Free Carolyn Jewel by One Starlit Night Page B

looking directly at her by focusing his gaze just past her ear. “Because I took your virginity on a night like this?”
    “Turn about is fair play. After all, I took yours.”
    That frown of his flashed again. He ought to have smiled at her joke, but he didn’t. And this time, he looked her full in the face. “For whatever offense I gave that made you leave me.”
    She sat on the armchair, just on the edge of the seat, and clutched the padded arm. Her heart turned to ash in her chest while she searched for the words to explain what had happened. “I didn’t leave you.”
    “You didn’t come with me.” He made a sharp, dismissive gesture. “It was ten years ago. We were practically children. Young and foolish, the both of us, but I have always, always, wanted to tell you that I never wavered.” He set his palm on his head and looked away in a gesture she’d seen a thousand times from him. When he did that, he was gathering his words, assembling thoughts, so that when he spoke he said precisely what he meant to say. “It’s done. You and I. Over.”
    “I know.” She wanted to go to him, but that would be worse than presumptuous. She wanted so badly to touch him, to tell him she understood his anger and that he should let old hurts go.
    “I ought not blame you for youth and inexperience of life, and yet I do.” He let out a frustrated breath. “It’s nonsense, my doing that. But seeing you again— Sometimes I think we were only yesterday and all my old habits with you come back.”
    “It’s been difficult for me, too.”
    He pushed away from the dresser and walked to the fireplace. For a while, he stood with his back to her, staring at the line of chimney ornaments on the mantle. He touched a bird’s nest he’d given to her when she was eleven. “You still have this.”
    “I’m sentimental about such things. Magnus is always on about how I won’t discard anything. I’ve collected a box of buttons I’ll surely never use. Old grammars and the like. Sketches Magnus did when he was a boy. I kept them all, you know.”
    He turned, and his eyes were hard as stone. “What happened today should not have. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
    “There’s nothing for me to forgive.”
    He said, softly, after far too long, “I think about him all the time.”
    She closed her eyes.
    “He’d be nearly ten, if you’d had a boy. I imagine him with your beautiful eyes. My mouth.” His voice rasped over her, killing her. “Or a girl with your hair and my smile. She might have had your brother’s gifts.”
    “Don’t.”
    “I don’t think I ever told you how I felt, and I ought to have.”
    She turned her head toward him. “It’s not the men who suffer. It’s the women who are turned out of the house. Women bear all that burden.”
    “How could you not trust me? The day you told me you were with child, that night, I lay in my bed at Wordless, and I was glad and at the same time I was afraid of what my father would say when I told him. Afraid of Magnus and what he’d think of me for what I’d done to you. And afraid for you. Terrified for what might happen to you.”
    She didn’t dare open her eyes. She couldn’t, didn’t, and still the tears came. In those days when she’d been trapped and desperate and unable to tell anyone for fear Magnus would find out, she’d felt as if the poison of Lord Northword’s hatred had given the man the power to twist the world into any shape he wished. Crispin’s father did not wish for a world where his son married a woman like her, and he had transformed the world until he had what he wanted.
    “I knew you were afraid and distraught and that you blamed yourself, as if you’d gotten with child without any help from me. I knew you blamed yourself, but I never told you how much I wanted to marry you and hold our baby in my arms. I thought you understood that. I thought you knew I loved you too much to let that happen to you or our child.”
    She rested