‘He’s calling again this afternoon to make certain my skull’s all right, then I can sit up, he says. The man’s seen too many head injuries during the war, it makes him over-cautious.’
‘I would rather he was. I thought…I thought for a moment that you…were dead, or had broken your back.’
‘Would you care very much?’ The austere, cool expression was back on his face and he was looking up at the underside of the bed canopy, not at her.
‘Of course I care! You saved my life, Cris. That was an incredibly brave thing to do, to risk. And I couldn’t have jumped for anyone else, there is no one else I would have trusted. How did you think of telling me to do what Jory did? It confused Franklin, stopped him guessing for a few vital seconds.’
‘I thought that would penetrate the noise, and the confusion, and reach you in a way that just shouting Jump! would not. If I thought at all. But I do not want your gratitude, Tamsyn.’
‘Why not?’ she asked softly. He seemed somehow angry and all she got for a reply was a shake of the head. ‘You are in pain and I am making you irritable. I’ll go, I just wanted to see for myself that you are alive and are going to get better.’ She released his hand and got to her feet.
‘I am not irritable,’ Cris snapped.
‘No?’
‘No. I am working out how to propose to you from this ludicrous position.’ He sounded completely exasperated.
‘Propose? But, Cris, why?’ Of all the unromantic offers of marriage she could imagine, being snapped at by a man flat on his back and in a foul temper must be top of the list. ‘We have discussed this.’
‘I love you.’
‘Just because—’ Her brain caught up with her ears. ‘No, you do not.’ How much more did this have to hurt?
‘I think I may know better than you how I feel.’ His eyes, blue and dark and unfathomable, watched her as he lay, unmoving.
‘You are being gallant again. The scandal does not matter, I am leaving today.’
‘Today?’ Cris came up off the bed, cursing with pain, and twisted to take her by the shoulders with both hands.
‘Lie down, please.’ She tried to push him back, but he yanked her against him, kissed her until she stopped struggling and began to kiss him back. It was the last time, she justified to herself with what was left of her powers of reasoning. When they finally broke apart she reached for the pillows and piled them behind him in the hope he would at least lie back.
She moved the chair safely out of range. ‘That is not love—that is desire. We know we feel it. What about the woman you were in love with before? Is this just the rebound from her?’
‘How did you know about Katerina?’ Cris was controlling his breathing with a visible effort.
‘I did not, you have just told me her name. I guessed there was someone. Your friends thought so, too.’
‘I believed I was in love with her. She was married and it was impossible. We exchanged one kiss—that was all. I think the very impossibility of it made me believe it was love. That first time I kissed you, in the sea, there was something that made me doubt my feelings for her and the more I thought about it, the more I realised it was not love I had felt.’
She should not ask him any more, because even if this was the truth, he was not for her. She was not for him. But I am only human. ‘What makes you think what you feel for me is love?’ she asked, her voice steady, her body shaking with the effort of will that took.
‘The ache when I came to London and you were not here. The sense that something was missing, as if I had lost a limb, or a sense. And then last night, when I saw you fighting to be free from Franklin, when I saw you blazing with courage and determination and a refusal to give in and I thought I was going to lose you. Then I knew.’
‘I am not the wife for you, for a marquess. You know that.’
He loves me. I love him and I cannot, must not, marry him.
‘All my life I have thought I knew not whom I must marry, but what kind of woman. It was a certainty, like knowing that the land was entailed, or that I had a seat in the House of Lords. But I lay here last nigh
t, unable to sleep, and made myself listen to reason, to reality, to what I felt. I realised I could marry a yeoman’s daughter tomorrow and a few eyebrows might be raised. And they would be lowered again if she proved to be elegant and cultured and knew how to behave in society. And before you mention last night’s uproar, the scandal is Chelford’s. Only a small inner circle know how you are involved.’
‘Jory—’
‘Was a youthful love. A romance that happened a long way away from any of those raised eyebrows. Tamsyn, I do not have to marry for money, I do not have to marry for political alliances. I have only myself to please if I fall in love with a lady who can only enhance the family name, be a life’s partner to me, a wonderful mother to my children.’
Her control did break then, as though he had hit ice, sending cracks and fissures spreading out, taking pain with them. Of course he did not know what had happened on that clifftop that day, not all of it.
‘But I do not love you,’ she lied as she stood up, sending the chair to the floor behind her. He was white to the lips as he stared at her, his hands already clenching on the bedclothes as though he would throw them off, try to follow her as she backed across the room to the door.