“And a husband who loves his wife,” Astrid said in low, vicious tones, “doesn’t leave her.”
“I’m here, for God’s sake,” Andrew said, holding her more firmly still. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“You went to bed without me.”
He went still, insight rendering him mute and paralyzed. He’d made the Dreaded Worst Mistake; he’d committed that single unforgivable blunder every male with sense worries about. Not in his words, apparently, but in his deeds, or in what he’d failed to do.
“I see,” he said, turning Astrid loose and locking the door. As he crossed the room back to Astrid, he picked up the pile of gowns on the floor and tossed them over a chair. Then he stood before his wife, directly before her.
“I was trying,” he said in clipped, frustrated tones, “to be considerate of my exhausted, sleeping wife. The same wife upon whom murder had been attempted, if I recall. The wife who had borne the burden of a series of uncomfortable revelations from me just before weeping her heart out on my shoulder.”
Astrid’s gaze remained fixed on that shoulder.
“I awoke alone,” she said in a small, broken voice. “Again, Andrew. I fell asleep in your arms, and I awoke alone, alone. I can’t be married to you like this, I cannot.”
“And I,” Andrew said softly, “don’t want to be married to you like this either.”
She raised tortured eyes to his, and he feared—feared—what might come out of her mouth.
“For God’s sake.” Andrew’s right hand moved as if he would touch her, but then dropped back to his side. “Astrid, don’t go, please. I love you, and I want to make love with you. Always. I don’t want you to wake up without me—I don’t want to wake up without you. I don’t ever want to wake up without you again.”
He let her see into his soul. He let her see the vulnerability, the hope, and most of all, the love she’d found in him. He loved her, and a man who loved and who was loved was not at liberty to wander his existence away on foreign shores.
It was the hardest truth he’d faced, but he bore her scrutiny without flinching.
“Say it again, Andrew,” she said softly. “If you mean these words, prepare to say them often for the rest of your life.”
For the rest of his life…
Relief coursed through him, and joy—and lust—and love.
Most especially, love.
“You, Astrid Alexander, are the home my heart has longed for, and I would be the home your heart has craved as well. I will be the father of your children and your partner in all that life holds in the years to come.”
More poetry welled up, but he fell silent as Astrid studied him at interminable length.
“You want more children, then? Children of your own?”
“Every child you bear will be a child of mine,” Andrew said, because it was a simple truth, easily given. “If God wills, we’ll have a large, happy family.” Though based on the way Astrid’s lips turned up at the corners, her will would have something to do with the size of their family too.
Her smile died aborning, and Andrew felt as if his heartbeat suspended with it.
“You must not make love to me as another farewell, Andrew. Not ever. I cannot bear it.”
He sat on the bed and steered her by the hips to stand between his legs. She’d put her finger on a truth. All of his lovemaking with her had borne an element of parting, of loss, and acceptance that she would soon be telling him good-bye, because good-byes were all he’d thought he deserved.
“I could learn from you how to make love as something other than a farewell, Wife, but you must be patient with me, for I can be slow to learn the most important things.”
She wrapped her arms around him, bringing him the flowery fragrance of her person and the sweeter scent of welcome. “We will learn together, Husband, and be patient with each other too. We will be patient with each other quite often.”
***
Three months later
“Andrew?”
Three pairs of male eyes riveted on Felicity’s smiling face.
“You can go up now, and congratulations on the birth of a fine, healthy daughter.”
Andrew was out the door like a shot, leaving Heathgate and Fairly to call for the champagne, while he bounded up the steps two at a time.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Andrew asked, closing the bedroom door quietly behind him.
“I have spent the past six hours getting in and out of the bed, Andrew,” Astrid replied. “Unless you are prepared to share the bed with me, I have no intention of wasting any more time there.”
“That’s all right then,” Andrew said, slipping the sleeve button from his right cuff.
“Andrew, what are you doing?”
“If I have to spend the next week in bed with you so you’ll take care of yourself properly, then into bed I go,” he said, freeing the second sleeve button.
“Stop that, Husband. I was being ridiculous.”
Astrid was whole, she was scolding him, and he could breathe for the first time in weeks. She could be as ridiculous as she pleased. Andrew crossed to the window seat where Astrid was perched and sat down beside her.
“Are you all right?” She looked tired, but exultant too, with a luminous quality that was more than the late-afternoon spring sun on her hair.
“Andrew, I am…” She leaned on him, and Andrew felt his heart turn over with joy. “I am in awe…”
“May I see her?”
“No,” Astrid teased. “You have to wait until she’s eighteen, at least. Of course you may see her.” She carefully unwrapped the tiny bundle she held cradled in her arms, and a small, sleepy face emerged. The baby sported a golden-blond peach fuzz of hair and a tiny rosebud mouth.
“She’s perfect,” Andrew said, stroking a finger down the baby-fine cheek.
