Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (Transformation of the Shelley Sisters 1)

Everything was mercifully numb now, just as it had been when they told her James was dead. The numbness had begun to melt into regret by the time they showed her his will and the document folded inside it and then the pain had come like a slash from a knife, all consuming. It would again, very soon, but not yet.

‘I did not know when I married him,’ she repeated finally as the silence dragged on. ‘I had no idea.’

‘You say you loved the man, yet you suspected nothing?’ There was a sharp crack and Ross tossed the splintered halves of the pen on to the desk.

‘I was an innocent. A romantic i

nnocent. I thought I loved him.’ I love you. Please do not kill that, please, the voice in her head clamoured.

‘Then you have changed, Meg. These days you are all practicality. You seized on my unconscious body quickly enough as a means to get you back to England. I wonder what would have been my fate if that plan had not occurred to you? I would be feeding the crabs on some sandbar in the Gironde, I suppose.’

It seemed her legs would support her after all and that pain and hurt could be turned into anger. Meg stood up, so close that her skirts brushed Ross’s knee. ‘I had years to learn to be practical, years to learn to look after myself and a man who was not the model of perfection a foolish girl thought him to be. And afterwards? When I learned that he had betrayed me and that poor woman? I could have just given up and died, I suppose. Or sold myself. Either would have been convenient for others, I am sure. But I chose to live. It is hard to be a woman alone, Ross; a married title is some little protection, although not much.

‘I was coming to tell you the truth today, give you the opportunity to withdraw your offer. You can believe instead two people who were deeply hurt by their only son’s behaviour. They need to blame someone, poor things, especially if they have lost a grandchild as well as a son.’ Meg fought for composure as Ross straightened up, his eyes fixed on her face. ‘If I may go now?’

‘In a moment,’ he said as he reached for her and pulled her into his arms. His mouth was hot and hard, but his control was complete as he plundered her mouth, holding her with one hand cupping the back of her head, the other at her waist. Meg tasted anger and need and confusion and fought her own wildly conflicting instincts, to claw at his eyes and to melt into his arms.

It was the last time they would kiss, the last time her nostrils would be full of the spicy scent of his skin, the last time his body would heat hers with demands that her own flesh leapt to answer.

Then Ross released her. ‘Meg, I want to trust you, I want you. But—’

She knew him now, saw the pulse beating in his throat, the vein blue on his temple and the rise and fall of rigidly controlled breathing. That demonstration of male dominance had been as hard for him as it had been for her. But if he could not trust her, there was nothing, could be nothing. He would never be sure of her again.

‘But?’ she asked rhetorically, turned on her heel and walked out, up the stairs and into her room. She turned the key in the lock and then simply slid down the door until she sat crumpled at the foot of it.

She loved Ross and she had lost him, not because she had refused him, not because he had heard her explanation and acknowledged that Lord Brandon could not marry a woman in her situation. No, she had lost him because, it seemed, she had never truly had him. Perhaps he could not trust, perhaps his past had killed that in him. She did not know, all she knew was that she hurt.

He did not trust her or he would have shown the Halgates the door, she told herself. He did not love her or he would have fought for her. Meg drew up her knees, wrapped her arms around them and sat, face buried in her skirts, and sobbed.

Chapter Twenty

‘Mrs Halgate!’ The knocking shook Meg out of a cramped sleep. She was still huddled against the door, her face sticky with half-dried tears, her skirts rumpled, her back aching. She scrambled to her feet and went to sit on the edge of the bed.

‘Mrs Halgate, ma’am!’

‘Damaris, I have a sick headache,’ she called back, her voice convincingly shaky.

‘Oh. I’m sorry, ma’am. Can I get you anything? Some tea? A tisane?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘I’ll leave you in peace to sleep, then. Only, you don’t know where his lordship’s gone, do you? He went out, very suddenly without saying and Perrott was wondering what clothes to lay out for him this evening.’

‘I’m sorry, Damaris. I have no idea.’

He may go to the devil, for all I care, she thought, knowing it was not true. But she was angry, she realised, as she splashed water on her blotchy face and dragged a brush through her hair. Furious with Ross and the Halgates and James. The only people in the world who loved and trusted her and always would, whatever anyone said about her, were her sisters. And she was going to find them. If the villagers would not talk to Jago, perhaps they would talk to her.

Meg dragged open drawers and threw wide the clothes press. Out of old habit she had simply packed everything she owned—it was little enough—when she came to London. Now she stripped to her skin and folded each item she had bought with Ross’s money on the bed. She dressed in her old gown and underthings and shook every penny she had out of her purse and the money bag that contained her savings and the salary Ross had advanced.

She knew how much she possessed on the day she met Ross. She put that to one side. He owned her nothing for the voyage; she had exchanged her care of him for food and the cabin. She totalled the days she had been employed and counted out the money for those and added it to her own cash. Then she wrote a careful sum out on a piece of paper and piled the remaining money with that on top of the clothes.

Meg packed everything else she owned back into the valise, put her old bonnet on her head, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and unlocked the door.

The hall was deserted when she leaned over the banister. Meg eased her way down the remaining flight of steps, ran across the hall and opened the door. The street was busy and there, coming towards her from Piccadilly, was a hackney carriage. She hailed it. ‘Ludgate Hill, the Belle Sauvage.’

Ross woke with a blinding hangover and lay staring at the ceiling while he tried to remember how much he had drunk, and why. Meg. He sat up, winced and reached out an arm for the bell. He had gone out, fully intending to get drunk and make someone else’s life miserable. He had found a gaming hell off St James’s—Pickering Place, he seemed to recall—and had proceeded to win a great deal of money at cards while drinking an inordinate amount of very bad, very expensive claret.

‘Good afternoon, my lord.’ Perrott came in with catlike tread and proffered a salver with a small glass of an unpleasant milky-brown liquid on it. ‘My previous employer used to swear by this.’