Page 26 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

F reddy was still a little dazed in the aftermath of the encounter.

At some point, he must have pulled away from her, must have set himself to rights. By the time he returned to any semblance of time and place, he was already in the process of storing the dough like he hadn’t been interrupted at all.

Claire herself had settled into a chair near the site of their collision and was nibbling at one of the cooled, early hand pies he’d made, watching him with those big, brown eyes shining with something like wonder, following the motions of his tidying like she could not make sense of it.

She’d drawn her legs up into the chair with her, her knees poking against the thin material of her night rail in peach-hued peaks.

She looked incredible like this, he thought. Her hair was tangled down her back and over her arms in thick, honey-colored coils. Her tiny little toes peeked out over the lip of the chair, dusted at their ends by the lacy hem.

When he took up a broom to handle the cherry pits they’d scattered over the ground, her gaze started to narrow.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, soft as a snake’s hiss.

“I …” He glanced up at her, a little puzzled by the question. “I’m cleaning up after myself?”

Her brow continued to furrow. “Why?”

He hesitated, a self-conscious little chuckle scraping at his throat. “Because I made a mess?”

“Hm,” she said, frowning.

He gestured with the top of the broom toward the pie she was eating. “I told you those ones are too tart.”

“They aren’t,” she replied with no little amount of defensiveness, licking her lips. “I like the tart ones.”

“I suppose you do,” he replied with a laugh, turning his back to her to find the dustpan. He could feel her gaze boring into his spine, right in the center of his ribs.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked after a moment, watching every move he made. “The trip was exhausting.”

He glanced up at her, remembering all at once the answer to that question, an annoyance flaring up in his chest that scraped oddly against the languid satisfaction of finally having found release here, with her.

“Why couldn’t you?” he returned, rather than answering.

“I woke up to the smell of the pie,” she said a little dreamily, tilting her head so that her hair spilled onto the table. “I had a craving.”

He paused, a little flash of heat giving a threatening stutter in his core. “A craving,” he repeated softly, glancing back at her. “For … pie?”

She returned the look, her eyelids still hooded, her lips red with cherry sauce. “For pie,” she confirmed with a flutter of her lashes. “What else?”

He tried not to groan. “Stop that unless you want to go back on the table,” he told her as firmly as he could manage.

She grinned, her teeth flashing in the low light, and took another slow, deliberate bite of her hand pie.

He glared at her and turned back to his task, knocking the pits into the dustpan and setting it to the side. He was too spent to make more pies tonight, as evidenced by his automatic stowing of the dough in the muddled aftermath of his senses.

He took up the box of glass jars he’d been using to jar the sweeter variation of his sauce, wondering if he could somehow label them to know them from the first batch.

“Why couldn’t you sleep, though?” she pressed, obviously taking joy in antagonizing him. “Do the games make you restless?”

“I couldn’t sleep because I am cross with you,” he said, a little more snippily than he had intended. “Or I was, I suppose.”

He paused, the pot tilted in his hand over the jar he’d arranged under it, his brow furrowing as that image of the gossip sheet rose in his mind again, that picture of him with big, sharp teeth. He bared his own, starting to pour. “No,” he added, “I still am.”

“Are you really?” she asked with something that sounded suspiciously like fascination. “Because of what just happened?”

“No,” he said immediately, using the spoon to scrape off the gooey pour from one jar to the next. “Not that. Certainly not.”

“Certainly not,” she agreed, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “Never that. What, then?”

He clenched his teeth, finishing his pour and setting the steaming jars aside. The lids were stacked neatly in the box he’d taken them from, and he leaned over to start pulling them out, each with a flat tab that went down before the metal halo that would hold them in place.

“Dot shared some of her reading material on the trip over,” he said, weighing each word carefully. “I was not as entertained as I had hoped.”

There was a pause, a long, stretching beat of silence in the kitchen that allowed in some of the noise from outside.

The revelry had started to wind down, it seemed, with far less human voices coming in through the thin glass on the windows.

They could hear insects now. They could hear the scream of a fox.

After it had stretched to an unbearable thinness, the silence cracked. Just a small crack, as Claire said, “Oh.”

“Oh,” he repeated, a little soothed by knocking her off her mischief. He took up a handful of lids and crossed behind her to the windowsill to start sealing up the jars that had cooled there. He did not look at her or otherwise touch her, no matter how badly he wanted to.

“What exactly did you read?” she asked after a moment. “The fairy tale?”

“Oh, I haven’t gotten to that yet,” he said briskly, pressing the flat lids down over each jar in the row. “I started with the source material first. Dot implied that one informed the other.”

“Did she?” Claire answered weakly. “The gossip circular, then? The first one?”

“Both of them,” he answered, starting on the haloes. “I read them several times over. They were very …”

“Factual?” she suggested with a little sniff. He could hear the legs on the chair dragging as she turned it to face him and climbed back into its embrace. “Accurate?”

“One-sided,” he decided, lifting his head without turning it back toward her. “Conveniently curated, in fact.”

“O-ho,” she said with a humorless chuckle. “That’s what this is? You’re offended that I told everyone what you did without skewering myself in the process?”

“No, actually.” He tightened the lids, one after the other, the muscles above his wrist singing with the unnecessary force he put into the motion.

“No, I never expected you to villainize yourself. I actually imagined those blasted sheets were a lot harsher and more critical of me, in fact. I went in expecting far worse.”

