“Lend me your carriage, then.” How she wished she’d driven this morning, instead of walked from her house accompanied by a footman. How she wished she’d never come here at all. She struggled not to remember Silas declaring his love. Every time she did, her chest tightened to paralysis and she felt like the real world rushed away from her down a long dark tunnel.
She battled to rein in her panic. Silas’s kisses had thrilled her. His love terrified the life out of her.
“I don’t think you want the servants to see you.” Helena dragged her across to the mirror over the fireplace.
“Oh, dear God,” Caroline whispered, appalled at what she saw. “I look like I’ve been romping in a hedgerow with the Household Cavalry.”
Her hair flowed around her, somehow more wanton for what remained of the morning’s neat coiffure. A fraying plait. A couple of pins sliding from the tangled mass. Her dress, thank heaven, was still fastened. But that was all she had to thank heaven for. The pretty green muslin was crushed and stained. Silas’s teeth had left a red mark on her neck. Dirt streaked one cheek. After those fierce kisses, her lips were swollen and glistening.
“A muddy hedgerow,” Helena said drily. “I’ll get Rose to fix you up.”
“What’s the point?” Her voice was bleak. “My reputation will be in shreds anyway. If your servants saw me flat on my back, they won’t keep the story to themselves. Why on earth didn’t you stop us sooner?”
Helena frowned. “I thought you knew quite how public the greenhouse is.”
Caroline looked away from the devastated gaze she met in the mirror and slumped onto a dark blue sofa. She could hardly believe only minutes ago, she’d been kissing Silas. Now she didn’t know where to turn. “I must have been mad. All London will call me a strumpet.”
Helena sat next to her and took her trembling hand. “It’s not as bad as that.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Most of the staff have worked for us for years and they adore Silas. And hopefully they’re too busy to check on what his lordship’s up to in the garden.”
“You’re clutching at straws.”
“Yes.” She squeezed Caroline’s hand to apologize for her bluntness. “But no point borrowing trouble. Let’s get you back to your fashionable self, then we’ll decide what to do.”
From where she sat, Caroline had a painfully clear view of the fatal glasshouse. The kisses she and Silas had shared would have been as visible as if they stood on a stage. Bile rose in her throat at the performance they’d put on. “I can’t stay. I can’t face Silas.”
“I suspect he’ll brood in there for a while yet.”
Caro’s stomach soured with self-hatred as she studied that tall form. She hardly heard Helena leave the room. Instead she watched him standing hunched over the place where only minutes ago, she’d been spread out for his delectation.
Then the scoundrel had had the nerve to tell her that he loved her. She wished to heaven he hadn’t. That familiar breathless feeling overwhelmed her. She made herself inhale to clear her head. And again. Already the tentacles of that precious, unwanted love reached out to throttle her dreams.
The only true liberty a well-bred woman could have was as a widow of independent fortune. After unwilling subservience to a martinet of a father, then an uncongenial if not unkind husband, she was now in that enviable position.
So what did she do? She went and fell in love. Could she be any more of an idiot?
Today’s astonishing events opened her eyes to so much. Her ability to hurt Silas. His love. The reason behind his sudden cantankerousness—however jealous she’d been of Fenella, he’d been equally jealous of West.
The invincible power of desire.
She caught her breath and closed her eyes as her body heated to the memory of those ferocious kisses. Today’s encounter had held little tenderness, but dear God, they’d shared passion. A passion that threatened to set the whole world on fire.
Tears pricked her eyes. So sad that after ten years of marriage, she only just discovered desire. Now she had, could she accept its counterfeit with Lord West?
She liked West. She had little doubt that he’d prove an accomplished lover. But how she’d thrilled to Silas’s shaking, desperate need. To Silas, she’d been water to a man dying of thirst. To West, she was a bonbon to sweeten a moment. Consumed, enjoyed, then forgotten.
She reminded herself that brief enjoyment was what she required, not a love that demanded commitment and promises and duty. After those dismal years nursing Freddie, she’d decided that if she ever got the chance, she’d dance through the rest of her life like a butterfly, alighting to taste a flower’s nectar, but never lingering beyond the moment.
Well, so far she was a complete failure as a creature of air and space and freedom. That went to show what a calamity love was.
She’d survived Freddie on willpower alone. Surely she could summon that will to claim the future she wanted. The first step was to move past this hankering for the man she wouldn’t let herself have. At her ball, she’d felt like she had the whole world in the palm of her hand. She could feel like that again. She would feel like that again. But only if she took decisive action to seize her destiny.
Enough of this shillyshallying. Her new life started now.
She clenched her hands into fists and shored up her shaky resolution. With one final look at Silas, she silently said farewell to the love they might have shared if she’d been a different woman with a different past.