an odd topic of conversation for him to engage in, she let it be known not at all. “Do you refer to Nigel Hackenbush, former landlord of all of Sudberry, and his Dutchman’s manor?” She asked, referring to the name by which she’d always known the large home; it was said to have been named after the first Hackenbush, who was, it seemed, a Dutchman.

  “I do,” he answered simply.

  “Oh, well, I have no idea,” she said, th
ough that was not entirely true, as she imagined that if the home, vacant now for more than a year since Hackenbush had died without issue, had suffered damage, it would likely have been promoted by her brothers. “Why do you ask, my lord?”

  “I only ask because I have just purchased it and am loathe to spend the winter there if I cannot get the glass repaired in all one hundred and sixty-two windows.”

  “One hundred and sixty-two?”

  “As in, every window within the dwelling,” he clarified, though sounded not at all put out.

  “Oh, my. Well, it had been empty for some time, my lord,” she defended lamely, but her mind was swirling with the news he had just passed on to her. The earl was moving to Sudberry! He would be living in her own little hamlet!

  My Lord! How was she ever to face him on a regular basis, having humiliated herself so completely as she had done by practically throwing herself at him and declaring her unrequited love to him at their last meeting?

  “Do you mind if I cross?” He asked then, as he had on the very first day that they had met.

  She smiled at this. “Not at all, my lord, but you should be aware that you do so at your own risk.”

  “I think I am quite safe,” he called across, dismounting as he did. When he faced her and began to cross, he informed her, “I’d just met your brothers upon the lane. They were keeping good company with some man who seemed quite intent on calling upon you.”

  Isabelle closed her eyes momentarily in mortification. She hoped that neither Timothy nor Donald had given up that she had actually condoned their actions, whatever tactics they might be using now.

  When he was standing before her, with only the space of a foot between them, Isabelle saw how wonderfully his brown eyes shone and then danced with their own mischief as he added, “And I don’t suppose you would know anything about that poor chap being rather manhandled by those brothers of yours?”