Charming Artemis by Sarah M. Eden
Chapter Eighteen
Artemis had abandoned the game. Charlie wasn’t certain why. She’d seemed to be enjoying it, though she’d fumbled a bit for a question to ask him. In the end, the one she’d chosen had been rather perfect. It told his family they knew each other’s interests and pursuits, which they certainly would if their ill-fated marriage was the growing success they were trying to pretend it was. His siblings had asked dozens of questions about his lecture opportunity, and in the midst of it all, she’d disappeared.
She’d placed such importance earlier that evening on getting on with his family that simply walking away made no sense. Nothing about any of this made any logical sense.
He sat amongst the others as the game of questions and commands continued with its usual hilarity. But he couldn’t enjoy it. He and Artemis had kept their interactions cordial. She’d used her signature dramatics to add his family’s amusement to the equation. He’d multiplied that with a bit of his own antics during their round of questions and comments. It ought to have resulted in an improvement of the situation. Yet there he was, alone and confused.
Corbin’s wife, Clara, came and sat next to him, something that didn’t happen overly often. She was as quiet as her husband, though not unfriendly. “I am certain you have and will receive ample unwanted advice from your brothers, but will you accept an observation from a sister-in-law who loves you?”
“Of course.”
Clara held his gaze. “You embarrassed her.”
“Embarrassed her?”
“Artemis.” Clara emphasized the explanation with a nod. “Her husband publicly declared he could not under any circumstances be convinced to kiss her.”
He had panicked a little when his name had been drawn in conjunction with hers. But he thought he’d played it off well. “She knew I was teasing. She does it all the time.”
“You were not looking at her,” Clara said, “but I was.”
“She wasn’t . . . laughing along?”
“I am honestly a bit surprised she wasn’t actually crying.”
His heart dropped. Surely Clara was overstating the severity of Artemis’s reaction. “She doesn’t cry.” But he knew that wasn’t entirely true.
“You made it clear to everyone in the room how low your opinion of her is, Charlie. That would make even the most stalwart heart falter, especially when she is already feeling alone and afraid.”
He shook his head. “She’s Artemis Lancaster. She’s never afraid.”
“She is now Artemis Jonquil, and I assure you she is terrified.”
Charlie pushed air past the catch in his lungs. He’d made a mull of things again. Of course he had.
“Any advice on how I ought to approach this?” he asked.
Clara smiled a little. “Ask any one of your brothers. They’ve ample experience landing in their wives’ black books.”
“Then I come by my stupidity rightly?”
Clara didn’t take the bait. True to form, she quietly motioned him away, a silent suggestion that he go address the mull he’d made.
He left the drawing room and headed to the first place he could think of to look for Artemis: the bedchamber they would be sharing.
The room was dark. He left the door a bit ajar, allowing the dim light of the candle sconces in the corridor to spill a bit inside, enough to spy a candelabra on a nearby table. He took a moment to light the candles using a corridor sconce. He wasn’t entirely convinced Artemis was inside the room, but he wouldn’t know if he couldn’t see. It was possible she’d fallen asleep.
Stepping back inside, he could see that she had, in fact, dozed off. She was on the chaise longue, curled against the arm, a blanket covering only her feet. The same handkerchief she’d held when he’d come across her in the circular sitting room at Brier Hill was clutched in her fist again.
He set the candelabra down securely on the lowboy and stepped over to her. While she was smaller and shorter than he—not an unusual thing, he having the legendary Jonquil height—she could not possibly be as comfortable on the benchlike bit of furniture as she would be on the bed. And she must have been a bit cold with the blanket all but lying on the floor.
He hunched down and set a hand on her arm. “Artemis?”
She took a shaking breath, precisely the sort one could not help when one had been crying. A closer study of her face revealed she had likely been more than merely crying. She appeared to have been sobbing.
Did I do this? He hated to think he had.
“Artie?” He nudged her arm a little more.
Her eyes fluttered open. She studied him a moment as sleep clung to her. She blinked a few times, watching him through a cloud of confusion.
“You’d be more comfortable lying on the bed,” he said.
“It’s not my bed.” She was still slowed by her half-awake mind, though she did sit up a bit more.
“I’ll help you over,” he said. He reached for her handkerchief.
“No.” She snatched it back with every indication of panic.
“I was only going to put it on the bedside table so your hands would be free.”
“I can’t lose it. It’s the only thing he ever gave me.”
The only thing who ever gave her?
Artemis took a shaking breath, still not entirely awake.