“Here.” Astrid tucked the blanket back around her daughter—their daughter—and handed the child to Andrew.
Andrew accepted the baby, accepted the implicit trust with which Astrid had handed her over—to him. “I am overwhelmed by her… by you.”
Overwhelmed was accurate, Astrid thought, smiling at her husband and daughter. In the past few months, Andrew had struggled to become a more communicative, trusting husband. For him, it was hard work. He tried Astrid’s patience, and she tried his, bludgeoning him with sentiment and argument and a relentless pursuit of his honest involvement in their marriage. Sometimes they got it wrong, and each had to retreat and reconsider, until the other could be approached again more thoughtfully, or more overtly.
But more and more, they got it right. And as the weeks had gone on and the winter had turned to spring, their love had blossomed like the verdant, well-tended land they lived on.
Andrew wrapped one arm around his wife and kept the baby cradled in the other. “I feel an instant willingness to slay dragons and smite griffons and otherwise take on any challenge for our daughter. This is amazing…”
“Were you concerned?” This was, after all, not his biological child—whom he could not take his eyes off of.
“A bit.”
Which meant he’d been terrified.
“Me too,” Astrid said, resting against him again. “I love my nephews and my nieces, but I wasn’t at all sure I would immediately take to someone who did her level best to split me in two on her way into the world.”
Andrew kissed the baby’s cheek, the tenderness of the gesture threatening to tear Astrid’s heart asunder. “You were concerned I might not be smitten with her at sight?”
“Of course not. She’s a pretty girl, Andrew. You didn’t stand a chance.”
“I suppose not,” he agreed, a smile spreading to his every feature. “What shall we call her?”
“Well, we are not calling her Herbertia, or anything ridiculous like that. No H names at all, if you please. I’m surprised we didn’t consider this before—babies do need names.”
“What about Lucy?” Andrew suggested, snug
gling his wife and daughter to him more closely.
“For the light she brings? I like it—today is the equinox, isn’t it?”
“It is. Maybe Lucy Elizabeth?”
“I can live with that. I am not sure, however, I can live with waiting three months before starting on the conception of her first sibling.”
“But wait we shall,” Andrew said, smiling ruefully. “And what did you mean her first sibling?”
Astrid kissed him on the cheek. “I meant exactly what I said. Exactly.”
They lasted nine weeks.
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to acknowledge my dear mama, whose initial experience with childbearing involved the procedure now referred to as a manual version. As if that challenge weren’t enough, her obstetrician had not wanted to upset his patient, so he kept his suspicions about twins to himself. Mom did not learn she was carrying twins until the nurse told her, “Keep pushing, Mrs. Burrowes. You’re still in labor.” My brother Dick showed up three minutes after John’s arrival in the world, though both have ever known how to make a noteworthy entrance.
Second, thanks are due in another direction. When I wrote this book, life was handing me a few lemons. Beloved Offspring’s efforts to leave the nest were not going well, my law practice was reeling from the effects of some nasty, awful cases, and the economy seemed to be doing much of its contracting right in the neighborhood of my checking account. I still had the means to regularly ride my horse, Delray the Wonder Pony, a 17.1 hand Oldenburg gelding who was and ever shall be one of the Good Big Things to happen in my life.
I’d show up for my riding lessons feeling like crap, eighteen child abuse cases in my head, my dear daughter in distress I could not help her with, and no relief in sight. My instructor, Todd Bryan, would not ask me about that stuff. Todd’s a smart guy (and a helluva horseman); he could probably see the alligators riding right behind me on Delray’s croup. Instead, he would ask me “How’s the writing going?” and between playing with flying changes in our warm up, and eventually getting down to business at the trot, all the bad things would go away, and the stories and the ride would take their place.
In every riding lesson, I was reminded of two things. First, in Todd, his wife Becky, and the other folks at the barn, I had friends who knew what I was dealing with—riding buddies who honestly did not care if I ever learned to sit the trot (and I still haven’t, not properly), provided I kept showing up for the ride. Second, the writing was going well.
When I write, I’m happy. I needed my friends, my horse, and my riding to remind me of that, and they did. And when the writing goes well, much else in life takes care of itself.
May you have riding buddies, and may your writing always go well.
Read on for an excerpt from
Douglas, Lord of Heartache
Coming January 2014 from Grace Burrowes
and Sourcebooks Casablanca
The child was small, helpless, and in harm’s way.
As Douglas Allen drew his horse to a halt, he absorbed more, equally disturbing facts:
The grooms clustered in the barn doorway would do nothing but mill about, moving their lips in silent prayer and looking sick with dread.
A woman—the child’s mother?—unnaturally pale at the foot of the huge oak in the stable yard, was also likely paralyzed with fear. The child, standing on a sturdy limb of the old tree, thirty feet above the ground, was as white-faced as her mother.
“Rose,” the woman said in a tight, stern voice, “you will come down this instant, do you hear me?”
