Longing for a Liberating Love: A Historical Regency Romance Book

by Bridget Barton

  Alina watched those hands with a sort of removed appreciation. He was a handsome man, engaging and thoughtful and very amusing, but there was something about his nearness that pushed her away. She couldn’t help thinking of Theo’s hands on Jinx’s shoulders when she saw the colonel’s hands kneading the night sky; she couldn’t help wishing she was listening to the coachmen with Theo, hearing his thoughts on their bawdy banter.

  How preposterous, she admonished herself, to be thinking of Theo at such a time as this. She should embrace the evening, not think about filling that void left by Jonas. But it wasn’t a void, really. It was great, gaping wound that he’d carved in her heart, and the thought of Colonel Ellis strolling into that wound felt like salt burning away at the edges. Theo was gentle—Theo was balm. Theo was—she shook her head to clear it.

  “You weren’t listening to a word I said just now, were you?” the colonel drawled, turning his brilliant green eyes in her direction.

  “I’m afraid my mind was elsewhere,” she admitted quietly. She felt fractured, like a broken vase that the colonel wouldn’t know was broken until he picked her up and saw her shatter in his hands.

  “I was asking if you would like to go to the Chain Pier sometime next week. I’ll bring you to Constable, and we’ll watch him butcher the sky and embrace the water like a lover.”

  She blinked at the frankness of his language. “Oh, my.”

  He laughed in the night sky. “Come—you are not like the others in that warm assembly room. You are special, and you needn’t be tied to all their dull conventions. Come walk with me along the seashore. It will be beautiful, for sure, though in some parts I will confess it smells very strongly of fish.”

  Alina didn’t know why she said it then, and even later as she rode home in the carriage with Imogene she couldn’t determine what had possessed her in the moment to answer as she did. Perhaps it was the moonlight, or the colonel’s bright eyes. More likely, it was the desperate urge to banish Theo from her mind.

  Whatever the reason, she answered him softly but clearly, “I think I could manage a walk on the seashore.”

  Chapter 12

  One walk turned into two, and two into four.

  Each time, Alina met Colonel Ellis by the wayside and walked without linking arms with him along the path to the shore, down to the fishing docks and then back again to the house. Imogene made no comment for the first few days, but her secret smiles were enough.

  On the walks, they simply talked, but even that was sparse. It seemed to be enough for the colonel just to be close to Alina, but she couldn’t shake a feeling of misplaced affection. She felt she was doing Colonel Ellis wrong by agreeing to do even the simple act of walking with him, but she didn’t know how to deny him. Even if she could, she would be denying Imogene, as well, who had developed the distinct philosophy that Colonel Ellis was the solution to all Alina’s problems.

  “Do you wonder why it is that we always walk this way?” he asked one day, when the sun was high in the sky and Alina had been forced to bring a parasol along for protection.

  “I had not wondered,” she answered honestly. “I thought it was just your favorite route.”

  “And you never ask to change it? Is there another way you would prefer?”

  “I had not thought about it,” she confessed. “But tell me, why is it that you stay on the same path, if the reason is not your personal preference?”

  “Because I feel you are a butterfly that has lit for only a moment in my life and will flutter away at the slightest hint of change,” he told her.

  The impact of his words on Alina was stronger than she let on. She hated the vulnerability in them, the poetry from a man who talked more of ship’s hulls and overland conquests than love and affection. She could see the crevasse that she’d somehow opened in his heart, and it frightened her.

  “I am not so easily dissuaded,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “If you wish to walk somewhere else, I will go along with it.”

  “And if I don’t wish to walk somewhere else—if I wish to be something else?” There was a dangerous longing in his voice.

  Alina sped up, her slippered feet eating up the sandy ground like frightened rabbits. “Tell me about your time overseas,” she invited. “Tell me about your favorite campaign.”

  He turned to her, his eyes deep and stormy. “You wish to change the subject.” He sighed, running his hands through his hair. “Alright, little butterfly, let us alight on another branch.”

  At the end of their walk, he caught her hand for a brief moment in his own. “We have avoided the inevitable for now,” he said gently, “but it will not be so forever.”

  She didn’t ask him what he meant, because she didn’t want to know.

  There were others that came to call on her, some soldiers and one man of the cloth, as well as a merchant who had known Imogene for some time. None of them made it past the pleasantries in the front parlour, and Alina wondered if this, too, was a mistake. Because she allowed no one else the privilege of seaside walks, she felt it leant more import to her times with Colonel Ellis than she truly felt.

