Free Where Love Shines by Donna Fletcher Crow

the butler’s offer of tea or smelling salts. She slipped quickly into the dark, cavernous coolness of the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room with its deep Persian rug. The double doors clicked shut behind her, and she felt herself relax. She walked toward the sofa in the center of the room. Then she stopped.
    She was not alone.

Six
    I t was several moments before Jennifer’s eyes adjusted to the dimness enough to see the form sitting with deathlike stillness at a small writing desk against the far wall. She gasped.
    Why would anyone sit at a desk in a library with the shutters half-closed? “Well?” His voice was irritable. The single word wasn’t spoken loudly, but it sounded like a gunshot in the silence of the room.
    “I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.” Jenny took a step backward and started to turn when he raised his head and leaned in the direction of her voice. Light from the half-shuttered window fell across his face. It couldn’t be. Yet it was. “Lieutenant Greyston!”
    Now she moved forward rapidly, expecting him to hold out his hand just as he always had in the Barracks Hospital. “How is this possible? I thought you lived in Newcastle.”
    He did not offer his hand. His voice was so bitter Jennifer doubted that, if she had not seen his face, she would have known him. “I do not ‘live’ anywhere. My body accompanies my mother and sister wherever it is bid, but that can hardly be called living. If I had been two inches closer to that exploding cannon, it could have done its work properly and taken the top off my head as it was meant to do.”
    Jennifer longed for a pillow to plump or a blanket to straighten, any movement to break the tension and give her time to think. Her impulse was to open the shutters, but she recalled vividly the searing pain the light pouring through the hospital windows had caused her patient. Then she spotted a book on the floor and moved to pick it up.
    She had no idea what to say, but she did know two things: that she should not offer sympathy and that Richard must be rescued from his doldrums, as surely he had been rescued from the fever in Scutari. With the book returned to its shelf and her headache forgotten, Jennifer took a chair near Richard, near enough that she could reach out and touch him, but she didn’t.
    She felt a restraining awkwardness in their new situation. Besides, she had already committed one serious error today by speaking without thinking.
    “Well, isn’t this amazing?”
    He made no reply.
    She smoothed the satin of her skirt and forged onward. “So you must be Lady Eccleson’s great-nephew. I have just met your sister, but I had no notion that the Lavinia I was introduced to was the ‘dearest Livvy’ of your letters.”
    “Correct on all counts.”
    Jenny cleared her throat and shifted on her chair. Richard sat with his hands folded on the small table before him. He had not moved since she entered the room.
    “Doubtless you are finding the adjustment extremely difficult.” She tried again in her most matter-of-fact tone. “I have been home only a week, but in many ways it seems that I have returned to a different world.”
    When Richard failed to respond, she continued with perhaps more vigor than she felt. “I suppose the change is more in myself than in my family or in London…” Her voice trailed off as she thought. Then she leaned forward in her chair. “That is it, isn’t it? They haven’t changed at all. And I have changed so much.”
    “It’s certain I have changed.” His voice was thick with irony.
    Again she fought against the dead silence in the room. “I apologize for interrupting you. Your thoughts must have been deeply engaged.” She hated the stiffness separating them after the closeness of those hours spent holding his hand in the hospital. Why must there be these barriers now?
    “I was not engaged at all. To be brutally honest, I was hiding out from Mama and Livvy who forever insist that I