“Then whyever are you cross?” she demanded, that little strain of shrillness that had always made her hopeless at bluffing finding its way into her throat. “Especially if it is not as bad as you imagined.”

“Because, Claire, it reminded me of the whole cursed business,” he said, turning with the final jar still warm and gripped in his hand.

“It reminded me of waking up that morning without so much as a single farewell written on a scrap of paper, still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I found that you’d cleaned us out.

I got dragged out of there, you know. They handled me quite roughly until they realized I was a peer. ”

“They did?” she asked, her lips gone white from being pressed together.

“And that’s not even what’s got me twisted up,” he continued, slapping the jar down on the kitchen table between them.

“Because, whether you intended to or not, you saved my life by abandoning me like that. Every barbed little choice you made that year saved me, Claire. It cut out the parts of me that were rotting.”

She stared, squeezing the little tip of what was left of her pie so hard that some of the sauce dribbled over her fingers. “Oh?”

He stared at her fingers. He felt the heat warring in him with the rest of it. He wanted to snatch her wrist up and lick her fingers clean as much as he wanted to shout at her and send her away. It was truly very confusing.

“It’s only made me wonder,” he made himself say, dragging his eyes from her fingers up to her face. “It’s made me think that you remember all of that exactly as you wrote it, that you think I was deliberately malevolent. That I harmed you and the others on purpose. That I somehow … I don’t know.”

“That you enjoyed it?” she finished, guessing correctly, like she had a piece of his soul within hers, magnified and clearer than it had any right to be.

He made a face, a grimace. “I know I made you miserable,” he said, “but I never wanted to.”

She frowned, still gripping that little corner of pie. “I know that.”

He exhaled heavily, turning and making his way to the stone slab, where he’d left the wet rag. He started to dab up the smear of flour, his heart grating against his ribs in sickening slaps.

“Freddy, I know that,” she said a little louder. “I never thought you were harming me for the joy of it. I don’t think you did that to any of us.”

“I didn’t,” he muttered, focused on the way the cloth cleared the flour, at the way it removed the gritty proof of the mess he’d made. He folded it and passed it over again, his breath oddly thin in his lungs, like it was vanishing of its own accord.

“Freddy.” She was behind him, her dainty little hand suddenly sitting on his shoulder, its warmth soaking through the linen of his shirt.

“You were going to show him those stories one day,” he said quietly, still gripping the rag, still focused on it. “You were going to, weren’t you? When he was old enough.”

She didn’t answer right away, her fingers tightening ever so slightly on his shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said a moment later, very softly. “I might have, one day, if you never came back. If he asked.”

He shuddered, his face feeling very hot.

“I never told him anything about you that was not heroic,” she continued. “He thought you were away on an adventure, like a knight. He worships you, Freddy, you must see that.”

“Like a knight,” he repeated, sniffling. “Tilting at windmills.”

“Freddy!” she said, tugging at him now, pulling him to turn around, revealing to herself the tears that had started to escape down his cheeks. “Oh, God, Freddy. Oh, my love.”

He tried to laugh, to shake it off, reaching up with his dirty hand to try to push the tears away, but she did not let him.

She pulled him firmly down into her arms, her hand sliding around the back of his neck and resting in his hair. She let him drop his head onto her shoulder, let him collapse a little into her strength.

Absurdly, it made him want to break apart a little harder. He felt it tugging at him, inviting him to tear down the dam on his shame and pain. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her. Instead, he held her back, burying his face in her tangled hair and breathing deeply.

He felt her this time not in heat, but in presence. In security. He gripped her fiercely and shattered a little bit in the process.

She didn’t seem to mind it at all.

When he pulled back, likely pink and puffy, she didn’t look away from his face.

In fact, there was a softness in her eyes that he hadn’t seen there before.

Not since he’d come back, certainly, but perhaps even before that, perhaps not even in the charmed perfection of their early marriage or its gradual decay on the Continent.

“Freddy,” she said one more time, reaching up to touch his face, to stroke the tips of her fingers over his brow, her thumb clearing the tear that hovered at the corner of his eye, “I am so sorry.”

He couldn’t move for a moment. He couldn’t quite grasp what she’d said. He could only stare.

“I am sorry,” she said again, bringing her other hand up and holding his face in it. “For my part in it all. For ever making you feel like this. For the gossip sheets. For keeping you from Oliver. For all of it. I am so very, very sorry.”

He reached up to take her wrist, to pull it forward so that he could lay a kiss in her palm, a benediction, a gratitude.

She smiled at him, looking a bit teary-eyed herself.

“We should go to sleep,” he said softly, glancing around the kitchen. “We ought to get a few hours, if we can.”

She nodded, taking a step back to allow him to lead, to extinguish the extra lights he’d set ablaze during his time in the kitchen.

When they reached the fork in the hallway where they must diverge, he turned to her to say his good nights, only to find her smiling at him, as though she were anticipating some foolishness he hadn’t even committed yet.

“It’s only a couple of hours,” she said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

He blinked at her, a hint of something like joy tugging at the corners of his lips. “I shouldn’t?”

“Not tonight,” she confirmed, a little smirk and a roll of the eyes confirming that she saw it too, in his face. “Just tonight. If you want.”

“Yes,” he said, reaching out for her hand, breaking fully into a grin as she tugged him toward her room. “I want.”