Lord Garson’s Bride (Dashing Widows 7)

Had he mistaken what Jane offered him today? Was she inviting him to stay? His battered heart swelled with excruciating hope.

She retreated a pace. “I thought you might like to wash and have something to eat before…”

Bugger and blast. Hadn’t he learned by now that hope was always a mistake? “Before I do my duty?”

Damn it, there was no dignity in playing the deserted husband. This was worse than those days after Morwenna left him. But then, Morwenna had never worked herself into every facet of his life the way Jane had.

To do his wife credit, she responded calmly enough to his barbed question. “Yes. I’ll be waiting in the next room. When you’re ready, come to me.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, I see,” he bit out.

She didn’t wince. Her self-control started to worry him. In his more optimistic moments, he’d wondered whether seeing him after these weeks apart might weaken her resolution. After all, she claimed to love him. Surely she’d missed him, even just a little bit.

But he found no chink in this woman’s armor, no hint of indecision that offered him a chance to lure her back.

And despite repudiating her love, he ached for her return. He’d spent every day of the last month, feeling like someone had taken a saw and amputated a leg or an arm. Yet now, in Jane’s presence, however unsatisfactory their meeting, he felt whole again.

Odd but undeniable.

“Next time, we can organize things differently, if you like,” she said with more of that deuced detachment, as if she discussed an afternoon walk instead of how she’d give herself to him. “Perhaps you’d prefer it if I came to your inn.”

“I’d prefer it if you came home,” he growled, heaving the saddle off Lysander’s back and setting it on the wooden barrier dividing the stalls.

“You know that’s not possible,” she said, and be damned if he heard any trace of regret in her tone.

“I know nothing of the kind.” Before she could argue, he went on. “Shall we dine afterward?”

There were already oats and water in the stall, so he took up the saddle cloth and began to rub Lysander down. Not that the short ride from Winchester had tired the magnificent brute.

“Hugh, I thought you understood,” Jane said, eyeing him as if he might cut up rough. “After you’ve…finished, you have to leave.”

“What?” he asked, baffled. “When do we talk?”

She met his gaze, her eyes opaque. “We don’t.”

Garson dropped the saddle cloth and stared at her in consternation. “I want to know how you are.”

Her lips firmed. “I’m well.”

Good for her. “I’m not.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She didn’t bloody sound it. He wasn’t angry now. He was sad and lonely, and deathly afraid that he’d blundered about and ruined something that could have been marvelous. “Is this really what you want?”

Her delicate jaw set with the stubbornness that he’d learned, to his cost, could match his. “I’m not going through my reasons again.”

“Come home to me, Jane. Forget this nonsense.” He abandoned pride to admit the shameful truth. “I miss you.”

Her pale features were so set, they could be carved from alabaster. “Have you changed?”

He knew what she wanted to know, but nonetheless he tried to weasel out of answering her. “I’ll never take you for granted again.”

She wasn’t fooled. “You know what I’m asking.”

He did. She wanted to know if he was still in love with Morwenna. He considered lying, but in the end, that assessing gray stare undid him and his threadbare strategems. “I haven’t changed,” he said miserably.

“I thought not,” she said in a carefully neutral tone and turned to leave the stable. “I’ll see you upstairs when you’re ready.”