Lord Laughraine's Summer Promise. Elizabeth Beacon

voice she was learning to hate.

      ‘I’m sure Grandfather Sommers wanted us to be happy,’ she said as if that made the gulf between those young lovers and now a little less.

      ‘I wish you’d believe Lord Laughraine does, as well, Callie. It’s not his fault we looked for reasons to hate each other when our baby died. I wish you could find it in your heart to forgive me for that, even if everything else I did and didn’t do is beyond it.’

      He looked as if memory of the quarrels and furious silences that marred their marriage had been a hair shirt to him ever since. Memories of long, hot nights of driven passion after they found out what her grandfathers were up to slipped into her mind and whispered they couldn’t have felt such endless need for each other if all they had was lust. Then she thought of their baby and shivered. Nothing had mattered to her but the terrible space their little girl left behind her in the dark days after that terrible journey from London to King’s Raigne to bury their child in Grandfather Sommers’s recently dug grave.

      She simply hadn’t any emotion left over for Gideon or anyone else after that. Even the irony of hearing her real mother invite Gideon, Callie and Mrs Willoughby’s sister, Aunt Seraphina, to stay with her whilst they considered what to do next, since they had nowhere else to go at the time, was wasted on her. For the first time her true mother opened her life to her secret child and they might as well have been on the moon for all the difference it made to Callie. Her withdrawal from the world was a way out of heartbreak and she’d dived into that grey nothing as if not feeling anything was all that mattered. No doubt Gideon felt desperate for comfort, painfully young and bereft as he was, as well. It wasn’t an excuse for what he did, but she wasn’t as blameless as she liked to believe at the time.

      ‘First I’d have to forgive myself,’ she said with a sigh, and half-heartedly pushed a slice of cold bacon round her plate so she wouldn’t have to meet his intent gaze.

      ‘You must, Callie, there won’t be a pinch of happiness for either of us until you do.’

      ‘I’d have to look past a lot more than petty quarrels and grief for there to be an “us” again, wouldn’t I?’ she challenged him.

      ‘Ah, and there’s the rub. You don’t want to see past that farce, do you?’

      ‘No,’ she admitted bleakly. ‘There’s no excuse for what you did that day.’

      ‘Yet even in a court of law a person is innocent until proven guilty. You didn’t bother to wait for niceties like that before you condemned me, did you?’

      ‘I expect that’s why you like them. I prefer to believe my own eyes,’ she said bitterly.

      ‘You still want to think I was unfaithful, don’t you? Whatever I said fell on deaf ears because you had already given up on us. It was a good excuse to finally push me out of your life and you’ve certainly done your best to forget I exist ever since.’

      ‘How could I? We had a child,’ she said with the sadness of losing her daughter still raw in her throat after all these years, and her absence seemed all the more savage now they were in the same room and she wasn’t here.

      ‘Yes,’ he said bleakly, ‘we did.’

      * * *

      ‘Ah, there you both are,’ Aunt Seraphina said as if she had been looking everywhere for them before she breezed into the room.

      Anyone else would feel the tension and leave them in peace. Callie caught herself out being disloyal and managed to smile a half-hearted welcome.

      ‘I thought you two had broken your fast and gone out long ago,’ Aunt Seraphina remarked blandly, although the door would hardly have been shut in that case, so why lie?

      ‘I had a disturbed night,’ Gideon said, reverting to unreadable again.

      Callie felt as if some golden opportunity to understand all they’d lost and gained had been brushed out of the room like house dust.

      ‘Poor Kitty is mortified she mistook you for a burglar in the dark last night, Sir Gideon,’ her aunt went blithely on. ‘We can’t sleep safe in our own beds of a night any more. I really don’t know what the world is coming to,’ she added, shaking her head as she poured herself coffee and refused anything more substantial as if it might choke her.