He laughed again.
In the mirror opposite she caught sight of herself, her colour heightened and her eyes glittering. She looked so similar to the girls Charles had brought to Medlands in the first year of their marriage, his wild and unbridled parties demanding the sort of feminine willingness that was palpable in the expressions of those attending.
Thank goodness she was not back there, moving like a ghost around the few rooms left to her use, always frightened and never certain.
This relationship could not be like before, with Charles. She could not endure another loveless and distant marriage in which both parties had dealt with each other in hatred and mistrust. This one had to be different, better, real.
Shaking her head, she chastised herself for such fantasy. It was duty and obligation that had brought each of them to this pass. Fluffy oversized cushions on the bed behind beckoned and a carafe of wine and two glasses sat on a cabinet nearby.
There would be expectations placed on the head of the title, and one of them resulting from a marriage even as hasty and ill-conceived as this one would be children. Heirs to trace the name of Hawkhurst down through the centuries and link them to the ancestors who had already been. Antiquity lived in a castle like Atherton and no one person’s needs were bigger than the narrative of history. Especially not hers.
With Charles she had withdrawn from any intimacy as soon as she realised what sort of man he was. But here…here a different truth lingered.
‘You sell yourself too short, my lady. A wife with a blameless slate would not suit me at all. Oh, granted, once I thought so, but now…’
The compliment made her cheeks redden and she knew the blush of it was showing on her face. She hoped he might step forwards and show her exactly what it meant to be his wife. The dampness between her legs throbbed, the lust of want so familiar she felt dizzy from it.
She wanted him, wanted him in the same way they had wanted each other in London, breathless and burning, wrapped in each other’s arms until the morning. As Hawk poured two glasses of the red wine, she tried to take stock of everything.
‘To us,’ he said, handing her a goblet, careful not to touch her as he moved back and drank. His eyes did not stray from her own.
Drink took the edge from panic and she needed it to. her nipples hardened in a movement that sent small clenches of need to her core as he touched her arm.
‘Does it hurt?’
Shaking her head, she smiled. ‘Mrs Simpson found a bandage this morning and she dressed it. The ointment took away any pain.’
He placed her left hand in his. ‘I will find you a ring that fits as soon as I can. My mother had many and…’
His words petered out as she placed her lips on his fingers, one by one.
‘I love you, Stephen.’
There was nothing else to say to a man who had never given up on her, even when he thought her a traitor.
He shook his head at her proclamation and tried to move back, but she would not let him. ‘Ahhh, sweetheart, you don’t know who I am inside,’ he said, his free hand above his heart as if shielding some dark thing that he did not wish her to see. ‘And if you did…’
‘Then I would love you more.’ She could not allow his distance to break honesty into pieces. He could not love her back in the way that she wanted, he could not say the words that she could barely hold back each and every time she was with him.
I love you.
I love you with every breath and every heartbeat.
‘It is the imperfections that make people interesting, Stephen, those things that are hidden from everybody else.’
‘I have killed people, Aurelia, many people.’
‘In the name of a country trying to keep its citizens safe. England should thank you for it.’
‘If only it were so simple.’ Yearning lay in his voice.
‘Sometimes it is, my love,’ she returned. ‘Sometimes to forget for a moment is simple.’ Her fingers began to unbutton his jacket and she was pleased as he allowed her to slip it off. His neckcloth, waistcoat and shirt followed. He breathed in quickly as he traced the line of bandage across her left arm and helped her out of Lillian’s gown.
‘If you had not survived it…’ His thumb crossed her left breast, drawing a name. His name. Hawk. She read it in the quiet touch of skin.
Her husband. Joined by God and by law. Contentment gave way to alarm, though, as his fingers passed over raised skin at her nape and he pushed her hair aside.
‘What happened here?’ It was not the mark a lady should have had, she knew this, the quick slice of Charles’s knife a warning to comply.
‘I married your cousin on a whim and he soon regretted it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘He was my husband and I had promised before God to obey him. If I had given him his marriage rights perhaps none of what happened would have happened. John’s daughter might have had her baby and would still have been alive.’
Hawkhurst shook his head. ‘A man who would slice the skin of the neck of his wife is an unbalanced and dangerous one, Aurelia. You were wise to stay clear of him and there is no shame in protecting yourself.’
She smiled at that. ‘As you protected your brother?’
Shock ran through him. ‘Who told you?’
‘Lillian did. She said the scar on your thigh was from your effort to save your brother when he was caught in the crossfire of war.’
‘It was a fumbled effort. He died in my arms.’
Lord, he could give out advice, but he could not receive it. The irony of that made him smile and when she began again to talk he made himself listen.
‘Both of us have been scarred by death then, it seems, and have paid the price. Perhaps you were right when you said that it is time for the guilt to end, you with your brother and me with Charles.’
Her fingers strayed and she held the small bud of his nipple between them, causing Hawk to simply stop breathing.
Would there ever come a time when he did not want to possess her? Laving his tongue at her throat, he left a mark, reddened by passion, and took her to the marriage bed.
It was night when he woke, the moon full through the windows, its pale shadows lighting the limbs of Lady Aurelia Hawkhurst. Hawkhurst repeated the name to himself, liking the way it tripped from his tongue into the silence, midnight long since passed.
Her head was on his chest and her arms were thrown out across him, the ring he had placed there easily seen in the moonlight on her fingers. Further off the breeze rattled the leaves on the giant oaks that marched along the driveway.
Atherton and Aurelia. The rightness of it made him smile and he lay still just in case she might wake and see all that she meant to him.
Why did he not tell her? Why did he not give her back the words she had given to him all across the long and lovely day?
Treasure.
‘It can be simple,’ she had said. But he knew that it never was.
Hawkhurst was gone when she awoke next, the sun streaming into the room.
Mrs Simpson came in with a quick knock, her face wreathed in smiles and a basin