And the letter grew longer. And remained unsent.
Paris was thankfully cool on the morning I boarded the train south. The journey from London to Dover, then Dover to Calais, and then Calais to Paris, had been delayed by several days of torrential rain, which made the Channel nigh impassable and the country roads wet quagmires that sucked carriage wheels deep into the muck and refused to let go. But today had—finally—dawned clear and dry, if slightly chilly, and the passage south was smooth and untroubled.
Not at all like my jumbled, fevered mind.
When I’d left Silas’s house that day, hurt that he’d left without thinking to leave me so much as a note, I’d initially set down to write him, to try to explain the myriad of conflicting feelings I felt, to convey the deep, needy love I had for him and also my burning desire to be my own woman.
But as I had tried to write it, I couldn’t articulate what I needed to say. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure myself what I meant. Maybe it was because I had to see his face as I explained to him, I had to know that he understood.
Or maybe it was because I already missed him so much, after only one day without him, that writing a letter felt like a painfully hollow exercise. It was no substitute for what I wanted, what I needed.
How funny that we’d spent so much of our time this last year apart, but now that everything with my aborted marriage was settled, I couldn’t bear to spend another moment without him. Even though I’d told him I wasn’t ready for an engagement.
What is wrong with me? I sounded like an insane person with my inconsistent and plaintive wailings, a disconsolate child that refused to be placated by any alternative.
So after a long, lonely night, my dreams full of Silas, I had made up my mind. I would follow him to his brother’s villa. If nothing else, it would show him that I did love him and I did need him. I went to my solicitor’s to inform him of the termination of my engagement with Hugh, which he’d already heard about. And he’d delivered some good news, at least.
“Not all of the board members are walking away,” he’d said with a smile. “A few of Cunningham’s closest are. But several of them are much more hesitant to resort to something so extreme, especially since Cunningham’s scandal has weakened whatever loyalty they may have had for him. And,” my solicitor had added with a smile, “Martjin van der Sant sent over a business contract late last night.”
“What?” I’d asked. Van der Sant had been so far out of my thoughts in the past twenty-four hours that it took me a moment to process what my solicitor was saying. “He’s still going to partner with my company?”
“There was a short note attached…apparently he was quite impressed by the personal fortitude you exhibited in protecting his daughter, even knowing that it would threaten your prospects.”
Birgit. While I didn’t doubt that he would have come to this conclusion on his own, I also suspected that his daughter had something to do with this.
So I’d signed the papers, sending a silent thank you to Birgit, feeling a fledgling hope about O’Flaherty Shipping, which would have a difficult winter, perhaps, but it would survive.
It would survive.
But hope had long since given way to fretful misery as I made my way down to Provence. What did it matter if my company survived if Silas didn’t want to be with me? What if the personal matter was just a convenient excuse he’d directed his butler to give me, and this was actually him trying to run away?
What if I got to the villa and he shut the door in my face?
It took three days for me to make it from Paris to Vaison-La-Romaine. Three agonizing days. And when I reached the hotel I’d planned on staying in, I went straight to the clerk while my things were unloaded.
“Could you tell me if there is a villa nearby rented by an English family?” I inquired in French. “Cecil-Coke would be the last name.”
The clerk responded in a French that was heavy with the southern accent of the Languedoc, and I struggled to parse out his words. “There is an English family nearby,” he affirmed, “though the gentleman there just died, I’m afraid. Cholera.”
My heart plummeted down to my feet even as my head raced to catch up. “A gentleman died? When?”
“It’s been over a week now.” The clerk thought for a moment, oblivious to my quiet panic, oblivious to the cacophony inside my head.
No. It couldn’t be Silas, he was so healthy when you saw him last.
But the timing’s right. And cholera works fast.
No. It can’t be him.
“And the gentleman’s wife died too,” the clerk finally said. “Before him. Fortunately, the children are all safe.”
God be praised! It’s not Silas!
I hated myself for the sigh of relief I heaved, because the moment I realized that it was Thomas and Charlotte who had died and that my Silas was safe, I also realized how crushed Silas would be by his brother’s death.
A personal matter.
That must have been why he rushed off without a word. Not because he was angry or hurt—though he may have also been those things—but because his world was ending hundreds of miles away. His world and the world of—how many nieces and nephews did he have? Four? Five?
Guilt crashed into me. This entire time, I’d perceived this as either an act of emotional self-preservation or, worse, an act designed to deliberately hurt me. And all along, he’d been wrapped in grief, wrapped in the grief of those small orphaned children, and Jesus, this made every sleepless night and lonely morning feel so fucking trivial. What were a few stray tears in comparison to this kind of loss? What was the pain of a shattered romance in comparison to the pain of a dead brother?
As easy as it was to pretend when we were together, the world didn’t revolve around us. The world was cruel and harsh and full of unexpected pain, and it had yanked Silas away without a care for my needs or even his. And I had been so petty and shallow and selfish to have never even considered that Silas’s trip had nothing to do with me.
I suddenly felt very small. And very stupid.
