Page 36

Cressida paused on the threshold of her bedchamber, listening to Greville’s shallow, uneven breathing.

She took two quick, quiet steps into the room and found him stretched out on the floor at the foot of her bed in all his long-limbed grace.

How like him to fall asleep in the wake of a revelation that would have floored most men.

She stood watching, unable for a moment to look away: he lay on his back on a bedroll that Somers must have laid out before the fire, stripped to the waist but still in his breeches and boots, as if he were expecting to get up and fight, and unaware for now of how she took in every inch of his form.

Dark blood had already soaked through the linen bandage, but his arm was a sculptor’s study in muscle and form: surely looking at him like this was just a harmless small pleasure?

Cressida allowed her gaze to fall from Greville’s arm to his naked chest, torso and belly.

Four years ago, he’d had the lean strength of a rich young aristocrat favoured by the gods, trained only by riding hard and sparring in the boxing salon he favoured.

Now there was a new edge to that strength.

The Greville she’d known had taken pleasure in satisfying his every want.

‘You still look like a fallen angel, you fool,’ she whispered into the darkness, dropping into a crouch at his side.

The uneven rhythm of his breathing betokened feverishness.

Somers must have drawn shut the heavy velvet curtains, but thin grey sunlight slanted in through the crack, illuminating a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead.

She fought a half-forgotten desire to trace those winged dark brows with her fingertip, but he woke anyway, opening his eyes to meet her own, even as he flexed the long, strong fingers of one hand, reaching for the knife sheathed close to his waist so that it would have been concealed beneath his evening jacket.

The liminal half-waking expression cleared from his eyes, and he let the hand fall by his side.

‘Cressida.’ There was an edge of humour in his voice mingled with threat, and she was overwhelmingly aware of his size and strength.

If Greville was a clear danger now, what would he become when he learned she’d found Rosmoney?

She’d taken a step closer to understanding the lethal mess Jamie was in, and had not told him.

‘You should be asleep,’ she said, instead. ‘You’ll go home by weeping cross if you’re not careful. I’m sorry about your mother and father.’

Greville watched her steadily. ‘That sort of dirty great secret is never as much of a shock as everyone thinks – at least not to the people it concerns. At any rate, so will we all go home by weeping cross if we go on like this. I don’t think there’s a person at Drochcala without a motive to kill your cousin, and the last thing we need here is the sheriff.

’ He stretched then, wincing as he moved his injured arm, crooking the other behind his head.

The sight of his dark underarm hair sent a shock of intimacy through her, even as she was certain that Greville himself knew something he had chosen not to share with her.

He looked up at her again: ‘I wish you weren’t here. I wish you weren’t part of this.’

She didn’t quite manage to keep a thread of anger from her voice. ‘I’ve been in worse fixes, Greville.’

‘And I wish that wasn’t true, not that wishes are much use to anyone other than children.

’ Greville got up then, moving with a little less grace than usual because he was favouring the wounded arm.

He crossed the room to the large window and drew back the curtains before leaning on the window frame, facing out towards to the loch.

His shoulder blades rose elegantly from the lean, muscled expanse of his naked back and she had to catch her breath.

It shouldn’t hurt like this to look at him, whatever he was keeping from her.

‘It’s my fault,’ he said, at last. ‘You should know at least that I accept it.’ He turned to face her.

‘Every last insult that you’ve suffered for the past three years might as well have been at my own hands.

I swore before God to protect and honour you, and instead I drove you straight to Cleveland and from there into what can only have been a form of hell. ’

Cressida sat on the end of the bed, like a puppet with the strings cut away. Now it was her turn to make wishes: how dared he do this, here and now? ‘Why didn’t you come after me? I always did wonder that. I thought you’d reclaim your legal property, if nothing else.’

What if he had come after her? What if she’d never set foot on that troop ship with her Michael, or not without Greville at least?

What if Sylvia and Kitty had succeeded in packing her and Greville both off to Summercourt to let their mutual fury scorch itself out behind closed doors?

Had her baby lived, he or she would have been rising three years old now, either Greville’s child or Cleveland’s cuckoo.

It struck her that Greville would have probably found it within himself to love a cuckoo, or at least to treat him or her with the careless kindness he showed to all animals and children.

Greville watched her now, very still, with the afternoon sunlight and the loch behind him.

The window was ajar, and she breathed in the faint scent of exposed seaweed as the tide began to turn.

‘I didn’t come after you because on that occasion anger and stupidity overrode my pride.

I’m sorry for it. And if you want the truth, actually I’m still furious with you.

I don’t even know the half of what you did, what you faced.

And even then I’m still not as angry with you as I am with myself.

But you don’t need me to rescue you any more – if indeed you ever did. ’

His face was cast into shadow by the light streaming in behind him, so that it was hard to read his expression.

‘You’ve been looking out for your own survival since the day Rosmoney left Ireland, have you not?’ Greville went on. ‘Dealing with his idea of a pleasant, rational mode of living must be second nature to you by now.’

‘You’re feverish,’ Cressida said. ‘Did that man of yours even clean the wound before he bound it?’ She refused to think of how Greville had enveloped her in his arms on that launch; she wouldn’t waste a single moment on the memory of how he had taken that bullet on her behalf as though it were more natural than breathing.

‘He bled me, and I’ve felt devilish ever since. Cressida, where is your father?’

She had trusted Rosmoney in that bothy last night, believing him as he lied straight to her face.

Trust was too dangerous a game to play now, with anyone.

Greville said nothing, at least mercifully quick to realise that he would get no more secrets out of her, just as he showed no signs of sharing whatever he was keeping from her.

He was hiding something: she sensed it, almost an invisible presence in the room.

Instead, Greville sat beside her on the end of the bed, swearing quietly as he reached around to loosen the pin in his bandage.

She removed that pin herself, sliding it out of the fabric.

Greville caught his breath as they touched, but whether this was because of the discomfort or the flash of heat as his fingers brushed hers, she couldn’t say.

The gunpowder had been wiped away, and dark bruising now flowered in its place.

Cressida sent for boiled water and clean linen, ignoring Ines’s look of warning as she glanced from husband to wife and back again before retreating to the safety of Mrs Scudamore’s kitchen.

Cressida left Greville sitting on the bed and took feverfew and honey from the battered roll of canvas she’d carried from the dusty apothecary shop in a shady Lisbon back alley all the way to Badajoz.

She took the can from her pack and set water to boil at the edge of the open fire, crouching down to turn the can with the blade of her knife and the old iron spoon she’d found in a ruined house near Talavera.

When the water had boiled, she dressed the wound with honey and bandaged it again.

They had settled into silence and neither spoke as she shook dried feverfew flowers from her leather pouch into the seething water, brewing a tisane with willow bark and some of the honey drizzled from the end of her knife, which she went to wipe on her apron until she remembered she hadn’t worn one for months.

Nudging her can away from the glowing embers to cool on the hearthstone, Cressida got up and found Greville still watching her, leaning on one of the bedposts with the old velvet canopy above his head.

‘You work like a bloody soldier.’ The anger in his voice was undimmed; he would never forgive himself or her.

‘No, Greville. I work like the soldier’s wife I lived as.’

‘You’re my wife,’ Greville said, with an expression in his eyes of such fury and come-hither that if she didn’t leave the room now, they’d both regret it.