Free Hadrian by Grace Burrowes Page A

about your wife.”
    Avis didn’t want to listen, not to this, but twelve years ago Hadrian had listened to her, listened, and listened, and listened, no matter how sordid and unbecoming the tale, and she owed him the same courtesy.
    “Her name was Rue. She was the daughter of a clergyman and seemed suited to the life I envisioned. Harold didn’t like her.”
    Had Hadrian liked her? “Harold once said she had her eye on Landover, not you. That observation was a rare breach of manners for him, so I recall it clearly.”
    “Harold likely had the right of it. I wanted children, though once the marriage had settled, Rue wanted to wait. For what, I don’t know.” He rode a length ahead and held a branch back so Avis’s horse could pass.
    “Was your wife waiting for a better position?”
    “I provided from my own funds, not from the livings I held. We never wanted for much, though a vicar doesn’t exactly seek an image of idle luxury.”
    “You had servants?” Avis was no pattern of card of Christian virtue, to be relieved that the memory of Hadrian’s late wife did not cause him raging grief.
    “We had at least a maid of all work and a man of all work,” Hadrian said. “We had a conveyance to use, more than tallow and rushlights. I didn’t feel material want, but a woman needs a few simple comforts.”
    “She had you,” Avis said, wanting to throttle this Rue person who’d put such doubt in a good man’s eyes. “You’re much more than a simple comfort.”
    He straightened in the saddle and took up the reins. “Generous words, coming from you.”
    “I speak the truth, Hadrian Bothwell,” she said sternly. “Perhaps your wife failed to appreciate the wealth she had because she was too busy anticipating the wealth to come.”
    “One doesn’t want to speak ill of the dead.”
    Oh, yes, one did. The vicar was already losing his hold of the man, which was doubtless what Harold had hoped would happen.
    “There’s something you’re not telling me,” Avis said. “Something that doesn’t speak well of your former spouse.”
    “Late spouse.”
    The last of the mists dissipated around them, while Avis waited, as Hadrian had so often waited for her to find words.
    “There were letters,” he admitted some distance later. “She wrote to her sisters of her discontent. Upon her death they gave me the letters, likely not recalling their exact contents.”
    “The lot of them sound in want of loving kindness.” Or plain common sense.
    “Death doesn’t always make us think more clearly or carefully,” Hadrian said, as they emerged from the trees. “When Rue died, I stopped thinking for a time. I stopped nearly every mental function, while the body soldiered on, like a ghost ship without rudder or crew.”
    “But you watched yourself soldiering on, like reading a book about the life and times of one Hay Bothwell, a tale neither boring nor amusing, but simply…a tale.”
    He drew his horse up, the morning sun showing both the fatigue in his eyes and the sheer male attractiveness of his features.
    “Is it still like that for you, Avie? You’re observing as somebody resembling you lives your life?” His voice and his gaze held such concern, she looked away, across the dewy loveliness of the deer park.
    Avis seldom rode this close to the mares’ pasture, though it was fitting Hadrian be the one to accompany her. “Usually, I am content, Hadrian, and I can take pride in running Blessings; nonetheless, I’m having the dower house refurbished.”
    The admission felt like a confession, a sin of which she should repent.
    “The dower house?”
    “I’ll be thirty in less than two years, Hadrian.”
    “You said you’d want children.”
    He
had wanted children, too. “What one wants and what one gets are not always the same,” Avis said, addressing herself to a space above and between her horse’s ears. “One sometimes has to send a brother in his fourth decade off on a quest across the water.”
    “Not