Page 7 of The Forbidden Love of an Officer (The Marlow Family #7)

She nodded and began as the man watched her in silence, in pain, looking faint as blood dripped from his limp hand onto the ground.

Paul walked away. She heard him talking to the driver and realised they were moving the highway man’s body. Her trembling fingers struggled to tie the cotton, but she managed.

Cold seeping deep into her flesh, she shivered, her teeth chattering.

‘Ellen, get in the carriage.’ Paul’s words were an order. Not knowing what else to do, she did. It was just as cold within, and dark, and lonely.

After a moment he opened the door. ‘I am going to ride on the box to the nearest inn. We will sort everything out there.’ There was a dark stain on his grey pantaloons. Blood.

She nodded. She had left everything she knew behind her. This was a world of unknowns. She had never imagined anything like this might happen.

The carriage lurched into motion. She heard Paul talking on the box above her, but not his words.

Images of the man lying on the grass and Paul standing over him cluttered Ellen’s mind. Her senses waited for something to happen as the carriage rolled slowly on towards the next inn, their pace restricted to protect the wounded man who must be sitting beside Paul.

Every sound reverberated through her body. She could still smell the gunpowder as if it were in the carriage. She shivered, her arms folding over her chest as she swallowed, trying to clear her dry throat. Then she gritted her teeth to stop them chattering.

The next inn was in the middle of nowhere at the edge of the road. The golden light of an oil lantern bleached out the moonlight when they turned into the courtyard, but the carriage was still dark inside, since Paul had put out the lamp.

Ellen looked through the window, her fingers shaking as she put on her cloak and bonnet.

Yawning men appeared from the stalls, grooms ready to change their horses.

She saw Paul jump down from the box and say something, and a man’s eyes opened wide, staring at Paul. Then the man ran into the inn.

Paul turned to the carriage, opened the door and knocked down the step, not meeting her gaze until he offered his hand to her. The hand that had recently killed a man. But then it must have killed many men during the Peninsular War. Her fingers shook as she took it.

‘Ellen,’ he whispered, ‘I have told them you are my wife. I have asked for a private parlour for you to wait in while I sort this mess out. Do you wish me to order a warm drink for you? Chocolate? You look in shock.’

She nodded. She was shocked.

His fingers holding hers, he led her across the courtyard, and she tried not to think of the dead man whose body lay sprawled over the back of the carriage, on top of Paul’s trunk.

But she did think of the injured man as she heard him climb down behind her. There was a word spoken, ‘Surgeon’.

Paul had killed the man to protect them.

This was the ugly world he knew, she had only known the sanctuary of her father’s property.

A lone rider left the courtyard, she presumed to fetch a surgeon.

‘Ellen, wait here,’ he commanded when she was seated in the parlour. But he did not then walk away; he squatted down and rubbed her gloved hands as he held them together, as if warming them. Then he said more gently, ‘I will be back in a while, as soon as I can.’

She nodded.

He had not returned when her warm chocolate arrived.

She sat in silence, sipping it – drowning.

How would she cope on the edge of a battlefield?

Paul was more than the man she knew, the man who overflowed with vibrancy, who smiled and laughed easily – he had killed a man with no thought, or remorse.

She had taken neither her bonnet nor her cloak off, and the fire in the hearth blazed, but she was cold.

Paul arrived an hour later – an hour which she’d endured in the form of a statue, sitting in the chair staring at the cup of chocolate in her hands.

He shut the door behind him; the action sent her nerves reeling. She was unused to being in a room alone with a man, and yet they had spent days confined in the carriage. But now she knew she had spent those days with a man who could kill so brutally and close his heart off to it.

An expression of pain flickered across his face as she looked up. He had seen her flinch.

He no longer wore his blood-stained clothes and he had put on his greatcoat.

‘Have I made you dislike me?’ The words held anguish. He looked younger. His age. ‘I am sorry.’

She stood, setting her cup down.

How could she balance the man she loved against the soldier who could kill? There was a lethal warrior residing inside the gentle man she had met in a drawing room.

He was not gentle.

But she did not dislike him. Her heart loved him. She had known he was a soldier, she had not understood what that meant. Now she was terrified of the choice she had made.

She went to him, sobbing, and her arms embraced his midriff; doing what she had longed to do for an hour – hold him and cry – and pretend that what had happened had not happened.

His hand slid her bonnet back so it hung from her neck, then he kissed her cheek and her forehead as his hands held her waist. ‘I have spoken to the magistrate. The villain was known here. There will be no prosecution against me, and the driver who is injured is being replaced. The injured man will stay here until he is well enough to travel back. I have given him money for his lodgings.’

Ellen nodded against his chest, not knowing what else to do.

His palm lay on her hair, a gentle weight of reassurance.

How could he touch her with such gentleness yet do what he had just done?

‘You have had a taste of death tonight, Ellen. Has it made you wish to turn back? I will take you back if it has changed your mind.’

Had it?

She would not remain with her family if she returned. Her father would force her into marrying Argyle.

But Paul had killed a man…

Yet that man was a thief, he had chosen a fate to kill or be killed. He had shot the carriage driver.

She pulled away from him, although her hands held Paul’s greatcoat either side of his waist in fists. ‘Was killing him the only way?’ Maybe she showed her naivety by asking. But she was a little afraid of him tonight.

His eyes studied her in the flickering orange light of the tallow candles which burned in the room.

