Page 77

Even so, there was a flurry of movement behind him as Grace propped up on her elbow. When she looked down at him, dark tendrils framing her face, she looked confounded.

“Wait, can you not see them?” she asked, glancing from his face to his back and then to his face again. “Not even with a looking glass?”

Now he frowned, too. “No, I can.”

“Then what do you mean if they’re hideous? You must know they’re not that bad.”

This was a bald-faced lie. One of the scars was a puncture wound from a French bastard’s bayonet, the other was a long swath of burns that extended from the right side of his neck, down andacross to the upper side of his left ribs. It had taken ages to heal and had left a rough, rugged texture behind.

“Ye needn’t coddle me, Grace,” he said coldly, trying to shift away without hurting her. She did not make it easy on him. “I know what I am.”

Now she was looking at him like he was stupid.

“They’re just scars,” she said. “I have one just here, look.”

She raised her left arm—which, given that she was still unclothed, gave him a marvelous view of her breasts, as well, though he did try valiantly to focus on what she was showing him. There were two little divots there.

“This isn’t even from my time away,” she said. “This scar is from pure idiocy, I’m afraid. I was, oh, seven or eight years old, and thought I could climb trees just as well as my brother and his friends. I was wrong, and when I fell, I managed to jab a stick straight through the skin of my arm here.”

“Ye what?” Caleb demanded. His hands reached for the little scars, as if he intended to probe for some lingering injury.

“I’m fine, you dear, foolish man,” she said, and Caleb wondered if he should object more strongly to being calleddearorfoolish. He let her continue speaking instead. “My point is, I got my scars by being a ninny. You got yours from defending our country from Napoleon. Which do you think is more honorable?”

Technically, not all of Caleb’s scars were from his military service, but the worst of them were. He didn’t know if the fighting had been honorable, however. It had been his work, and he didn’t regret it. But he’d seen too many men die painful deaths for the glory of kings to be at all certain that there was any honor in battle.

Grace continued speaking through his silence.

“I confess—and do forgive me for saying it if I’m wrong, here—that I’m surprised to see that you were injured, however. Weren’t you an officer? Shouldn’t you have been kept well behind battle lines, seeing as you were a duke’s heir?”

This was, Caleb recognized, the moment where he had to make a choice.

He could push her off, push her away. He could be gruff, could remind her that this was an arrangement between them. She had no right to his past, his history, his scars.

If he did it now, he sensed, it would be final. He would put distance between them forever. And perhaps that was meant to be what he wanted. Perhaps it was what heshoulddo.

But…

But the golden light made his wife look like something from a painting, and the familiar way she curved her naked body around his, even after seeing all the places he was too big and toorough and too ruined—that familiarity opened some other kind of wound inside him, something deep and old and still not yet scabbed over.

And so he let himself acknowledge the other possibility, the one that was dangerous and dark, like a cave never explored.

He could tell her the truth. He could let her see him.

And maybe, just maybe, she would understand. If anyone did, surely it would be this woman, the one who had been snatched by demons and dragged into hell, only to escape with her light undiminished.

Caleb wasn’t a coward.

“I had an officer’s commission, aye,” he said, rolling onto his back so he could stare up at the drapery that surrounded Grace’s bed. “But, seeing as my father feckin’ hated me, he bought one that was as shite as he could get away with, without anyone questioning him.”

Grace’s fingertips, still trailing along his side, stuttered but did not stop. And when she spoke, it was not without sympathy, but there was none of the pity he so dreaded.

“I see,” she said, and knowing her father, he gathered that she probably did. “And so you saw battle?”

“I did,” he confirmed. “Mostly early on. The deep mark, on my shoulder here—that one actually came from my very first battle. Got stabbed.”

Now she sucked in a breath, but it sounded furious.

“You could have been killed!” she said.