Whispers from the Shadows Page 20

  Her breath caught in her throat as she took it in. Her painting, so prettily framed and hung in the center of the wall, where every visitor to the Lane house would see it. See her interpretation of his ship, the sea he so loved, him as fearless captain. Made all the more complete with said fearless captain leaning against the mantel and studying her as she studied her handiwork.

  Her fingers tangled together over her abdomen. “Well, look at that. You managed it.”

  “A feat that will inspire minstrels for years to come.” He too took a step away to survey it. “I daresay there is no finer painting in all these United States.”

  Gwyneth chuckled. “I am afraid that is not saying much for your country.”

  He turned to face her, brows raised. “Do not disparage your talent, sweet.”

  She knew well her grin must look impish. “I am not. I am disparaging the rest of the art to be found here. You ought to have heard the things said of you Americans in the London drawing rooms.”

  “Prithee, what things?” A sparkle in his eye to belie the slope of his brows, he took a step forward.

  She inched back. “The ones you might expect. That the land is still untamed and uncultured, and the people in it have no appreciation for refinement.”

  “Rubbish.” The sparkle turned to an outright glint as he swept his gaze down her. “I have great appreciation for refinement.”

  Had the sun reemerged and blasted her through the window? She felt its heat to her very bones. “Of course you would think so. How would you know better? Given that all Americans are uneducated bumpkins.”

  “Bumpkins!” He took another step toward her, though if he wanted to look menacing, he would do better to keep the smile from the corners of his mouth. “You are calling me a bumpkin?”

  She edged back a bit more. “Not I, sir. The ton of London. They are the ones who view you all as ignorant—” she had to take a larger step back to counter his stride forward—“uncouth—” she bumped into the leg of the low table—“uncivilized—”

  “Uncivilized again, am I?” He caught up to her and reached out to keep her from tumbling backward with his long, strong fingers around her elbows. “Shall I show you uncivilized, Miss Fairchild?”

  Yes, please. Thank heavens her breath had escaped her and kept her from uttering such embarrassing words. Not that he gave her time to speak. His hands jerked her close, one sliding around her waist and the other moving to tip up her head.

  Her heart galloped when her gaze clashed with his. Amber eyes molten, sparking like a flame tossed by the wind. Terrifying and alluring and invigorating all at once, so intense she had to close her own to take it in. And then his lips were on hers.

  Civility indeed had no place in his kiss. ’Twas more the embrace of an adventurer, one who was seeking, hungering, demanding…yet not demanding more than she yearned to give. She wrapped her arms around his neck and surged up onto her toes.

  How could something feel both familiar and new? Never had a man kissed her like this—never, in truth, had she wanted one to. Yet as Thad’s lips caressed hers, she had the sensation of waking from a dream and finding it real, part misty wonder and part warm reality. And his arms…they felt like home around her.

  Her smile took her mouth from his, and she opened her eyes to find Thad smiling too.

  His fingers wove through her hair, making her wonder what happened to her pins this time—she had never had such trouble keeping track of them in England. He pressed a gentler, quicker kiss to her lips. “That will teach you what you get for calling me uncivilized.”

  Laughter bubbled up and spilled forth. “It will indeed, you uncouth, uncivilized brute.”

  Another brush of lips on lips. “You are an astoundingly slow pupil.”

  “Perhaps you are a bad teacher.” She tightened her arms around his neck. “You ought to try that lesson again.”

  “Well.” One more kiss, feather soft, tempting as a cup of chocolate. “If I must.”

  He deepened it again, and this time was even more consuming than the first, making her imagine a thousand futures she could have in his arms. Tossing seas and galloping horses, exotic mountains and untamed wilds. Bustling streets and familiar faces, nights by the fire and days side-by-side.

  So long as she could feel forever this certainty in her heart, that wherever he was, that was where she should be. As her fingers moved through his hair and onto his cheek, her heart beat in time to his.

