Leave a Widow Wanting More by Charlie Lane
Chapter 30
Sarah had once worked twenty-four hours straight to help finish some lady’s gown in time for a ball. She had worked alongside ten other seamstresses, yawning and pricking their fingers more and more as the hours wore on. She’d nearly collapsed on the way home that night and had lost the job when she’d slept through her shift the next day.
But she felt more exhausted now than she had then. Odd, that. She was herself a lady now and not required to do work of any sort. Servants brought her tea in the afternoon. A maid helped her dress. She would never have to work twenty-four seconds again, let alone twenty-four hours. True, the morning had started out in a rush to give Gulliver’s to Henry before he left and then in a panic to find Pansy. But the rest of the day had been all leisure. Even now, she sat reading, or trying to read, beside the fire, her family gathered at a nearby table as Henry taught them an Egyptian card game.
Her eyelids and limbs drooped, ready for sleep. Yes, she also felt unsettled, as eager to move about as Henry had been to seek out his lost daughter that morning.
No use trying to read. Sarah tossed the book to the side and left the room quietly. She ambled down the halls, no true aim in sight, and considered the events of the day. Good work had been done—a father restored, a family fixed. She felt satisfied.
Didn’t she?
Though she had set out to fix the Cavendishes, she hadn’t really done so. Henry had fixed them all himself, deciding to brave the travails of fatherhood instead of running from its dangers. Pride for him mingled with love.
Yes, love. She’d felt a pale version of it with her first husband. Their relationship had been all friendship, no lust. But with Henry, oh with Henry, she felt everything. Friendship, intellectual challenge, partnership, and, yes, lust.
Lots of lust, to be honest.
She stopped, realizing she’d reached the end of a hallway. Would she ever learn her way around this gigantic place? But perhaps she’d ended up exactly where she needed to be. Her body must have known what she wanted before she did herself. The map room. She cracked the door and slipped inside. Moonlight pooled in through a crack in the curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows. She stood in that sliver of light, decided she needed more. In seconds she’d pulled the curtains back and moonlight washed the room in its yellow glow.
She found the map of England and pinpointed London, then she traced her finger down to where Cavendish Manor would be. Approximately. Henry would know better. She traced her finger back up toward London and found where she thought Harrow might be. James would return there shortly.
But where would she go?
The question startled her. Where had it come from? Such an absurd question. She lived at Cavendish Manor now. She would stay with Henry and the girls and the twins and even the damned horses.
But they didn’t need her now.
Oh.
The thought that had been working its way into her brain all night finally formed, a dreadful feeling made real as the right words clicked into place.
She paced away from the map. One of the major reasons Henry had brought her here no longer mattered. It had been an equal agreement after all. She needed financial stability and he needed a mother for his girls while he traipsed about the world.
He wasn’t traipsing any longer. His girls had a father, so they wouldn’t need a mother. Sarah only now benefited from the marriage. It was an unequal agreement.
Would he—horrid thought—annul the marriage?
“No.” She shook her head rapidly. “No.” He’d talked about a honeymoon. He’d said strange things about lonely hearts in chests that had seemed to indicate he felt something for her. He lusted after her. She did not doubt that, but he’d not—
The door hinges creaked, and the door swung open. Henry stood illuminated in a pool of light, his gold-white hair reflected the moon’s glow. “Sarah-mine? Is everything all right?”
The man was too observant by far. And oh, she hated it when he called her Sarah-mine only because she loved it so much.
“What are you doing in here?” He crossed the room and wrapped his hands around her upper arms, rubbing them up and down. “It’s cold. Come back to the sitting room.”
Sarah pulled from his grasp and strode back to the map of England. Even in miniature, the distance between London and Kent seemed huge.
Henry’s warmth pressed against her back and his arms wrapped around her. “If you’re plotting our honeymoon, you’d best look outside the confines of our little island.”
She turned in his arms. “Will there be a honeymoon, then? That was not part of the original agreement.”
He hesitated before answering. “It was not.”
“Neither was your presence here. When you bargained for a wife, you didn’t intend to be home enough to have to deal with one.”
“Correct.”
“So, the contract has been …” She searched for the right word. She’d tried to read some law books at Hopkins’s shop, but they had proved too dense and boring. “The contract has been breached. Hasn’t it?”
His arms about her stiffened. “Are you saying you wish to renegotiate?”
She huffed. “I’m not sure what I’m saying. The words are fuzzy. But it has occurred to me you no longer need me, and you may wish to annul the marriage, and I may need to return to London shortly.”
“Do you wish to return to London? Be honest.”
Sarah snorted. As if she’d be anything but! “No. But I don’t wish to burden you.”
His arms coiled tightly around her, causing her breasts to press against his hard chest. He dropped a kiss to her nose, then kissed each eyebrow, then trailed kisses down her jaw, her neck, her collarbone. Her arms melted as his lips met hers, and when he pulled away, much too soon, she made a little moue of displeasure.
He put up a hand to stay her advance and reached into his coat pocket. He handed her the book he pulled from its confines, and she read its title in the moonlight.
“Gulliver’s Travels,” she smiled. Then her smile trembled and dropped. Was he giving it back to her to end their agreement? She’d given it to him so he could remember her, but if he didn’t want it anymore … Oh, bloody Gutenberg. She’d lost her heart to a man who didn’t want it, a crocodile with a toothy grin and fatal bite.
His finger rested on her chin and lifted her face to his. His eyes locked on hers. “I don’t need Gulliver’s anymore.”
She’d guessed it, then. Perhaps she could sell the book. It would break her heart to do so, but since it was already broken, it would do no more damage.
“Sarah-mine, don’t cry.” His thumb rubbed the single tear from her cheek. “I don’t need a book to remember I’m yours because that much is obvious. I would never start research with a question that’s already answered. What would be the point? Does Sarah hold Henry’s heart? Is Henry in love with Sarah?” He snorted. “There’s only one clear answer. Yes. In fact, the only remaining question is whether or not you lo—”
Sarah threw her arms around her husband’s neck. “I love you! I love you!” His arms clamped around her and she grunted. “Henry, could your arms love me a little bit less? You don’t know your own strength.”
“No, they cannot,” he answered, loosening his grip. “Now that we’ve got that settled, would you like to come back to the parlor? It’s warmer there, and the girls need your motherly influence.”
The girls could do without a motherly influence for the moment, or a fatherly one for that matter. They’d be fine for a good half hour, maybe longer. She kissed him once, long and hard, before whispering in his ear, “What is it like to make love with all the nations of the world looking on?”
“Shall we find out, Sarah-mine?”
She answered him with a kiss.