Page 31 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

When Moria returned with her sewing basket, she was ever so careful not to jostle the table underneath Marcus with her movements. She was more careful with him in that moment than he’d ever been with her, or her heart.

Lawrence supported Marcus’ head as he poured a hip flask of liquor down his throat and then laid him back down on the table. Marcus reached for her hand and pulled her close with the hand of his uninjured side even though it seemed to use all his remaining strength.

“My girl…I’m…sorry,” he breathed, clutching her hand like a tether to life.

He’d grabbed her like this before, but she’d been so swept away by his attention solely focused on her, she hadn’t listened to the alarm bells in her head.

When both of her brothers looked at Moria in shock, she felt it then.

The secret possession he’d made of her, it felt wrong when she saw the way it must look through their eyes.

“Don’t…go,” Marcus bit out, his face paling under the light of the fire in the kitchen hearth. She kissed the white skin of his knuckles just before his eyelids fluttered and he lost consciousness.

She counted the rising and falling of Marcus’ chest and felt his fingers occasionally tighten around hers, his head occasionally lolling to one side. For a few moments, none of the occupants of the room spoke.

“Don’t think we won’t be discussing this later,” Lawrence said as Jasper’s capable and slender fingers dug with instruments procured from God knows where to remove a bullet lodged in the abdomen of their neighbor, Moria’s secret beau.

A small gasp tore through Marcus’s pale, parted lips as though he were regaining consciousness when Jasper held up a bullet.

“He’ll need sewing up now, Moria.”

Was she supposed to sew up the father of her unborn child with the same needle she’d just begun stitching a little linen bonnet?

She couldn’t get enough air. She couldn’t breathe—

* * *

Hands shook her. Someone was calling her name.

When Moria opened her eyes, she saw who it was. She read the pain and confusion in his face.

“It was only a dream,” Her Captain said, reassuring them both.

“I need to tell you something,” the words leapt out before she could hold them back.

He held up a hand between them. “Wait. Whatever it is, love, it’s yours to keep till you’re ready to share it. And whatever it is, you’re not carrying it alone. Not anymore.”

Moria’s hand toying with the hair at the nape of his neck fell back like she’d been burned.

“You wouldn’t say that,” she shook her head, avoiding his eyes to look out the carriage window. “Not if you knew the truth.”

Devyn ducked his head, searching for her eyes, a large finger tipping up her chin.

“None of that, my girl. I want all of you, for a lifetime. You try me and see if I run. You ought to know by now that I won’t. Whatever you throw at me, I’ll catch it,” he said, dark eyes somehow so gentle and trustworthy, or maybe Moria had made friends with the dark.

Moria didn’t meet his eyes for a moment, couldn’t.

She’d been so tempted by this man and the thrill of him, but the innate gentleness and affection of his words, his touch, had deepened whatever was between them.

The word for what it was danced on the tip of her tongue, she knew what it was.

It meant that she had to give him all the facts.

“What if I told you someone had left a hole inside I was unsure if anyone could fill? Until you.”

His eyes went to the chain she usually wore around her neck. His fingers skated along her collarbone. “It was him,” he said with realization.

But when he went to reach for the pendant that she wore, it was different.

It looked similar, only this time, when he turned over the pendant instead of an M, there was a D carved there.

When he saw it, he pulled back, and she caught him by one of his thick wrists.

He took her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“As good and honorable as you are, you need to know. And if you still want me—”

He crushed her to him, his lips overtaking hers, showing her without telling her just how much he wanted her.

As the carriage wheels rolled, they were pushed even closer together.

She slid her tongue into his mouth, slipping it around his and drinking in the little sounds of pleasure she drew out of him.

It was sweeter and headier than any wine.

He pulled back, then granted her one more chaste kiss at the tip of her nose that made her feel cared for, both sturdy and a little wobbly at the same time.

“You and your body and your words have my undivided attention, my lady,” Devyn said, making a show of crossing his arms and sitting up straighter on the carriage seat.

Moria wasn’t sure where to begin this tale, so she started at the beginning.

“Marcus lured me with false declarations and promises and a hundred other things, but I didn’t realize until afterward how false it all was.

The only thing that was real was that I meant and I believed everything I said, and I gave him my full heart. ”

She swallowed, then nodded. “Marcus took, that’s all he knew how to do.

He took everything that I willingly gave, without proposing to me.

There was always some test of my love for him, some reason keeping him from offering for my hand.

I didn’t see it for what it was,” she let out a long exhale and leaned more of her weight into Devyn.

“Or maybe, I also didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want them to tell me what I already knew: it wasn’t love.

Love doesn’t…” She shook her head as a tear escaped.

“Love doesn’t inflict words harsher than any slap ever could.

Love isn’t lies and coercion. But in the end, Marcus was shot in a duel over some gambling debts.