  A blistering French exclamation from the doorway made them both jump. Her feet firmly on the ground again, Gwyneth’s vision blurred from the rush of blood to her face. She leaped away from Thad and pressed her hands to her burning cheeks.

  He dragged in a breath and turned leisurely toward the door, where Captain Arnaud stood glowering. “Thunder and turf, Alain. You startled a year off my life.”

  Gwyneth slid to the side to keep Thad between her and Captain Arnaud, though she wasn’t sure why she felt the need to do so.

  Arnaud swept his hat from his head and dashed it to the floor. “Is that what you call treading carefully, Thad? Taking matters slowly?”

  Gwyneth drew in a long breath. They had spoken of her? Or rather, of Thad’s feelings for her? The thought made her insides turn to mush…until she realized that his best friend obviously did not approve. The mush hardened to lead and sank into the pit of her stomach.

  Thad’s head came up. “Yes, that is exactly what I call it, given how long I have wanted to kiss her and held myself in check.”

  Her breath caught. How long had he wanted to do so? Since she first started imagining it?

  Arnaud muttered something too low for Gwyneth to make out, though the intonation was unmistakably French once more. He shook his head. “You are too blind to see the dangers. She is a guest under your roof, yet there you stand taking liberties—”

  “Liberties! ’Twas only a kiss, and my parents are directly across the hall. I am hardly—”

  “You are.” He stooped, scooped up his hat, but then he tossed it down again with even more fury as soon as he straightened. “Blast it, Thad, look at yourself. You have not courted her. You have only known her eight weeks. She is still distraught over her loss, and you swoop in and take advantage.”

  Ridiculous. He would never… Joke as they may about him being uncivilized, Gwyneth had not a single doubt that he was a gentleman. She slid to her left, willing to risk being within Arnaud’s line of sight so that she might see Thad at least in profile. She found a muscle in his jaw ticking.

  “Watch yourself, Alain. I have granted you many a jab over the last two years, but I will not suffer another now.”

  Arnaud loosed a scoffing laugh. “You have granted me…? Is that what you call refusing to discuss something?” He strode across the space between them and gave Thad a push that would have sent a smaller man tumbling backward. “It is time you give me answers. Is this how you treated my wife, Thaddeus? How you convinced her to marry you while I was rotting in a louse-infested pit in Istanbul?”

  Gwyneth staggered back as if she was the one he had shoved. What could he be talking about? Arnaud had been married to Marguerite. Thad’s wife had been Peggy.

  Peggy—short for Margaret. Gwyneth tried to blink away the realization, but it still clouded her eyes. Had she not found it amusing that Captain Arnaud called his son Jacques while everyone else used the Anglicized version? Yet she had never once considered he was doing the same with his wife’s name.

  She felt Thad’s gaze on her and refocused her own past the shock. Why did she feel betrayed? He had never lied to her about it, had never said anything to deliberately make her think Marguerite and Peggy were two different women—but he had certainly never explained it, either.

  Still, there was no missing the hurt clouding his eyes as he looked again at his friend. “Alain, you had been gone two years. Dead.”

  Arnaud held out his arms, needing no words to point out the lie.

  But Thad shook his head. “Dead. Your crew
man saw you struck down. You were gone. And you know well what that did to us all.”

  His friend pivoted away, strode to the fireplace, and braced himself on the mantel. The clouds in her painting suddenly seemed darker, feeding off his inner storm. “Two years would not have been enough for her to grieve me.” His tone proved it, so heavy with mourning for his Marguerite that she must have felt the same.

  Gwyneth’s gaze went again to Thad, whose Adam’s apple bobbed. “No. Nowhere near. But she was dying, Alain, and the money was gone. What was I to do? Leave her and Jack to starve?”

  Arnaud speared him with a sharp glance and a quiver at the corners of his mouth. “You take them food.”

  “To where?” He lifted his hands and let them fall again. “You know well she sold the house to buy medicine. They had no place to go. Your widow, the son you had never even met, would have been left to the streets.”

