When he got back with the water pitcher and a towel Guinevere was still sprawled across the rumpled sheets. She smiled drowsily at him and pulled herself into sitting position against the pillows. ‘Thank you.’
‘It is cold,’ he warned, dipping in the wash cloth and handing it to her.
‘Not for the water,’ she said, blushing a little as she took the cloth from him.
‘Thank you.’ He put aside the pitcher and got to his feet, began to search out his scattered clothing.
‘Where are you doing?’
‘Getting dressed.’ He pulled on his breeches and reached for his boots. ‘Then going down to the library to be found innocently studying the available reference books.’
‘Everyone knows where we are.’ Guinevere plumped up the pillows and curled against them, pulling a sheet over her in a manner that left far too many tantalising glimpses of body for a man attempting to do the right thing. ‘Come back to bed.’
Where had the shy, blushing widow gone? She had been enchanting, if fragile, but this woman was provocative and just a little demanding, which was piquant. ‘Your reputation is something else I should be guarding.’ And I am now worrying about shutting the stable door after the horse has well and truly bolted.
‘Please.’ There was that faint pink beneath the pale skin again, that hint of uncertainty. ‘Only to talk.’
Jared dropped his boots and went back to the bed, keeping his breeches on as a reminder to himself that this was just to talk. When he settled back against the pillows next to her Guinevere turned and burrowed down, her head on his shoulder, her arm over his chest. She made a contented little humming noise that stirred the hairs on his chest, made his nipples tighten. She noticed, sat up a little and reached out to touch.
‘Were you trained by the Spanish inquisition?’ Jared enquired, slapping his free hand over his chest like an outraged virgin before she enticed him into making love to her all over again.
Guinevere chuckled, but did not try and dislodge his hand. ‘I have been thinking.’
‘Yes?’ he said. Warily.
‘We should go and visit the Quentens, whatever we find in the Landed Gentry, not write to them. One can tell so much more by talking to people face to face.’
Jared could have sworn he controlled his reaction, but they were skin to skin, she could not avoid noticing any slight movement, any acceleration of his heart rate.
‘What is wrong?’ She sat up, the sheet pooling around her like water around a mermaid on her rock. ‘Why do you not want to go?’
‘I said nothing.’
‘I know you didn’t. You went very still and you do that when something is wrong.’
Damn it. ‘Do I?’ He had thought he had disciplined every possible tell out of his reactions.
‘Yes. It is something to do with your early life, isn’t it? You come from around here.’
‘How the devil did you know that?’ He sat up abruptly, all his prized control lost in a moment. He used the movement to stand, instinctively covering the reaction.
‘Very occasionally there is the faintest trace of Yorkshire in your voice. I hear it when you are speaking to Thomas or any of the staff here. You did not want to come up here, even though you had decided it was the best thing to do. You hid it deep, but I could tell.’
‘It appears I have become very easy to read.’ Which was a disaster when his entire livelihood depended on the exact opposite.
‘Not at all.’ Guinevere studied him, head to one side, her lower lip caught between her teeth for a second. ‘For some reason I seem able to sense your mood. Will you tell me what is wrong?’
Tell her? Tell her what he had never spoken of to a living soul, dig out the betrayal and the disillusion and the anger and reveal the vulnerable seventeen year old boy that he had been?
‘Yes,’ he said, startling himself. ‘I was born and lived the first seventeen years of my life between here and Whitby. I have an elder brother.’ William. ‘I loved and respected him and he betrayed me, lied about me and took my honour with that lie. My father believed him, not me, which I suppose is not surprising. He was the heir, the serious, sensible one.’ The cunning, scheming one, as it turned out. ‘I was wild, endlessly in trouble.’ And romantic and naive and in love with chivalry and swordplay, not with real life. ‘There was a… situation. Accusations were made that I denied. I left.’
‘The accusations were untrue.’ Guinevere made that a statement, trusting him without even knowing what he had been charged with. She gave a little nod, strangely decisive. ‘And you have never been back? Never contacted them?’
‘No. I suppose I should forgive them, it has been a long time.’ He did not hate any more and the betrayal had become a scar, not a wound, but the love had gone, the trust had gone. There was no respect and without those things, what was the point of family? Guinevere would not agree with that, he supposed, women usually valued reconciliation, whatever the provocation. Jared waited for the lecture.
‘Why should you?’ she demanded, startling him. ‘They betrayed you, the people who should have loved you. Did they look for you?’
But then Guinevere is not an ordinary woman… ‘I do not think so. My brother had everything to lose by admitting the truth, my father believed him. My mother had died the year before.’ It had been then, he had come to realise as he looked back, older and wiser, that things had begun to fall apart.