“Thank God you are well.” She glanced toward the garden doors—old habit, now that Claudia was in residence again—and led him to a bench behind a rhododendron. “I still do not understand what happened or why.”
If he told her everything, here and now, she would be able to understand why a hunter with iron-headed arrows might pursue him. But this was too public a place. “Can you come to the wood tonight, after the others are asleep?”
He could tell by her breathing that her thoughts followed the same paths as his, but she shook her head. “I cannot. I promised my aunt that I would look at fashion plates she brought from London and select several new gowns.”
Claudia. “I had thought such matters as fashion and vanity were no longer important to you.”
She blinked, startled by his tone. “They are not. But I have obligations to my neighbors, and I must be respectably dressed in their company.”
“Your neighbors?” He tightened his grip on her hands. “Like the ones you had in London?”
“The local gentry, landowners—people with responsibilities similar to my own.” She smiled uncertainly. “Surely you can understand the necessity of my associating with those from whom I can learn so much. Now that my mourning is nearly over, I can do more to help the people of Hartsmere.”
“How much more can you do? The folk here are prosperous enough.” He tried to modify the harshness of his voice, but it refused to obey his will. “Are you sure it is not because you miss your old life of carefree pleasures?”
A frown creased her brow. “Why do you speak so, Hartley? I have spent the past few days worrying about you, we have been apart, and these… accusations… are all you can offer?”
“Ah. That is it, isn’t it? I can offer so little, and the marquess so much.”
“I do not understand you, Hartley. We have been through this before—”
“Without having reached a satisfactory conclusion. Is that not true?”
An odd, fleeting expression crossed her face. “I had not thought that you wished to reach a conclusion. Has that changed?”
Yes, he bellowed inwardly. Yes. But the words—human words—caught in his throat. The letter had burned itself into his memory. What emerged from his mouth bore no resemblance to what he’d intended to say.
“Did you accept an invitation to stay with the marquess?”
Her lips parted and then pressed together. “How did you know of that? The invitation only arrived the day of… the day the trespasser attacked us.”
“I saw the letter you wrote to him. ‘I hope and trust that my visit to Caldwick will go a little way toward making up for any wounds my poor judgment may have incurred,’ ” he quoted savagely. “How will you make it up, Eden?”
She pulled her hands free of his. “What right have you to go through my private correspondence? Lord Rushborough has been my friend for many years, and I shall not cut him as if he were an importunate mushroom.”
“Do not see him. Stay away from him, Eden.”
“Hartley, you are behaving as if—”
“I forbid you to see him.”
She laughed. Perhaps it was only surprise, but his emotions had snapped their leash and there was no recalling them. He heard it as mockery. He surged to his feet.
“I forbid it, Eden. I can enforce my commands.”
“Oh? I have seen you behave intemperently, Hartley, but never with violence. You have no reason for jealousy—”
He recognized her overture for peace and swept it aside. “You do not love him, Eden.” He loomed over her. “You love me.”
Once more her lips parted, as if she invited him to kiss her. Her face flushed, and her eyes grew soft and vulnerable. Only the barest veneer of sanity kept him from laying her down on the bench and branding her as his.
“Is that what this is about?” she whispered, searching his eyes. “You never demanded such declarations from me. And you have never given them.”
“And if I did, it would change everything, would it? You would give up your Society—the marquess, all of them—and stay here with me?”