  “My wife.” Slashing a hand through the air, Arnaud’s nostrils flared. “So you swoop in to play the hero as you must always do. As you are doing now, again, with another grieving woman.”

  A second blow to her chest. Wishing she had a shawl to clutch around her, Gwyneth stumbled another step to the left.

  Thad sent her a helpless look before turning it back to his friend. “It is not the same. Peggy needed someone to care for her. It was a matter of survival—”

  “She was carrying your child when she died!”

  That accusation ripped through the room like a bolt of lightning, making Gwyneth feel stranded in a tossing, tempest-ridden sea. Having no part in this, not really, yet trapped within it. And she shook her head. That was why no one would mention Peggy and the babe. Not because of Thad’s grief, but because of Arnaud’s.

  A grief so very understandable. She took another step away from them. To come back from death, back from slavery, and find that one’s wife had died in one’s absence…as the wife of one’s closest friend. To find that the woman supposedly so ill she could not survive on her own had been with child…

  The slight stoop of Thad’s shoulders hinted at the weight Arnaud’s words brought crushing down on him. “We believed you were not coming back. And we were left with whatever we could make of the pieces that truth brought upon us. She was my wife—”

  “She was my wife!”

  Thad sighed. “Please try to understand. Please. Every day I fell to my knees and prayed for her healing. Prayed the Lord would touch her and make her well. Because the only future I could see was the one that seemed true at the time—that you were dead, that she and Jack were all I had. And so my priority was not to guard your feelings. It was to try to forge a sound marriage, one that could grow strong when my prayers were answered. That was the only reality I had, Alain.”

  A soul-rending cry tore from Arnaud’s lips as he flew across the room, heading straight for Thad.

  Gwyneth spun away and darted out the door. She understood that Arnaud had long bottled up his feelings over this and they were now erupting. She understood she had been an unintended casualty from an issue too long ignored.

  But understanding did nothing to hold together the shards of her heart.

  She nearly collided with the elder Lanes, who stood in the hall a few steps from the door. Her face flaming again, she tried to hurry away.

  Winter’s hand on her arm stayed her. “Gwyneth, I am sorry. You did not realize…and I never paused to consider you wouldn’t. I should have explained it to you.”

  “No, he should have.” Perhaps not at first, given how sensitive a subject it was, but sometime. Certainly sometime before he took her in his arms and kissed her senseless. A thud came from within the drawing room, all the inspiration she needed to pull her arm free. “Excuse me.”

  She took a few steps, but Winter shadowed her. “Gwyneth, he—you have a right to be upset. But know that regardless of what Alain says in his anger, your situation now is nothing like Peggy’s was. Thaddeus has never looked at any woman the way he does at you.”

  Maybe that was true, but who was to say it was not because she was more broken, more in need, more in distress than any other damsel he had yet come across? Because she provided more opportunity for him to play hero, as Captain Arnaud had called it?

  She needed to get away, to be alone, to close out this whole family and all their noble, terrible truths. And so she headed for the stairs, the one place Winter still moved slowly, and ran up them two at a time. Gaining her room, she slammed the door. And for the first time since her arrival, she turned the key in the lock.

  Twenty-One

  Thad bit back a choice word when his elbow connected with the table’s edge on his way to the floor, and he gave Arnaud a foot in the gut to push him away. “Blast it, Alain, that hurt.”

  “That hurt?” He scrambled back to his feet, leaving Thad little choice but to jump back to his. “Try being whipped until your back is raw.”

  Thad rolled his shoulders forward, his arms raised. “I told you not to go. Why could you not have listened?”

  “You think I have not asked myself that a million times?” He took a swing that Thad ducked. Then he charged him and knocked Thad onto the chair.

  He used the momentum to roll Arnaud over him and onto the floor with a thud. “It would all be so different.”

  “I know!” Fury drenched the words, fury obviously aimed at himself. Not that that stopped him from hooking a foot under the chair and tipping it backward, Thad along with it. “I know. But someone had to go, and you refused.”

