‘You’ll marry,’ he said, almost welcoming the knot of pain in his gut.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, picking another garment from the drawer. ‘I would like children.’
‘Come back to bed.’ Luc heard his own voice, rough, demanding. Impatient. He could have kicked himself when Averil put down the garment she was folding and rose obediently to come to him. Obedient to the man who is paying her.
‘Come,’ he said, more gently and saw the tears glimmering in her eyes. The tears he had put there because he was selfish and thoughtless and had taken what he wanted. ‘Come back to bed and let us say goodbye.’
At nine o’clock Averil stood on the dockside shielded from the press of the crowd by Tubbs’s bulk behind and Tom the Patch at her side. Ferret was with Grace, making sure the last of the baggage was safely on board. The other men were scattered along the quay, watchful and armed.
She searched in her reticule for a hair pin and found the Noah’s Ark box. She had forgotten all about it. ‘Tom, can you write?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Learned at dame school.’
‘Then can you please make sure this is posted for me?’ she asked and scribbled Alistair’s name and title on a slip of card and handed them both to him. ‘He is sure to have a town house.’
‘No message, ma’am?’
‘No.’ She could not think of a thing to say. She could hardly think.
Her protectors clustered around her. The only person missing was Luc. He would be making himself visible in Mayfair, he had told her. ‘I daren’t go with you to the ship,’ he
said as he held her in his arms in the battered hackney carriage. ‘I can’t be veiled, I’m too big and I can’t hide this damned nose of mine. You will be safe. Ferret will stay with you until the pilot is taken off at Tilbury.’
Of course she would and it was the practical, sensible thing for him to do, she knew that. And Luc had probably had enough of her emotions by now and wanted to avoid a tearful scene on the quayside.
He was right to fear it. She had been on the verge of losing all control ever since she had woken. The urge to kiss him awake, tell him she loved him, had been so overwhelming that she had slid from the bed and gone to pack her last remaining things, just so she was a safe distance from him.
And then he had stood in the doorway and looked at her with something like anger in those dark grey eyes and the roughness in his voice when he had asked her to come back to bed had been like a blow.
But their lovemaking had been almost silent, slow, so tender and gentle that she thought she would weep and then found that she was and that Luc was kissing the tears from the corners of her eyes before they could fall. ‘You never cry, Averil,’ he said.
Now she thought he had drunk every tear. Her eyes felt hot and dry, but she managed a smile for Grace and Ferret when they came to say it was time to board and words of thanks for the men who were guarding her.
Then she was at the rail and the ship had cast off and was slipping down river on the falling tide and she searched the quayside for a tall man, a dark head, the face that she loved. The man who had cupped her face in his hands as he looked at her with something in his eyes that she had never seen before. ‘Au ‘voir, ma sirène,’ he said as he climbed out of the carriage without looking back.
‘Au ‘voir, Luc. Je t’aime,’ she whispered now as the docks slid away and the river widened. Ferret and Grace left her alone. Ferret, she knew, was scanning the passengers, checking, double-checking for anyone taking an interest in her.
Time passed, London passed, the river widened into an estuary. Soon they would drop the pilot, and Ferret would go with him.
The clocks rang the half-hour. Luc stared blankly at the open newspaper in front of his face. Diamond Rose was casting off now. She would slip down the Thames on the falling tide leaving nothing behind to mark her presence, only the ache in his heart.
The print blurred and he blinked, appalled to realise there were tears in his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? It felt as though something—someone—had died.
And then he realised. Something had. He loved her. He loved Averil and he had let her go, sent her out of his life. The image of the château came back, in colour now, and the children were there and the woman by his side and the laughter was Averil’s and the smiles on the faces of the children were hers, too. He had killed that future, those children, and it was too late. Too late.
But he had to try. Luc threw down the paper, ran from the library and down the stairs into the hall of White’s club, thrust past the indignant members by the porter’s desk, out on to St James’s Street. ‘Cab!’
Behind him he heard the porter. ‘Sir! Your hat, sir! Your coat!’ but the hackney stopped. ‘Get me to the nearest livery stables in five minutes and there’s gold for you.’
It would be too late, but he had to try.
Averil watched the banks as Tilbury came into sight. In a few minutes it would be too late, there would be no turning back. Perhaps it was already too late and this was madness, but quite suddenly, she knew what she must do. And with the resolve the blanket of misery that had seemed to stifle every breath lifted. ‘Ferret!’
‘Yes, miss?’ The little man materialised by her side.
‘I am going back with you.’
‘What—back on the pilot boat? To London? To the Cap’n?’