He was planning to marry me only if his scheme to make money fell through, and he made sure that I was thoroughly ruined so I would have no other choice and wouldn’t know until it was too late. ”

“I’d rip the man to shreds if I wasn’t already too late. Why did you wear his initial around your neck?”

Moria paused, her hand on the window curtain, familiar hills rolling into view. Soon, they’d be at her family home, and the realization made it possible for Moria to take in a bracing breath.

“It wasn’t the loss of Marcus I mourned as much as the loss of what we had, the loss of our child. She’d have been turning three tomorrow. Had she lived.”

When she turned shadowed eyes upon him, she didn’t know what reaction she’d expected her words to garner from this gentle brute of a man, but his mouth fell agape.

Belatedly, he closed it. Tears swam in his eyes, he reached for her like he wanted to hold her.

He wiped at his eyes with the back of a hand, and then linked his fingers with hers.

The tactile comfort was more than comfort, it suffused her with bravery, warm fingers covering the cold places inside of her enough to keep talking.

“This is what you were dreaming about?”

“It’s a dream, a memory I live over and over.

Even when I start to hate him for what he did, I picture the end.

The night I stitched him back together after my brother removed the bullet lodged in his side, and he never came to.

I was so young and na?ve that I laid in bed for over a day thinking I’d caused it myself.

And then, at the funeral, no one knew I was mourning a man I’d…

. I’d loved in secret. At least, I thought that’s what it was. ”

She couldn’t look him and her foolishness in the eye so she avoided both and looked away, shaking her head at her past folly.

“And then my mother found out my courses hadn’t come, so she whisked me away to a seaside cottage for “my health,” but it turned out that she was the one who was unwell.

There she was with her wasting disease while I puked up my guts and whined constantly,” she dabbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. His capable hand held her other one in his as she continued.

“One night I woke up and my sheets were soaked with blood. I thought I’d never stop crying.

I was in so much pain. And I thought she was going to say, “maybe it’s for the best.” But she didn’t.

She held me, and I held my little girl who never took her first breath in my arms. I wanted her, I wanted to be her mother, to show her such fierce love she’d never know the loss of a father, especially not a cold, hurtful man like Marcus. ”

She watched the way a tear tracked down his cheek, not of sadness, but the pride in his eyes as he looked at her cracked her open even more.

“And she’s at Brookevale now?” he asked, his voice gentle.

“We buried her by the sea. And then my mother made me promise that I’d…

” she choked on the words. “That I’d make the match of the century, that I’d spurn everyone who’d hurt me or talked behind my back.

‘The only way forward…is through.’ That’s what she told me, and I hear her voice, telling me that, all the time. ”

* * *

Devyn sat up straighter as the carriage wheels hit a particularly rocky jut in the road. She’d been- what? Nineteen? Twenty?- grieving in secret and carrying the child of a man who’d hurt her and tried to trap her before dying a grisly death.

He reached for her, and she let him hold her against his chest. The sound of her long, slow inhale against his chest unbalanced him. Nearly as much as seeing that pendant she wore replaced with a D instead of an M.

“Your daughter…her birthday. That’s what had you so distraught.”

He could feel Moria’s throat bob against his collarbone, and then she nodded.

He wrapped his arms tighter around her. “I think you are very brave, Moria.”

She pulled back to study him. The setting sun through the window lit her golden hair and golden face, but there was wonder in her eyes directed up at him. “I don’t know that anyone has ever called me that before.”

She was so strong, had been so strong for so long, had no one ever held her and told her she didn’t have to be strong anymore?

“You are,” he wrapped a hand around her jaw, slipped it into her hair. “You are the strongest, bravest woman I know that you could take so many losses and build a life for yourself amongst the ruins. My strong, beautiful girl.”

“Your girl,” she repeated the words like she wanted to savor the taste of them on her own tongue. “Does that mean that you still want me?”

Devyn had no words to answer this question. He took the finger bearing his mother’s ring and held it to his lips. He kissed her finger, the words coming to him in a rush.

“I want you every day, in every way that you will have a humble soldier like me. I’m yours, my lady, and I promise to make you know it every day of our lives.”

The mid-afternoon sun limning Moria’s childhood home, visible through the carriage window, caught their attention. The carriage slowed to a stop in the front drive. Brierley, the butler who didn’t leave Brookevale Park, rushed out to meet them flanked by other house staff.

“Ready to scandalize the servants?” she asked, brows dancing.

His laugh was ready and filled his chest. “I’m in for a lifetime of scandals with you aren’t I, my lady?”

She didn’t say it, but it was in her eyes. Later, he’d question if it was the golden hour; but at that moment, he knew. The radiant spark in her glorious eyes, it was one word, a feeling that started with an “L,” and didn’t ever end.