Theresa Romain - It Takes Two to Tangle

There would be just one more letter to Henry, and it would be their triumph. Frances’s triumph. She would tell him everything she felt, everything she wanted, even knowing he would credit it to another woman.

He wanted the lie, she reminded herself.

Her fingers wrapped tightly around the quill, the feathered barb teasing her skin, and she began to write.

My dear Henry,

How glad I was to see you earlier today. How glad I am too that you have continued painting. You must see now that you have lost nothing of permanence. Anything can be regained, given time enough and desire enough.

I must ask you now to dwell on desire along with me, for it is often on my mind. It has been a long time since I’ve been with a man, but I have not hungered overmuch for a man’s touch until recent days. As you and I spend more time together, my long solitude is a weight on my heart, and the days since my widowhood stretch out long and gray.

What have I lost? How can I bear it with so many years left ahead of me? Yet my loss, like yours, need not have permanence.

I have come to value your friendship greatly, yet it leaves me unsatisfied. Much as I enjoy every word we share, conversation is not enough. I think sometimes the truest, wisest, wildest, and deepest thoughts and emotions can be communicated only with the press of hand on hand, mouth on mouth, body on body.

How I should love to communicate with you ever further. I have pressed your hand in mine. But have I truly reached your heart? Do you understand me, and I you?

Let us give it time if you desire it. Heaven knows that I do.

I am yours, as always.

Henry had to sit on the floor of his bedchamber while he read this latest letter.

Even so, he still felt too unsettled. Too unprepared to take it all in. So he stretched out on his bed, flat on his back, and read it again as his body grew molten.

Ah, God. It was amazing. It was the type of letter a man fantasized about getting when he was young. The type an older man probably fantasized about getting too, for that matter, especially if the sender were young and beautiful.

The sender… that was the only part that troubled Henry. Cheerful friendliness still marked his every interaction with Caro outside of the letters; he had no idea she had grown ready for a deeper intimacy.

He held up the creamy paper again, studying the boldly incised words. They didn’t seem to suit Caro, but perhaps this was part of one of her own stratagems. Do you understand me? the letter asked. No, he really didn’t. And he rather thought that was the way she preferred it, despite the heat of her letter.

A few weeks earlier, he would have snapped up her offer regardless of his opinion. Any connection with the much-desired Lady Stratton would have been proof to the ton that he could conquer the polite world, even though the French had sent him home in pieces.

Now he knew the polite world had changed, just as he had. He needn’t be so eager to fit himself into his old life; it had moved on just as he had.

Frances had been the first to point that out, with her terrifyingly clear vision.

Pillowy damask cushioned him, a luxurious coverlet on a soft bed in his brother’s house. He fisted the rich fabric in his left hand, wanting to wrinkle it, to make some mark. Leave some sign of his presence.

No, he wanted more than that. He wanted happiness, intangible and maybe unattainable. Just as Jem had advised, he wanted to be with a woman who made him feel at ease. Comfortable even in his own wounded skin.

When he thought about it that way, the choice became clear. He didn’t want to spend his life looking backward, pretending three years of his life had never happened and the loss of an arm changed him not at all.

He had once hoped desperately that would be the case. But he was no longer so desperate that he couldn’t see the truth. There were some things he could never get back, and there were some things he was no longer suited to pursue.

One of those was a romance with a woman who seemed to have time for everyone but true interest in no one.

Only in Caro’s letters did Henry see glimpses of a deeper self: what she cared for, what bothered her. But what if they married? Would anything change? He couldn’t write letters to his wife for the rest of his life, then spend his days sitting aside while she enchanted others. And he couldn’t ask her to change to suit him.

Not when there was someone else who already suited him.

Henry let out a shuddering sigh. His shoulders sank deep into the mattress, his booted feet dangling from the edge of the bed. After years of training, it was impossible to be careless, to let his dirty boots touch the coverlet.

A small matter, but out of these small matters, life was built. Frances understood that. She always had.

When he first met Frances, he had seen her as only a means to an end. With a speculator’s view to the main chance, he’d asked her for help, laying his schemes on her shoulders. Oh, with an artist’s eye, he’d admired her beauty too. Muted, yet striking in its own way.

But in the Blue Room, artist and speculator had vanished, and he was nothing more or less than a man. And that, more than anything else since he’d returned to London, had shown him that he might be able to rebuild his life after all.

He’d stepped so wrongly with the portrait of Frances’s late husband. In trying to give her something that would matter to her, he’d only raised old ghosts—at least, that was what he guessed when he saw that haunted look on her face.

Such longing for a lost one was familiar. He’d been competing with the ghost of his old self since he’d come back to London, hadn’t he? But there was nothing to be gained by chasing spirits. The joy of the pursuit turned hopeless as soon as they vanished.

He hoped he could convince Frances of this. But first, he needed to convince himself.

Heavy red wax from the letter’s seal softened under his fingertips. Henry lowered the letter to his side and flexed his feet in his boots, his shoulders against the yielding surface of the mattress.