  The impact was negligible, just enough to make him want to let loose a few strong words. Words that would be aimed more at the past than the jab of pain. “You are right. It should have been me who went.”

  Arnaud spat out something in French and lobbed a pillow at Thad’s head. “Of all the idiotic things to say! Why? Why should it have been you? Because you could have evaded the pirates? Outsmarted them?”

  “Because I had nothing to lose! No one was depending on me.” He grabbed the pillow and whipped it at Arnaud’s face before pushing up to his feet.

  Arnaud sent the cushion flying toward the ottoman. “Are you daft? You have an entire nation depending on you. You are the one who knows every blasted man, woman, and child from Florida to Canada. You are the one Tallmadge trusts implicitly, who everyone trusts implicitly.”

  “What then, Alain?” Thad spread his arms wide, making himself a target if that was what his friend needed. “What should I have done? Should I have kept my distance and left Peggy and your babe with no help?”

  Arnaud spun away and kicked another stray pillow. “Don’t be a fool.”

  “What then? What should I have done?”

  “I don’t know! Perhaps exactly what you did!” Somehow he made it sound like an accusation, even pivoting around with a pointed finger. “Yes, you should have taken care of them. You should have raised Jacques as your own. Perhaps you even should have married her. But if so, then you should have loved her, Thad! She deserved to be loved.”

  He might as well have hurled grapeshot at him. Thad took a step back, his arms falling limp at his sides. “How?” His voice came out like a rusty hinge. “How could I love her when she was still yours? When you were every other word that fell from her lips?”

  Arnaud’s finger shook.

  Edging closer, Thad reached out and gripped his friend’s shoulder. “We did what we felt was best. But her heart was yours, was always yours.”

  There had never been room for him. He had known that the day he proposed. And she had apologized for it the day she died. As if it had been something she could help, as if he had not understood. As if he blamed her for it, and for not holding on long enough to give him the family she thought she owed him.

  Arnaud drew in a shuddering breath. “Do I apologize for that?”

  “No.” Thad swallowed. “Just do not begrudge me my chance now. Please.”

  Arnaud knocked his arm away. “Again with the idiocy. Why do you think I am trying to keep you from
making an utter mess with Miss Fairchild?”

  “I am not making a mess of anything!” He shoved Arnaud two steps backward. “We were getting along quite well before you came in and exploded like an overcharged cannon.”

  “Fire and brimstone, Thad, if it were anyone else you would be the first to point it out.” He indicated the door. “That girl is not ready for you.”

  Growling, he shoved his hands into his hair and gripped it, but that did nothing to relieve the pressure building in his head. “Why is it that every man, woman, and child from Florida to Canada trusts me except for you?”

  Arnaud had drawn closer again and reached out again to push him. “Why is it that you think you are the only one who can ever know what is right, ever do it right?”

  “Because you cannot even figure out why you are angry! Is it over Gwyneth or Peggy? Because I married your wife or because I didn’t love her?” He returned the push, though Arnaud leaned into it and tried to reach his shoulders.

  “Boys!”

  There had been a day when that tone from his father would have stopped them both cold. And it had, on many occasions, brought an end to a scuffle much like this one. Not today.

  Father huffed. “This way of solving your differences may have been understandable when you were ten, but now? How old are you?”

  Arnaud rolled his eyes. Only, Thad was sure, because his back was to Father. “Younger, I believe, than you were when your brother last visited, though I recall seeing you with your arm locked around his head.”

  Father’s lips twitched. “Entirely different. Archie and I were not fighting. ’Twas all in good fun.”

  Arnaud changed his position, and they both staggered to the right. Thad smiled. “I daresay that for this to be termed fighting, we would have to be trying to hurt each other.”

  They staggered back to the left.

  “Hmm.” Father leaned into the wall. “You do have a point. But you scared Gwyneth away.”

  “What?” Thad straightened and absently steadied his friend. Of course he had known Gwyneth left the room. But he had assumed…what? She was outside in the hall? Waiting to wrap her arms around him when he emerged? “Where did she go?”