“I don’t want to come down!” came a retort from the heights of the oak.
Douglas was no expert on children, but the girl looked to be about five years old. Though she stood on one limb, she also anchored herself to the tree with a fierce hold on the branch above her. When she made her rude reply, she stomped her foot, which caused the branch she grasped to shake as well.
Douglas heard the danger before he saw it. A low, insistent drone, one that would have been undetectable but for the stillness of the stable yard.
At Rose’s display of stubbornness, the woman’s hands closed into white-knuckled fists. “Rose,” she said, her voice an agony of controlled desperation, “if you cannot climb down, then you must hold very, very still until we can get you down.”
“But you promised I could stay up here as long as I wanted.”
Another stomp, followed by another ominous, angry droning.
Douglas took in two more facts: The child was unaware of the hornet’s nest hanging several yards out on the higher branch, and she was not at all unwilling to come down. She was unable. He recognized a desperate display of bravado when he saw one, having found himself in an adult version of the same futile posturing more than once in recent months.
He stripped off his gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of his riding jacket. Next, he shed his jacket, slung it across the horse’s withers, turned back his cuffs, and rode over to the base of the tree. After taking a moment to assess the possibilities, he used the height of the horse’s back to hoist himself into the lower limbs.
“Miss Rose,” he called out in the steady, no-nonsense voice his governess had used on him long ago, “you will do as your mother says and be still as a garden statue until I am able to reach you, do you understand? We will have no more rudeness”—Douglas continued to climb, branch by branch, toward the child—“you will not shout”—another several feet and he would be on the same level as she—“and you most assuredly will not be stamping your foot in an unladylike display of pique.”
The child raised her foot as if to stomp again. Douglas watched that little foot and knew a fleeting regret that his life would end now—regret and resentment.
But no relief. That was something.
The girl lowered her foot slowly and wrinkled her nose as she peered down at Douglas. “What’s peek?”
“Pique”—he secured his weight by wrapping one leg around a thick branch—“is the same thing as a taking, a pout, a ladylike version of a tantrum. Now come here, and we will get you out of this tree before your mama can devise a truly appalling punishment for your stubbornness.”
The child obeyed, crouching so he could catch her about the waist with both hands—which did occasion relief, immense relief. The droning momentarily increased as the girl left her perch.
“You are going to climb around me now,” Douglas instructed, “and affix yourself like a monkey to my back. You will hang on so tightly that I barely continue to breathe.”
Rose clambered around, assisted by Douglas’s secure grip on her person, and latched on to his back, her legs scissored around his torso.
“I wanted to come down,” she confided when she was comfortably settled, “but I’d never climbed this high before, and I could not look down enough to figure my way to the ground. My stomach got butterflies, you see. Thank you for helping me get down. Mama is very, very vexed with me.” She laid her cheek against Douglas’s nape and huffed out a sigh as he began to descend. “I was scared.”
Douglas was focused on his climbing—it had been ages since he’d been up a literal tree—but he was nearly in conversation with a small child, perhaps for the first time since he’d been a child.
Another unappealing aspect to an unappealing day.
“You might explain to your mama you were stuck,” he said as they approached the base of the tree. He slipped back onto the horse, nudged it over to where the woman stood watching him, and then swung out of the saddle, Rose still clinging to his back. He reached around and repositioned her on his hip.
“Madam, I believe I have something belonging to you.”
“Mama, I’m sorry. I was st-stuck.” The child’s courage failed her, and weeping ensued.
“Oh, Rose,” her mother cried quietly, and the woman was, plague take this day, also crying. She held out her arms to the child, but because Rose was still wrapped around Douglas, he stepped forward, thinking to hand Rose
off to her mother. Rose instead hugged her mother from her perch on Douglas’s hip, bringing Douglas and the girl’s mother into a startling proximity.
The woman wrapped an arm around her child, the child kept two legs and an arm around Douglas, and Douglas, to keep himself, mother, and child from toppling into an undignified heap, put an arm around the mother’s shoulders. She, much to his shock, tucked in to his body, so he ended up holding both females as they became audibly lachrymose.
Douglas endured this strange embrace, assuring himself nobody cried forever.
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Grace Burrowes hit the bestseller lists with her debut, The Heir, followed by The Soldier, Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal, Lady Eve’s Indiscretion, and Lady Sophie’s Christmas Wish. The Heir was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2010, The Soldier a Publishers Weekly Best Spring Romance of 2011, Lady Sophie’s Christmas Wish won Best Historical Romance of the Year in 2011 from RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards, Lady Louisa’s Christmas Knight was a Library Journal Best Book of 2012, and The Bridegroom Wore Plaid, the first in her trilogy of Scotland-set Victorian romances, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012. All of her historical romances have received extensive praise, including starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist.
Grace is a practicing family law attorney and lives in rural Maryland. She loves to hear from her readers and can be reached through her website at graceburrowes.com.
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