“I’ve been busy,” I said, inclining my head to Cosima at my left to indicate just how busy I had been.
Simon’s face collapsed like a sandcastle into the sea. He stared at Cosima for a long moment, emotions playing out behind his eyes as he absorbed the shock of seeing her standing there.
“You remember me,” he breathed finally, his expression creased and stained with old memories and stale shame.
Cosima hesitated, then nodded, moving slightly toward me in an unconscious appeal for comfort. I heeded it, taking her far hip in my grip to move her into my side.
“I, well, I don’t really know what to say,” Simon confessed, blowing out a gust of air as he ran a hand through his thicket of hair. “I was abominable, really. Just the worst of the worst. All I can offer is that I was terrified and in love. At the time, going after you seemed the best course of action.”
“Because you were worried they would find out about you and your slave?” she asked quietly.
“Daisy,” he said as his face spasmed with pain, and his voice dropped to a breathless whisper. “Her name was Daisy.”
“They killed her?” she confirmed; her eyes so wide and gold they rivaled the sun glaring coldly from the winter sky.
Simon took comfort in those eyes, straightening his spine as he nodded. “They did. Before they got to me, they found her, and…well, no need to rehash the details. Needless to say, I am terribly sorry for my behavior. I have an excuse, though, there really isn’t any good reason I should have scared you like that.”
“I think it’s a good reason,” she said softly, stepping forward to place a hand on Simon’s arm. “I think it’s the best reason.”
Simon’s lip trembled slightly before he rolled it between his teeth to stymie the show of weakness. “It’s no wonder a man like Thornton would be enamoured with a woman like you.”
Cosima tilted her head to the side in question.
“So much light and softness,” he explained with a small, private smile. “It’s an Achilles’ heel for men such as us.”
“Dark men.”
“Broken ones,” he corrected her, patting her hand on his arm before stepping back up into the house and pushing the door wide for us. “Come in, come in.”
Simon’s home was large, but the rooms were small, the hallways narrow, and both were filled with comfortable furniture. It was a home; vastly different from Wentworth’s previous residence—a small castle—back in England. Still, I recognized his joy in it as he touched his hand to the walls while he moved passed and through the photos lining the mantle place of the living room he led us into.
I was happy he had found happiness.
It was a strange revelation because I’d been a self-centered man, a callous one, most of my life. When you are taught that empathy is a weakness from a young age, what recourse do you have but to believe it?
Loving Cosima had made me considerably more empathetic, and I had to agree that it was, in a way, a great weakness. I didn’t want the innocent to suffer and the guilty to flourish, so I found I had to take a stand when these things happened.
The first time I’d really done so had been with Simon, whisking him out of the country so that the Order couldn’t finish him off. I’d tried to do the same for Daisy, but they got to her before the wedding, and there was nothing to be done.
A vase of daisies sat on the mantle beside a photo of a young ethnic woman with a demure smile. I instantly knew that was Daisy, and I felt a pang in my heart knowing he still memorialized her.
She deserved that.
“Did you move here to escape the Order after what happened?” Cosima was asking as we took a seat on a pink velvet couch that was clearly not the choice of Simon, a man whose style ran toward hunting chic.
Simon frowned at her. “Surely, you know it was Thornton who brought me over?” When I only pressed my lips together and Cosima’s eyes went wide as gold doubloons, he chuckled and shook his head. “Ever comfortable as the bad guy, hmm, Thornton?”
“I did castrate you,” I reminded me drily.
Cosima choked on a giggle, her hand flying to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Simon.”
He waved it away with a grin. “No, no, that was rather funny. You did, of course, but you also gave me a new life, and when push came to shove, you reunited me with the one person who could heal me when all was said and done.”
My wife’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “Oh?”
“He’s referring to me, I believe,” Agatha Howard said as she swept into the room looking every inch the aristocrat even in faded denim and an old Led Zeppelin shirt.