‘I have no idea why my mother gave me that ridiculous name,’ she said to divert them from the memory of how much he’d loved her when they eloped to Gretna Green. It hurt to linger on the past and wonder if they could have built a wonderful marriage together, if life was a little less cruel. ‘She might as well have put a millstone round my neck as named me for one of the Muses.’
‘Lucky you have a beautiful voice and a love of poetry like your namesake then, isn’t it? Perhaps she simply liked it. I always did.’
‘Yet how you used to taunt me with it when you were a repellent boy. If I had the gift of epic poetry, would you stop carrying me about like an infant?’
‘Because you’re named after a goddess?’
‘No, because I asked you to, although I should like to be a bard, if we lived in better times and women were taken seriously as such, but I never wanted to be a goddess with so many unpronounceable sisters to quarrel with.’
He wasn’t to know how serious she was, so she supposed it was unfair to stiffen in his arms when he chuckled. At least now she felt icy and remote again and he’d almost done it—he’d nearly disarmed her with flattery and wasn’t that another warning to be wary? Best to remember he was a professional advocate now, a pleader for apparently lost causes, and that they could never be friends. At least then she would hurt less when he walked away again.
‘You can put me down over there,’ she ordered, pointing at a convenient tree stump.
‘I’ll drop you in the stream if you’re not careful, Your Majesty,’ he muttered darkly.
She shot him a glare as he set her down as if she was made of bone china, then stepped back with a mocking bow. ‘Now go away,’ she said sternly.
‘I wouldn’t leave your aunt stranded in the middle of nowhere ill and prey to any rogue who happened along and I never liked her, so how can you imagine I’d leave you, Callie?’
‘I’m not my aunt,’ she defended herself absently.
‘Something I thank God for on a daily basis, my dear.’
‘Don’t call me your dear and don’t blaspheme.’
‘But I’d hate to be wed to your narrow-minded and joyless relative, my dear.’
‘She stood by me when nobody else would and I told you I’m not your dear,’ she told him shortly and wondered if it was worth standing so she could stamp her foot and show him she hated that false endearment on his lips. Deciding it wasn’t a good idea to stand up and wilt, then sit down again before she proved anything, she tried to look serenely indifferent instead. Clearly it didn’t work; he was having a job to conceal a grin at her expense.
‘Perhaps you’ll allow me the one freedom a married man can safely claim, which is the privacy of his own thoughts?’ he said with a pantomime of the henpecked husband that made her heart ache for all they’d lost.
‘And perhaps I won’t,’ she snapped.
‘Afraid you won’t like them, Calliope?’
Terrified if he did but know it. She sniffed and tossed her head to let him know she was completely indifferent, then regretted it immediately as the wild thundering in her ears told her she hadn’t recovered enough to flounce off and leave him standing like a forlorn knight spurned by the damsel he’d got off his horse to rescue.
‘If I was I’d have no wish to know, would I?’
‘As well if you don’t, perhaps,’ he told her gruffly as he turned from rummaging in the pack of his weary horse and removing a flask.
‘Please don’t try and force brandy down my throat, Gideon,’ she protested.
‘I don’t indulge in alcohol now,’ he said as he handed her a flask of clear water lukewarm from its journey.
He drank too much wine during the latter days of their marriage and the memory of him drunk and bitter as gall made her shudder. Not that he’d laid violent hands on her, but the thought of all that darkness and despair chilled her to the bone.
‘Never?’ she was startled into asking as his words sank in.
‘Only when a cook puts it in a sauce or some fanciful dessert when I dine away from home, but not otherwise. I drank too much and made things much worse between us. So you see, I’ve managed to put one of my baser impulses behind me,’ he said with a rueful smile that did unfair things to her insides.
‘Abstain from alcohol for your own good, but don’t pretend it’s got anything to do with me. If you set any store by what I wanted, you wouldn’t have come here and cut up my peace like this,’ she told him disagreeably to disguise it.
‘I can’t leave yet, but the drunken, headlong boy I was back then was repellent and I promise you I’ve done my best to kill him off. I doubt anyone mourned him.’
I did, argued an inner Callie who refused to be silenced. I wept myself to sleep for the lack of him by my side every night for far too long. Until I realised he was never coming back and I was the one who told him to go, in fact.
‘Devil take it, but I’m a rogue to plague you when you’re as unwell as a person can be without being carted about on a hurdle,’ Gideon exclaimed and she couldn’t stop a wobbly smile at the sight and sound of him as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror at last.
There—he was her Gideon again; a quick-tempered and passionate young man who could turn her knees to water at the very flicker of that self-deprecating smile or a sudden urge to wild action that made living with him such a clash of surprise, dread and delight. ‘Come, Wife, let’s get you home before you drop unconscious at my feet for the second time today,’ he added masterfully and she frowned at him again, wondering if she could ever bring herself to live with a gentleman who was so used to getting his own way, then shocking herself with the idea she might like to try, if things were different.
‘If you arrive on her doorstep, Aunt Seraphina will have the vapours even if I don’t,’ she warned him, and he actually paled at the thought of her aunt, who hadn’t liked him even before he ran off to Gretna with her niece.
‘She has plenty of experience,’ he said darkly and turned towards his hitched horse.
‘You could simply ride away again, nobody would know,’ Callie suggested desperately. Being lonely and a little unhappy was a state she knew so well that the idea of changing it in any way looked strange and frightening from here.
‘We would, wouldn’t we?’ he said as if that decided the issue.
‘Yes,’ she admitted with a sigh, ‘so we would.’
Simply getting Callie to ride his horse while he led it caused an argument. Gideon wondered if they could stop carping long enough to put the fragments of their marriage together and called up all the patience he’d learnt during his years without her. He should have remembered that aspect of marriage better and the magical glee of loving her less, he supposed grimly. Still, they were talking, even if it was in snaps of irritation. The odd moment of rediscovery made this all seem heartbreakingly familiar then strange by turns and he almost wished he’d slung his unconscious wife across his saddle brow and ridden off with her like a pirate with a princess.
‘Comfortable?’ he asked after the silence had stretched so thin he couldn’t endure it any longer.
‘What do you think?’ she challenged. ‘You should have let me ride astride as I asked instead of perching me up here like a doll.’
‘And have half the yokels in Wiltshire looking at your legs? I think not,’ he managed to say as even the idea of it made him rampantly jealous.
‘I