The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

* * *

Once inside Sinclair House he followed her upstairs to the private parlour adjoining their bedrooms. She placed her hand on the wooden table, as if trying to overcome a wave of giddiness. He waited, every muscle and tendon in his body clenched.

‘Sam...’

She shook her head.

‘It is a jest, yes?’

‘No. Sam...’ His voice was so hoarse he had to clear it.

‘You’re Bunny?’ Her own voice rose into a squeaky whisper and he groped for humour.

‘I’m most definitely not Bunny, but I am the author. I meant to tell you, but...’

‘You meant to tell me,’ she repeated.

‘Yes, I...’

‘When?’

She no longer looked shocked. She looked as cold as ice, her skin leached of colour, just two sharp streaks of fire marking her cheekbones like war paint.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘When did you mean to tell me? When did you mean to tell me you were the author who for the past six years I have been working for? Who I am now married to. When?’

‘You don’t understand. I never meant to tell anyone.’

‘I am not anyone, Edge. I am, for better, and at the moment for much worse, your wife. I am your...your partner in this. When would you have told me?’

‘Sam, it isn’t that simple...’ He floundered again. He needed time to think this through. He needed time to answer the question for himself before he answered it for her.

‘I don’t think you meant to tell me at all. Ever. Did you?’ Sam demanded and he felt the heat crawl up his face and her eyes widened. ‘You. Are. Mad. Mad! And blindingly stupid. As blind as a mole popping out of the ground under the noonday sun, Edge! Did it not occur to you it would be a matter of time before I discovered the truth? At some point I would have come across something that gave you away. Or perhaps you intended for us to live apart? Or to do all your writing in some secret pied-à-terre? Or have a locked room and warn me away from it with all manner of dire warnings in good Gothic novel tradition?’

‘Sam, calm down.’

‘I will not calm down. You didn’t trust me! You let me hang from the gibbet of my uncertainty every year, wondering if there would ever be another commission, if perhaps Bun...the author didn’t want my services any longer or...or had died and it was over. And all the time... Why would you do that to me? Did you think I would reveal your great secret? Have you so little faith in me?’

‘I thought you wouldn’t agree to illustrate them if you knew I was the author.’

‘Why on earth would you think that?’

‘After what happened in Egypt back then... I thought you would misinterpret...’

Her laugh was harsh, dismissive.

‘I know I made a fool of myself then, but surely you could not have imagined I didn’t understand your rejection. That was my fault, not yours. I would have been delighted to know you didn’t despise me after that.’

‘Of course I didn’t despise you and that is not what I meant, blast it. Hell, I know I should have...’

She sat abruptly, her shoulders slumping, and the ache in his chest expanded, pressing hard against his ribs.

‘I didn’t think. Sam. No, that’s not true. I considered telling you in Egypt, but I didn’t want anyone to know, not even you. Especially not you. This is a part of my life I keep apart. It is somewhere I escape to. Bringing it out into the open... I hate it.’

She began pulling off her gloves and did not appear to be listening to him, so he pulled the reins on his own confusion. He looked about the room. The parlour was decorated in colours of wood and sky. It suited Sam so much better than Greybourne’s heavy colours. They would not suit Sam in the least. He did not suit her in the least.

It wasn’t his fault. She’d inserted herself into his life and he had hardly any time to consider the benefits or the costs of marrying her. He’d acted on pure impulse. Greed.

Lust.

Need.

Eight years of bottled-up, unsatisfied, unspoken, hardly admitted lust and a need he didn’t even understand.

He’d wanted her eight years ago and that want tainted his marriage from the very beginning. And he’d wanted her again the moment he saw her howling at the skies above Bab el-Nur.

And that was all he’d thought when he accepted her proposal. Little more than: ‘Finally!’

Impulse. Nothing good happened when he acted on impulse.

He’d offered for Dora on impulse, because she’d represented a world that was the opposite of the war-ravaged hell he’d been desperate to put behind him—Dora had been light-hearted, carefree, she’d grasped pleasure with both hands and pushed aside unpleasantness. She’d been everything he thought he wanted to become. But it was precisely those characteristics he’d come to resent, and when they hurt Jacob, he’d come to hate them and Dora.