I arranged for a carriage up to the villa, my mind churning the entire time. It was as if I were King Lear, only too late realizing my destructive self-absorption and narrowness of my vision, and like Lear, I was close to madness and weeping. I’d been so focused on my company and on me, and how could I not see that Silas was the only thing that made me happy? The only person who completed me?
Why had I run away from my own happiness?
Twilight had set around the villa, pale crepuscular light casting long shadows around the walls and tiled roof, clustering in between the even rows of lavender stretching out toward the horizon. I walked through these shadows after exiting my carriage, flexing my fingers and reminding myself to breathe.
Breathe breathe breathe.
Because Silas had every right to shut me out of his grief. He had every right to turn me away, even if his brother hadn’t died, because of how we’d left things.
I prayed that he wouldn’t, though. I prayed that he’d unleash his anger and his hurt on me, punish me and use me, make me suffer as he used my body to soothe the ache inside him—anything but shut me out.
Voices spilled out of the courtyard as I approached, happy voices. The heavy wooden doors were cracked, and so I could see the scene inside, lit by several hanging lanterns, and when I saw it, my throat closed with emotion.
There he was, my Silas, tall and handsome and already a little tanned from his two weeks here in France. He was dressed more casually than he hardly ever was—trousers and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow. A tie loosely knotted around his neck, loose enough to expose the dip of his collarbone and the jut of his Adam’s apple. A day-old beard roughened those sharp cheekbones and that even sharper jaw, and in the lantern-light, his blue eyes looked deep purple or black. He was laughing—an infectiously happy sound that resounded in my very bones—and my chest tightened as I realized that was so quintessentially Silas. Laughing in the face
of tragedy. Finding joy in pain.
He was chasing four small children, his laughs interspersed with chesty mock-growls, and his loping gait punctuated by low, long swipes of his arms. He was clearly supposed to a bear of some sort, and the children squealed with fearful delight when he drew close enough seize them, which he did often and then tickled them until they begged for mercy.
And in the corner, sitting on a chair, a stout older woman dandied a baby on her knee, and Silas would also occasionally stop to plant a kiss on the little one’s head with a gentle affection.
If the mere act of witnessing a scene such as this had the power to impregnate, then I would be pregnant this instant. Watching Silas in his element, with the people he cared about, made my face flush with happiness. Not the selfish kind of happiness I was used to, but that almost spiritual kind of happiness that you feel in response to someone else’s. I was happy that Silas was happy, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t currently part of that happiness.
But the thought came anyway. You don’t belong here.
And I didn’t. I was intruding. Silas had created a small island of joy for his family in the midst of all this pain, and who was I to invade that with my need to apologize? My need for resolution?
I would come back, I decided. Later maybe. Or I could send a letter…yes, that would be best. A short letter or an invitation to talk. That would be the polite thing to do, given the circumstances.
I turned, moving away from the courtyard door and back to my waiting carriage, and then I heard his voice.
“Molly?”
There was a pause between my saying her name and her turning back, and for a brief instant, I wondered if I’d imagined her face at the courtyard door, imagined the lantern-light glinting in her copper hair.
But then she turned and, after a moment’s hesitation, stepped through the door, her figure resolving itself out of the shadows. She was real.
She was here.
My Molly.
Something was swelling in my chest, something heavy and light all at the same time, and it took me a moment to recognize the feeling of simple, pure happiness. Thomas had only been dead a week, and the feeling was already so foreign and strange, as if it had been years since I’d felt it instead of days.
She’d obviously been traveling all day; her fashionably striped silk dress was noticeably creased and her hair was slightly tousled from the wind. But she looked more beautiful than she’d ever looked to me, set against the Provencal dusk, her normally fierce face shy and vulnerable as my nieces and nephews rushed up to her to ask her who she was, where she was from, if she had any sweets.
And when she bent down to say hello, her rumpled hair spilling over her shoulder and creating a swinging shadow on the swan-like curve of her neck, something other than my heart started swelling too. Fuck. That neck and that hair. How had I forgotten how painfully sexy she was? How irresistible? How effortlessly destructive she could be with just a casual flick of her hair or a smiling one-shouldered shrug?
Collecting myself—and discreetly adjusting myself—I stepped forward to rescue her from the herd of children.
“Come inside,” I said, offering a hand to her.
She slid her slender fingers into mine, her eyes raising up, sapphires framed in dark ruby lashes. The hollows and curves of her face were filled with shadows, and she looked sadder and wiser than when I last saw her.
“I don’t want to intrude,” she whispered.
“Please, Mary Margaret.”
She flushed, a flush that was barely visible right now, but that I knew would stain her chest as well as her cheeks. Perhaps she was remembering all the times I’d used her name as I’d fucked her, as I’d held her down and made her come again and again for me.
And now I was remembering too.
I angled my body away from the others in the courtyard and leaned in. “Either you can walk inside yourself or I can throw you over my shoulder and carry you in—and then spank you later for your impertinence. What is it going to be?”
Her eyes grew round and her lips parted. “Both options are tempting,” she breathed.