He would never have to sleep on the ground again. He would never have to march for miles under a sun baked hot enough to leach the color from his uniform. And yet… he’d never really be free of the war if he always held the secret of Quatre Bras inside him.

He owed Caro an explanation first of all. And then—then he owed Frances the full truth. He must build his new life on a sturdy foundation, or it would all be flimsy and fragile.

Each society ball would be a building block, each call at Albemarle Street the mortar. If Caro had given Henry the determination to stay in London, to make something of himself again, Frances had inspired him to consider how he might do that. How a man with one arm could take hold in high society again. How someone who had seen the horrors of war could understand how to live in peace.

He didn’t have all the answers yet, but he knew how to find them. Starting tomorrow.

Hand on hand, mouth on mouth, body on body. Someday he might even experience that again if all went well.

He pressed the letter closed and let it flutter to his chest, let his hand wander downward.

He could not seize happiness alone, but as he thought of Frances, he came as close as he could.

“Henry, welcome. I’ve been expecting you to call.”

Caro’s butler had shown Henry into the drawing room, where Caro met him after only a few minutes’ wait. Caro stretched out her hand in greeting with queenly grace, as though it was perfectly normal for Henry to call at noon—an hour when the polite world was often still abed and certainly was not badgering its neighbors with surprise visits.

This ruler of fashion looked as stylish in her Pomona green silks as any portrait of the late Duchess of Devonshire, her fan hanging carelessly from a silk ribbon at her wrist. Breezy and confident, she could have passed no such fraught night as he had.

“You surprise me,” Henry admitted, surrendering his hand into hers for a tense second. “I wasn’t sure after the exchange of the miniature when I might call again.”

“Or whether you ought to call at all,” Caro added smoothly. She gave him a knowing smile that made him wonder just how much she did know.

She sank onto the long sofa from which she’d surely hold court in a few hours. With a lift of her brows, she asked, “Clearly you have something on your mind. Will tea do for coaxing it out, or should we ring for something more bracing?”

“Nothing right now, thank you.” He found a fussy cabriole-legged chair and dragged it near her, then settled himself on the brocade seat.

“As you wish.” Nestled against the cushions littering her sofa, Caro looked completely at her ease. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit? I have a guess, but I won’t say in case I’m wrong, and I do hate to be wrong.”

Henry’s shoulders were knotted, his spine a brittle ramrod. “In that, you resemble your cousin greatly.”

Caro arranged a fold of her gown into a more graceful drape. “Yes, I suppose so. Frannie and I both tend to confine our opinion to areas in which we feel ourselves on solid ground.”

Her bright eyes flicked up, caught his. “Which, right now, I suppose I do.”

This was getting more awkward by the second. “I’m aware that this appears to my disadvantage, calling on you at such an unusual hour, but—”

“Actually,” Caro countered, “it appears to my advantage, not to your disadvantage. My neighbors will think I’ve made another conquest.”

She plucked at a tassel on one of her embroidered cushions, studying it with deliberate attention as Henry’s thoughts unspooled in a giant loop of oh, damn. “But never mind that, Henry. Why not tell me why you’re really here?”

She surprised him again; he didn’t perceive the slightest bit of flirtation in her tone. If anything, she seemed… businesslike? The tone combed his thoughts into a sensible order.

“All right.” He collected his right arm into his left hand, took a deep breath, and plunged in. “I wanted to thank you for the very great honor of your letters, and also let you know that I think it prudent to put an end to the correspondence.”

She smoothed the cushion she’d been toying with and looked at him with those startling Paris Green eyes. A small smile bent her lips. “I’m not usually concerned with what’s prudent, Henry, but in this case I think I can divine what you’re too polite to say. You are interested in another lady, are you not?”

Henry wracked his brain for a proper response. Caro was awfully cheerful considering the bent of their conversation. Not that he had particularly wanted tears or a tantrum, but this blithe unconcern—he felt he saw only a mirror. She reflected what those around her wanted to see, but who was she really? The uncertainty made him uneasy.

And that, more than anything else, was reason enough to stop writing the letters. He needn’t stop them for Frances’s sake. He would stop them for his own. “My feelings for any other lady don’t affect my decision, Caro. I’m truly sorry if it causes you pain.”

To his surprise, she smiled again, wide and lovely. “You have nothing to apologize for, Henry. You needed something for a short time, and I was happy to be a part of it. Now you find you need something else. Who can fault you for that? Your life has been unmade, and you are remaking it.”

Henry’s mouth opened, but he could think of nothing that he ought to make it say. Finally, he managed, “You are very perceptive.”

“I am indeed.” She settled back against her long sofa again. “More than the world realizes, Henry. For example, this lady for whom you will not admit your regard. It’s Frannie, yes?”

He flailed for the cool dignity he’d often sported as Captain Middlebrook of the First Foot Guards. “I’d prefer to discuss my feelings for Frances with Frances herself.”

“So you do have feelings for Frannie.”

Well, there was no point in denying it now. “Yes. I hope you are not offended.”

“Offended?” She propped herself up on one elbow. “I am the farthest from offended that you can possibly imagine. I am more offended that you are the first man since we came to London a year ago to see Frannie’s worth.”