‘Not the only way, no. I could have brought him down from his horse and shot him in the shoulder or the arm. But it is my instinct, Ellen. In battle, a soldier cannot risk simply wounding a man. Otherwise, as you fight on, a dozen men could be aiming a pistol at your back and… you were in the carriage… and I did not know if there were more men in the woods.’

She could not judge the colour of his eyes in the candlelight, but she could see regret and pain. He had killed, but he did not wish to kill. He was not a murderer. Sorrow caught in his gaze, as if ghosts walked about him.

She pressed herself against him, holding him. This time it was not to receive comfort but to give it.

‘Ellen?’ His hand ran over her hair. ‘Do you want me to take you back?’

‘No.’ She did not want to go back, but she did not know how to go forward.

* * *

Ellen’s answer was warmth seeping through the clothing covering his chest, into his heart.

It would have hurt to let her go. But he would have done it, if she had wished it.

Thank God, she did not. He’d promised himself barely hours ago to protect her from the brutality of this world, and he’d not even reached Gretna before he’d failed.

‘You are strong, Ellen. You will face unpleasant things if you follow the drum with me. But you will survive, and I will make you happy.’

She sobbed and more tears dampened his collar in answer. He held her tighter for a moment. But then he set her away. If her father was behind them, they had lost hours… ‘We need to leave. Are you ready?’

Her gaze met his, flooded with the uncertainty he had dispelled before this incident. She was brave and strong, and she loved him, he knew it, but he could see she was also a little afraid of him now.

A sigh left his throat. He could do nothing. He had been trained to kill, and he had killed to protect her. He was a soldier; it was his instinct to fight and protect.

He pushed his thoughts aside, along with the memories of dead, dying and wounded men. They had to reach the border before her father reached them. If he had followed.

Within a quarter hour they were in the carriage with freshly heated bricks, his weapons tucked away once more, and blankets piled over them as the temperature had dropped still further. The next stop would be Penrith. They were nearly there… nearly.

Ellen pressed against him, seeking comfort, her arms about his midriff, but her body felt stiff and her fingers trembled a little, implying her shock had not really ebbed.

Neither had his.

She fell asleep, her head resting against his chest. He laid his arm over her shoulders and took comfort in her beauty as he tried to hold her steady while the carriage bounced over the frozen ruts in the road.

He could not sleep. The call of battle still raged in his blood. There had never been any real danger, he was by a mile more experienced in a fight than the highwayman, but a murderous desire had swept over him; the same which captured him on a battlefield.

Kill or be killed.

Ellen was right; he was skilled enough to have maimed the man and no more. But the thought of her in danger… God , he could not bear it. He had not stopped for one moment to consider doing anything less than kill.

Visions of battlefields, of corpses, and men’s eyes clouding with death before they fell played through his head, but his heart only felt Ellen and nothing of the bitter world he fought in.

He had fought for her, to keep her safe, to return to the beauty he had found and forget death.

What was his intent for the future then?

To keep her safe, he would have to march into enemy lines and slay every man.

A throaty sound of self-deprecation erupted from his chest. Bloody hell . It was what he wished to do, but he would end up dead from such stupid ideas, and that would hardly protect her, and what was the point of her companionship and comfort if he was dead?

He looked through the window, his gaze scanning the passing treeline.

He had left the lantern smothered, and the curtain open, so he might look out for any risk of attack, merely to ease his battle-ready nerves.

But now what he saw was snow. Ahh. Damn.

Why tonight? Why could it not have waited one more day?

As the carriage rolled on, he watched the large white flakes fall and settle. It was the sort of snow which could form deep drifts. But maybe it was a blessing. If it fell thick, it would hold her father back too. If he had followed.

The snow formed a swirling cloud of white and Paul’s heartbeat pulsed, his blood racing as hard as the carriage horses’ pace. This was not now only a race against her father, but a race against the weather. How soon before the roads become impassable?

He watched the white flurries for what must have been two hours, as they swept against the pane of glass in the carriage door.

Then the snow subsided and instead he watched the blue glow which shone back off the white blanket covering everything.

The carriage slid a number of times but fortunately the frozen ruts in the road, beneath the white layer, gave the horses and carriage wheels grip.

He remembered all the travelling he had done in the years of the Peninsular War, marching hundreds of miles.

He had not been tucked inside a warm carriage.

He had been outside, trudging through the cold and urging his men to ignore their numb feet, when his were also numb and his fingers burning with cold too.

How would Ellen survive days like that? True, she would be with the baggage train and have the luxury of a respite in the carts.

But there were times when the carts got stuck and the women had to get out and walk through knee-deep mud, snow or thickets, and then in the summer there were days of blistering heat…

He had been a fool to bring her with him.

Cruel. Selfish. But yet again he shoved the thought aside as he did with the haunting memories of war.

She was happy to be with him. He would not take her back.

She was his now, his comfort, and he would be hers.

She would be the thing that brought his mind back from war to peace.

Maybe it was good that she’d faced the encounter with the highwayman, maybe it meant, when she faced the reality of war and wished she’d not left England, he could say, ‘But you did know…’

Had he become such a selfish bloody bastard, then?

Yes, where Ellen was concerned. A thousand times, yes. He loved her.

It was not until the sunshine finally began glinting on the snow, reflecting gold light as it rose above the horizon, that Paul finally rested his shoulder against the corner of the carriage, lifted one foot up onto the opposite seat and fell asleep.