“Naughty girl.”
I tugged on her hand, and together we walked inside the house.
Bertha and I put the children to bed, and then I sent someone down to the kitchen to bring up a supper for Molly, since I guessed she hadn’t eaten. Rather than eat in the dining hall with its vast dining table and cavernous ceilings, I had her installed on the villa’s portico, which overlooked the lavender fields, lush carpets in the night.
The sky was a breathtaking dome of twinkling stars; the Milky Way wreathed purple and pink-gold directly in front of us. Molly had her face tilted up to the sky, eyes pinned to the colorful display as if searching for meaning there.
“La Voie Lactée,” I murmured, setting down a silver tray of food and wine.
She smiled, keeping her eyes on the sky. “Even in French, it sounds so domestic. The Milky Way. Such a humble name for such incredible beauty.”
I gazed at her, drinking her in. “That happens sometimes, Molly.”
“Are you saying my name is humble?” she asked, not missing a beat.
“I would never.”
With a sigh, she finally tore her eyes away from the stars and looked to me. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
I held her gaze steadily for a few seconds. “Are you talking about Thomas and Charlotte? Or what happened between us before I left?”
“Both.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “More. Everything. I’m sorry for everything.”
I let out a long breath. “These last two weeks would have been so much easier with you by my side.”
“I know. I was foolish.”
“About that.” I poured myself a glass of wine to disguise the uncertainty in my face and tone. “Maybe you weren’t so foolish.”
Beside me, she’d grown completely still, a rabbit that knows the falcon is swooping overhead.
Be strong, Silas. Think of her life, not just of your own pitiful wants.
I took a deep breath. “When I saw you walk through the door tonight, I thought my greatest wish had been realized. That you had found me, and that I would finally be able to claim you in all the ways I wanted to—fuck you and marry you and spend the rest of my life loving you as your husband. But then I realized, as I was saying goodnight to the children, that this great wish wasn’t actually my greatest wish.”
“It wasn’t?” she asked warily.
“No. You being happy is my greatest wish. And Molly, if you weren’t sure you could be happy with me before…” Fuck, this was hard to say. Hard to do, knowing there was a good chance that she would take the escape hatch I was offering. “I am the children’s legal guardian now. And I love them. I plan on being as involved as their parents were, not only because they are dear to me, but because they deserve that, at least. That if they are going to be deprived of the two best parents the world has ever known, then at least I can try my hardest, even knowing that I’ll fall short in so many ways.”
Molly didn’t speak, but her eyes searched my face imploringly, though imploring me for what, I didn’t know.
“They mean everything, Molly,” I continued. “So I guess what I’m trying to say is that they are bound to me. They are now, and forever will be, the biggest part of my life, and any woman who loved me would have to love them too.”
I reached for her hand but she drew it away, her mouth growing tight. My stomach sank, but I finished my speech anyway, already steeling myself for the inevitable rejection. “I know the idea of an engagement scared you. And damn it all if the idea of being your husband isn’t the thing I fall asleep dreaming about every fucking night—but I can’t ask you to take on this. A family. Children you don’t even know. And so, with all of my love and my blessing, I want you to know that I understand if you don’t want to continue our relationship in whatever form it takes.”
Her hands were balled in her lap and her mouth
was set. “Do you really think I’m that heartless?” she asked in a low voice. “Do you really think I’m that cold? That I would have such distaste for recently orphaned children that I would rather not see you at all than get to know them?”
I sighed. “It would be more than getting to know, Molly. For all legal and emotional purposes, they are my children now. Traveling, working, even playing…everything has to change. It’s a sacrifice that I make gladly, because I love them and because a big family is the vision I’ve always had for my own life, but I know that isn’t what you’ve wanted for yourself. I can’t ask you to give up your own vision and your own future.”
“You don’t think I apprehend that much?” Her voice had gone Irish in her anger, her words curling up into themselves. Musical, lovely, and most of all, incendiary. “I’m not an imbecile, Silas, and I’m not some Jezebel incapable of warmth and compassion. I wouldn’t abandon you simply because I didn’t anticipate having a family in this way.”
“But you’re under no obligation to stay. To love me,” I said gently. “This isn’t your burden to bear. It’s mine.”
For a moment, I thought she was truly going to blow up and rain insults (and possibly physical blows) upon my head. But she turned away, staring straight ahead for a moment. Then she stood up and walked over to my chair, kneeling in front of me.
My mind had no idea what was going on, but the moment her hands slid against the inside of my thighs, my cock leapt to happy attention, already half-hard just from her proximity alone. My body responded automatically in other ways—my legs spread to grant her better access and I trailed one finger down her neck. Goosebumps erupted across her skin.
“I want your burdens,” she said. “I want to help you carry the weight of them. I want to…” her eyes blazed in the dark. “I want to surrender to you. I want you to exorcise your grief on me, I want you to use me to feel better. I want you to fuck me while you’re angry, while you’re furious and hurt.”
The Wedding of Molly O'Flaherty Page 10
