A Mistress for Major Bartlett (Brides of Waterloo)

‘Yes,’ Sarah smiled. ‘I don’t think Mama would have tolerated him, were he not better than the alternative—which was Harriet never marrying at all.’

‘Did you want to go to school, though?’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ she mused. ‘I never really cared very strongly about anything, or anyone, except Gideon. Wherever I was, it wouldn’t have been with him, because he’d gone to Eton. I reckoned I may as well wait for him to come home to Chalfont as anywhere. The only thing is,’ she added wistfully, ‘if I had gone to school I may have made some friends, the way Gussie and Harriet did. None of the local girls wanted to come anywhere near. Too scared of what Papa might do, I dare say. Besides which Mama always said they weren’t of our class.’

‘It always looked to me as though you had plenty of friends. People who admired you. Wanted to be with you.’

She gave a bitter, sad little smile. ‘When a girl from my background makes her entrée into society, she will always have crowds of people wanting to get near her. For various reasons. The only trouble was, they were all keen to get husbands, too. So all their talk was of beaus, and fashion, and things I found deadly dull. I suppose they must have found me dreadfully dull. Or cold. I know that some of them whispered that I was cold and haughty. And because I abhorred the prospect of attracting a man’s notice, with a view to marriage, prim and proper, to boot.’

‘You are none of those things,’ he said hotly. ‘You are most certainly not dull. Or cold.’

She pulled her hand out from under his, her cheeks warming. ‘You have seen a side to me I have never revealed to anyone else.’ She frowned. ‘So far as anyone else is concerned, I am a demure, rather dull, society miss without two thoughts in her head to rub together and form a spark.’

Though, since she’d done her best to play at being a simpering virgin, too delicate and sensitive to accept the first offer some great brute of a man made her, wasn’t it her own fault if people couldn’t see who she really was?

‘I am honoured, Sarah.’

She lurched to her feet and went to the window.

‘The Mayor of Brussels requisitioned all the carriages yesterday, did you hear? They have actually begun going out to the battlefield to search for survivors at long last.’

‘Sarah.’ Tom’s voice sounded pained. He clearly didn’t like the way she’d turned the subject. But she couldn’t go any further down that road. Or examine too closely why she could tell him things she’d never told another living soul, apart from Gideon.

‘Wounded men keep on crawling out of the fields,’ she carried on, her back to him, her shoulders tense. ‘Half-crazed with thirst and pain. Heaven alone knows where the citizens will put them. Officers have been sent by barge to Antwerp, but as for the ordinary men—’

She broke off and turned to him. ‘Now that you are getting better, I really do think I ought to do something. To help. You don’t need me so much now, do you? It was different when you had the fever, but now...’

A cold lump formed in his stomach. She was going to leave him. She could already have left him, had he not pretended to be weaker than he actually was. And if Major Flint hadn’t tried to bully her into leaving, which had made her dig in her heels to defy him.

Yet he was too proud to beg her to stay.

Too attuned to her views to attempt to forbid her.

‘You must do what you think best, of course.’

She stood looking at him for a few seconds, a world of turmoil in her eyes. ‘I think, what I will do, right now, is go out riding. Castor will need the exercise.’

And sh

e needed to think.

Somewhere away from the distraction of his handsome face, and his tempting words, and his smouldering eyes.

Chapter Twelve

It had jolted her to realise she’d fallen into the habit of speaking to him the way she’d always spoken to Gideon. Was she using him as a substitute? She had started out feeling that if she couldn’t nurse Gideon, doing something for another, seriously injured soldier was a sort of...not compensation, exactly. But something along those lines. The next best thing, then.

Not that anybody could ever take Gideon’s place, not completely.

Though she did feel closer to Tom than any other living soul. She valued his opinion. When he said good things about her, it made her feel all warm inside. Like curling up in front of a nursery fire when a storm raged outside.

Was this love? Was she falling in love with Tom?

How could she know?

Though it would explain why it had meant something, to hear him say he loved her. She rather thought she did want Tom to love her. To have been in earnest. She’d always brushed aside any declaration of the sort before, knowing men said all sorts of things they didn’t mean. But Tom’s blunt admission that he loved her, coupled with his assumption that nothing could come of it, had sounded genuine. And had touched her. Deeply.

Did that mean she loved him, too?