A Mistress for Major Bartlett (Brides of Waterloo)

He flung his arm to one side and turned to look at her through dulled eyes. ‘With you? No,’ he said wearily. ‘Only with myself.’

With himself? For proposing? For losing control so that he felt he had to propose?

‘Please don’t be,’ she said in a small, rather tremulous voice. ‘Don’t let anger and regrets spoil this.’

A look of contrition flickered across his face.

He sat up. Reached for her face. Cupped her cheek.

‘Forgive me. I have spoiled it already, haven’t I? By bringing the spectre of marriage into our bed. Let’s forget it, shall we?’

A spectre? She flinched away from his caress. He thought of marriage as something deathly? Then she’d been right to refuse his proposal. She didn’t want a husband who looked on marriage as a grisly fate.

Heaven alone knew what she might have said had not someone knocked on the door.

His gaze roamed her body, her tousled hair, in a way that made her feel very conscious of what they’d just been doing together. That made her feel like a...well, a fallen woman.

Well, that was exactly what she was. What she would always be now she’d made him retract his proposal. And she’d better get used to people looking at her like that. With a toss of her head, she marched across the room and flung open the door.

‘Yes?’

Standing in the corridor was Robbins. With a letter in his hand.

Looking more than usually grim.

The cold pool in her stomach froze into a solid lump.

‘Justin,’ she whispered, wrapping her arms round her forebodingly chilled midriff. Something terrible had happened. She could feel it.

Felt as though she deserved it.

Chapter Fourteen

‘Is it Justin?’ she finally managed to ask. ‘What has happened? He hasn’t...’

‘No, miss, he’s on the mend,’ said Robbins as she snatched the missive from his fist and tore it open.

The shock of fearing the worst made her instinctively head for the nearest chair and sit down on it. A wave of giddiness assailed her even after she’d scanned the letter that was penned in Mary Endacott’s neat, precise hand. Because even though Mary had assured her that Justin was well enough to do without her, she’d ended the letter by wishing her well in the future, just as though they were never going to see each other again.

‘What did he do to her to make her leave?’ Sarah blinked up at Robbins in bewilderment. ‘After all Mary did for him, too.’

‘Couldn’t rightly say, miss,’ said Robbins.

‘Won’t say, you mean,’ Sarah muttered. The man must know why Mary, who had loved Justin enough to go searching for him in the hell that was the aftermath of battle, was leaving him now she knew he was out of danger. But he was loyal to Justin, so Tom had said. So loyal he wasn’t going to publish Justin’s idiocy abroad.

‘Don’t know as how this,’ said Robbins scathingly, ‘is going to affect him, when he finds out.’

He’d come in, shut the door behind him and eyed first the disordered state of the bed, then Tom’s insolently lounging nudity and finally her own déshabillé.

‘Well, it’s only what he’s been accusing us of getting up to all week,’ she retorted.

Tom covered his face with his hands. And groaned.

Which just went to confirm her suspicion that he’d only asked her to marry him because of what others were going to think, not because of what he felt for her at all.

Sarah glared from one to the other. ‘No need to worry,’ she said t

o them both. ‘Now that Justin is well enough to survive a visit from me, I will come and make a clean breast of it.’