  Jinx, for his part, seemed oblivious to any drama surrounding his mother’s love life. He had fallen for Brighton as thoroughly as a boy could ever fall for the sea. He spent every day by the shore, running up to his waist in the heavy waves and, inevitably caught on one bigger than himself, running back, drenched, to his mother’s arms.

  “Mama, look what I found!” he cried one day, returning with his shirt brimming with shells. “They’re the colours of the sea!”

  Among the brown curling castoff shells of hermit crabs and starfish, there were handfuls of blue sea glass. Alina took the glass in her own hand, peering at the beautiful colour as though it was an enchantment that could pull her inside of it. “This is gorgeous, Jinx. How did you find it?”

  “Under the rocks in the tide pools,” he said with a laugh. “There are crabs there, too, so you have to be careful not to get a pinch.”

  “What does it remind you of?” she asked, always prodding him to be more descriptive, more creative, to fill his mind with questions until his curiosity brimmed over into action.

  “The sky,” he said promptly. Then, a moment later, “And your eyes, Mama.”

  She smiled at him indulgently. “You’ve learned a thing or two about compliments from your Aunt Imogene.”

  “That’s not what Aunt Imogene said. It was the colonel. He said your eyes were like the sea.”

  Alina stiffened at the thought of her admirer touching the heart of her son, as well. “Do you like the colonel?” she asked tentatively.

  Jinx was quiet for a long time, rearranging his shells into stiff lines of military precision. Alina thought for a moment that he’d forgotten the question entirely, and even when he did speak again she wasn’t sure if his answer was in relation to the colonel at all. He said simply, “I miss Theo, Mama.”

  She looked down at his little head, thankful that he was not peering up at her enough to catch the shimmer of sadness brimming in her eyes. “Me too, little one. Me too.”

  It was halfway through her stay with Imogene when the situation finally came to a head. It had been a beautiful day in the morning, but the late summer rains were already coming to claim the English afternoons, and the clouds had begun to gather as Alina and the colonel made their usual trek along the ocean side.

  “We’d best turn back,” Alina suggested, peering at the clouds. “It looks as though we will get rain earlier this afternoon.”

  Colonel Ellis agreed, but no sooner had they made their change of direction than the sky broke open in a torrent and the rains began to pour down on their heads. Alina was wearing only a thin, dark cotton dress to stay cool in the summer heat, and in a moment she was soaked through to the bone. They ran for cover, splashing ankle deep into the tidal waves beneath the pier and halting there against one of the wooden pillars while the rain drummed in a steady curtain just outside.

 
Alina looked down at her soaked clothing, suddenly conscious of her hair shaken loose and dripping around her shoulders. “I am already ruined,” she said, trying to sound light-hearted. “Perhaps we should just make our way home.”

  “Not even a downpour could ruin you,” the colonel told her, that dangerous note back in his deep voice.

  Alina felt he was suddenly very close and she took a step back, pressing into the barnacled edge of the wood pillar. The colonel’s eyes were full, and his confession came fast and soft, barely audible above the thrumming downpour.

  “Alina—I may call you Alina, mayn’t I? We’ve become such good friends,” he pressed on, his voice shaking with emotion, “you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire you. I have since the first moment I met you. You have captured my heart, my imagination, and my will. I wish to lay all of myself at your feet.”

  He caught her hand and she winced at his touch, at his naked emotion, at the improperness of their situation beneath the hidden pier. He kept on, unrelenting as the rain.

  “I would give anything, Alina, to have you be mine forever. I don’t care how long I have to wait until you have satisfied yourself from your grief over your late husband. However long it may be, I will wait out the time. I long only to hold you now and forever, in my arms and in my heart. Allow me to care for you. Allow me to care for your son.”

  She couldn’t breathe, and she hated the way he stood before her so suddenly vulnerable and breakable. He was shaking, she could see that now, beneath his great dark coat. He was shaking because he knew her answer even before it came out of her mouth. She had to speak fast and hard, before she lost her nerve and sold herself to him for the price of peace and comfort.

  “Colonel Ellis, I am touched by your words—”

  “No, don’t say that.” He let out a small agonized cry and took a step toward her, pressing her hand tightly in his. “Please, don’t begin your refusals, little butterfly.”

  “I am not—” She paused, rallying her strength. “I am not a butterfly, flitting from one thing to another.” I am a stone, she thought drily. A stone who knows better than to open her heart again. “I am only a woman, not this perfect thing that you’ve placed upon this pedestal. I am no better than any other woman, and I do not think I would make you happy. You would only have part of me, for the rest of our lives.”

  She had meant this last sentence as a reference to her grief, but as it came out of her mouth, she saw another figure standing phantom-like behind the colonel, and she knew the truth—part of her would always belong to the poor, kind barrister she could never have.