Charlie sat on the chaise longue beside her. “Have you been crying, Artie?”
“I don’t cry.” No one seeing her would believe that.
“What is your policy on forgiving idiocy in husbands?”
She sat up more fully and looked at him. Heavens, there was no misunderstanding the puffed, red-rimmed eyes and droplets of tears on her lashes. No matter her protestations, she’d most certainly been crying.
“I suppose that depends on whose husband has been an idiot.”
He took her hand gently in his. “Yours, Artemis. Yours has been painfully stupid, and I’m hoping you’ll forgive him.”
“For which painfully stupid thing?” Oh, she was awake now.
“Take your pick.”
She watched him, her closely guarded handkerchief still clutched in her hand. Who had given it to her? The question refused to dislodge itself from his mind.
“I wasn’t going to insist you kiss me during the game,” she said. “We could so easily have played the entire thing for a lark, chosen a kiss on the hand or cheek and then put up with a bit of teasing. You didn’t have to humiliate me.” A tiny break in her voice betrayed the emotion she was keeping very well hidden.
Charlie squeezed the hand he still held. “I truly am sorry.”
Her brow inched down in thought. “I know you didn’t appreciate the teasing from your brothers and me earlier, so I was quite careful tonight not to join any of their jesting in your direction. I am trying to make things at least a little better.”
“Believe it or not,” he said, “I am as well. You will, to your horror, discover that I am utter rubbish at anything that isn’t mathematics. Ask anyone in this house. I’ve spent my entire life making a mess of everything.”
To his surprise, she leaned a little against him. “We did so well getting along at the inns. Why is it so much harder here?”
He slipped his hand from hers and put his arm around her, sitting with her in a side-embrace. They still were on delicate footing, but it was a comforting arrangement. “I suspect our difficulties are due to my family,” he said. “I fully intend to blame them.”
“I’ll support you in that.”
This was the sort of camaraderie they’d enjoyed on the journey here. It was welcome and fragile and desperately needed.
“I think we should lay most of the blame at Philip’s feet,” Charlie said. “But none of it at Mater’s. I’ll not say anything against her, even in jest.”
Artemis rested more heavily against him, cozily situated under his arm. It reminded him a little of the way Caroline would sit with him when she was sad or tired or simply wanting to talk. Except Caroline didn’t quicken his pulse. Artemis was doing precisely that.
“What is it like having a mother?” she asked in a whisper. “I’ve always wondered.”
If anyone had told him six months earlier that he would find himself heartbroken on behalf of the lady he’d long considered his nemesis, he’d have laughed. There was no laughter in that moment.
He pulled her in closer. “No one enters Mater’s familial sphere without being fully and completely adopted by her. Ask Crispin or your sister-in-law Arabella, or any of my brother’s wives. Allow her the opportunity, Artemis, and she’ll make certain you know precisely how it feels to have a mother, because she will consider you her daughter.”
“Even though I’ve ruined your life?”
“I suspect she has greater hope for the two of us than that.”
She looked up at him. “Do you?”
“I’m trying to.”
She took a steadier breath than she had up until then. “Perhaps, instead of trying to fool all your family into thinking everything is sunshine and flower-strewn paths between us, we should expend our effort on trying to have ‘greater hope’ that we can make something of this mess we’ve been thrown into.”
“I’ll support you in that.”
She smiled a bit, no doubt recognizing his exact repetition of her earlier words. “And let us begin by addressing the issue of this chaise longue.”
What did she mean by that?
“There is no reason you should always be the one relegated to the less comfortable arrangement. It’s not fair, and I won’t be bullied into being selfish.”
She put him a little in mind of the Dangerous Duke in that moment; implacable and determined in a way that might have been intimidating if not for the lingering mark left on her face from having slept against the seam of the chaise’s arm.
His pride wanted to object to being tossed from his position of gentlemanly sacrifice, but his neck and back were cheering. “Perhaps we could alternate?”
She gave a quick, single nod. “Excellent solution.”
“One I will accept without objection on the condition that you sleep in the bed tonight. I will consider it penance for having made such a mull of the game earlier.”
Mere moments later, she was settled beneath the heavy blanket on the bed, resting against the feather pillows. Her handkerchief, the mystery he still hadn’t solved, had been stored very carefully in the drawer of the bedside table.
Charlie returned to the chaise longue and sat silent and uncertain. He glanced upward in the general direction of the heavens. What would you have done, Father? Ought I to have done something more? Something different?
He didn’t know his father’s answer. And the heartbreak of it all was . . . he never would.
