Until recently, she had not considered the damaging effects of that loneliness. At the ripe age of twenty-six, she had seen more and more of her peers married and managing households of their own. She remembered a time when even she had held such aspirations.
Selfish aspirations, with no thought of others. It was Niall she must worry about now. She knew his real reason for avoiding the bonds of matrimony.
It was she. Athena Munroe, bound to him with the implacable chains of guilt. All he might have dreamed as a boy, all the old wildness, had been abandoned for her care, her happiness.
But how could she be content when she knew that he was not, even if his ultimate happiness meant that she must be alone? Was that not a small sacrifice to make after all those he had made?
As long as she had her work…
“Miss Hockensmith is rather lovely, you know,” she said. “Quite willing to help in the work of the Society, and with the orphans. I seem to remember that you had been considering her father for some sort of partnership.”
He peered at her over the top of the flowers. “Do you wish to become my business adviser, Athena, or are you simply matchmaking?”
His attempt at humor warmed her. “It would not hurt you to show occasional courtesies to my friends.”
He muttered something too low for her to hear, which was not an easy feat. Her ears still functioned perfectly well, and better than those of anyone she had met in her lifetime.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” He nodded to Brinkley, who had brought the dessert. He stabbed at the pudding as if it were a tough slice of beef. At last he set his spoon down and looked at Athena. The back of her neck prickled as if at the gathering of a prairie thunderstorm.
“This makes the fifth summer that you have not gone to the ranch,” he said. “I don’t like it, Athena. The heat and dust is unhealthy for you. You need fresh air and quiet, and by remaining in Denver you are certainly not getting it. I will not have you becoming ill because of your own stubbornness.”
Athena sampled her pudding, barely tasting it. “I am in good health, Niall. There is no danger—”
“You think me unobservant, but I have seen the changes in you. You’ve convinced yourself that you can solve all of Denver’s problems single-handedly, without taking any rest for yourself.”
“Rest? Look at me.” She swept her hand down the length of her body. “I have plenty of rest. It is the people I try to help who have no rest, struggling as they do every day simply to survive.”
“Our own father struggled when he first came to Denver, and no one gave him charity. He would have turned it away.”
“Not everyone in this world is alike, Niall. You know that as well as anyone.”
They stared at each other. There were two subjects they almost never brought up between them: Athena’s accident, and the nature she had inherited from her mother. Athena deliberately avoided thinking about either; the first could not be undone, and the second she had left behind forever.
She had not known her mother. Perhaps that was why she felt so deeply for the orphans, who had lost much more.
“I have kept my promise to you,” Athena said, the words sliding past the lump in her throat. “You promised not to interfere in my chosen occupation.”
He scowled, rising from his chair. “I did not promise to let you do whatever you pleased, no matter what the cost. Your insistence upon visiting the tent city and the warehouse district is foolhardy in the extreme.”
Her skin went cold. How had Niall learned of that? She had been so careful to go incognito, cloaked and hooded and accompanied by a brawny former soldier she had employed after her orphanage administrator had urged her to take some protection. Had it not been for her immobility, she needn’t have feared any man, even in the worst part of the city.
Do not think of what might have been. Do not.