  “Part of you is better than none,” the colonel replied, rain dripping from his limp hair into his eyes. “I love you, Alina.”

  “Please.” She pulled her hand back. “I am still in mourning. Surely you can see that. I am not free to be given to any man, and I am not free to return your affection.”

  “I knew it, all along I knew it.” His words were bitter now, angry. “I knew it was why you never attended any event on my arm. You were unwilling to commit your heart—it should have been a sign to me that you never flirted, or sought me out. But I thought perhaps you were overly cautious, overly pious, that you felt deeply for me and didn’t know how to tell me as much. I never suspected you were made of stone.”

  Alina stared back at him, tears threatening her eyes. She refused to let them fall, refused to make this moment about her pain when he was so openly breaking in front of her. Instead, she laid a gentle hand on his arm.

  “I’m sorry to have hurt you. Please, leave with my regrets as your comfort.” Go far away, she added curtly in her mind. Save yourself.

  He stepped away at last, back into the pouring rain. “I will go, as the lady requests,” he said bitterly. “I told you it would come to this, that you would fly away as soon as I made an overture. But I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer; I couldn’t.”

  She watched him go until the pouring rain had blurred his figure on the beach, and then she leaned her head back against the wooden post and wept as she’d never wept before. It wasn’t for the colonel that she cried—she didn’t wish him back again—it was for another. A tall, kind man, who was forever out of reach. She could feel him retreating from her just as the colonel had done, and now, weeping in the ocean, she knew she’d felt that retreat since the moment she’d pushed him away the day of the funeral.

  He’d been pulling away so long now, she knew, there was no hope of him ever coming back. She stayed under the pier until the rain dissipated, and then began her slow, steady trudge back to the house. She passed a few familiar faces but kept her head down to avoid conversation, struggling to find that inner peace that she would need to greet Jinx as a mother ought. Thankfully, when she arrived, sodden and disgruntled and still puffy-eyed at Imogene’s house, Jinx was in the back garden leaping through puddles.

  Alina slipped upstairs, wanting to avoid Willa’s exclamations of distress at the sight of her dress, but when she walked into the well-lit room she found Imogene waiting in a chair in the corner.

  “There you are,” Imogene said, standing up and extending her arms openly to the sodden girl before her. “Come, dear. Tell me everything.”

  Chapter 13

  “And so you sent him away.”

  Imogene stood and put another log on the fire. Alina had changed out of her sodden clothes into a simple evening wrap and was curled up in one of the chairs with her hair loose and damp around her shoulders. She had a cup of tea in her cold fingers, and her eyes trained on her friend.

  “I did. I couldn’t do anything else.”

  “Couldn’t you?” Imogene asked, a leading question lingering in her tone. “You could have been honest with him, Alina. You could have told him that you are afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Alina protested. “That wasn’t why I turned him down.”

  “He’s a good man,” Imogene told her. “Really good. He has an excellent income, a fine and respected place in society, and a heart that truly loves you. That’s more than you ever received from Jonas. You were so quick to run off with that self-righteous husband of yours that you never had a chance to see the world as it would be with someone like Colonel Ellis, full of kind people that will treat you the way that you deserve to be treated.”

  Alina winced, hurt by her friend’s frankness. Imogene continued on, oblivious to the impact her words were having. “You are always so reticent to take action. You never stood up for yourself with Jonas, and you’re not standing up for yourself now. Fight for love, Alina—don’t be apathetic.”

  “Stop!” Alina cried, louder than she’d intended. She pressed her hands over her ears and curled into a smaller ball on the settee. “Stop, you’re speaking to me like he used to, like someone who knows what is best for me. You don’t know everything, Imogene. I did fight for myself—I did stand up for what I thought was right, and I was rewarded with ridicule and abuse. Still, despite that, I stood tall and I clung to my principles. I was a good mother and a decent wife.”

  Imogene fell silent, stricken.

  Voice shaking, Alina continued. “I said no to the colonel not out of fear, but out of a knowledge of what was right. I love another.”

  “I don’t mean to attack you, dear,” Imogene said gently, “but I just don’t understand. How can you possibly still love Jonas after everything that he has done to you? You must know that rumours are as active here in Brighton as they are in London—I know who appeared at Jonas’ funeral; I know who he carried around London on his arm, and I know from your own mouth now that he hurled insults at you as well as physical abuse. How can you still love him?”

  “Not. Him.” The words came quiet but firm from Alina’s mouth, and they lifted above her with a soft freedom, like a dove carrying her away from all her troubles. At last, she’d said it out loud for someone other than her own tortured thoughts.