His Saving Grace (11 page)

Beside him, Grace was prattling on about something. Plants and flowers, no doubt.

Suddenly, he stopped and looked at her. At the sun streaming through the trees and touching her hair until it glowed golden. She stopped as well and looked up at him, her head tilted, her beautiful blue eyes questioning. She was wearing blue. He would forever remember that she was wearing blue. What an odd thing to want to remember.

“I…Uh…” He licked his lips and resisted the urge to run his hands down the side of his legs in agitation.

“Yes? You what?”

Then his nervousness was gone and his heart resumed its normal functioning and he knew, deep in his soul, that this was the right thing to do. He loved Grace so deeply that it sometimes frightened him. He loved her so passionately that life without her was inconceivable.

He dropped to his knee, right there in the middle of the path, with the birds chirping and the sun shining and her maid just around the bend.

Grace’s eyes widened and her hand went to her throat. “Michael?”

“I love you, Grace. More than life itself. Please say you’ll be my wife.”

Her hand went to her mouth, and tears appeared in her eyes. She nodded. “Yes,” she whispered, then louder, “Yes!” She dropped to her knees in front of him and hugged him so tightly that he swore he heard his back crack, but he didn’t care. They were both laughing, and yes, even he had tears in his eyes.

Almost right away, Michael knew someone was following him. At least his soldier instincts hadn’t failed him. He also knew who it was without having to turn around. Eventually, he stopped to allow Grace to catch up.

She looked at him warily and with sorrow. Quite a bit different than that day five years ago. It seemed so much longer than five years, and yet it seemed like yesterday that he had been that naive boy, a fool to believe that life would always be that good and happy.

Now he saw in her eyes what he knew in his heart. He was half a man. Hell, he couldn’t write a simple sentence. That he needed a secretary grated on him, even if most men of his station employed one. There were times when a man wanted to write his wife a love letter, and a secretary’s hand just wouldn’t do.

“I can’t smell, either.” It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but why not tell her everything.

Her brows came together, and little vertical lines formed on her forehead. She looked that way a lot lately. Frowning. Confused. “You can’t?”

“My sense of smell is gone. Like my writing ability.”

“Maybe it will come back.”

“And maybe it won’t.”

“It doesn’t matter to me, you know. I couldn’t care less if you can smell or write.”

“It matters to me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t even realize the words were spelled wrong. Even when you pointed it out.”

“I’m more than happy to read over your correspondence until you hire a secretary.”

“That’s not the point, Grace.”

“I know it’s not, but it’s the best I can offer. I refuse to tell you that everything will be all right, because I just don’t know, Michael.”

“Your honesty is a breath of fresh air.” It was beyond him to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

“I can’t believe that Tarik has been less than honest with you.”

“I don’t tell Tarik everything, and I don’t employ him to stroke my ego.”

“No. I can’t imagine he would, anyway. I hope you aren’t overly angry with him for letting me into your room last night. It wasn’t his fault. I forced my way in.”

He suppressed a smile, picturing his slight wife standing toe to toe with the Cossack warrior. He’d seen Grace when she became determined, and he couldn’t fault Tarik for folding in the face of her determination. She was a formidable foe when she wanted to be. “Nevertheless, I don’t want you in my room when I’m like that.”

“Nevertheless, I’m afraid you are in no condition to say so. I will be there the next time and the time after that and for however long you need me.”

The sun lit a halo of gold around her head, and her blue eyes flared at him. Clearly, she was just as angry as he. His bright flash of irritation at her impudence and insubordin
ation burned out as fast as it appeared, and he thought back to that day he’d proposed to her, when life was as perfect as it was going to get.

“I’m not a soldier, and you’re not my captain,” she said.

“I’m your husband, isn’t that the same?”

“Hardly.”

“You are my wife. You are supposed to answer to me and obey me in all things. Isn’t that what our marriage vows stated?”

Her lips twitched, and he found he wanted to see her smile. A true smile. Not the false one she’d bestowed upon him at church. He stretched his mind back and realized the last time he’d witnessed her real smile was days before leaving for the war. That was a tragedy.

He didn’t know when it had happened, but he found they were holding hands as they walked the wooded path. The sneaky woman. Her hand in his felt so natural. How many walks had they taken? With the sun behind them, their hands entwined, talking nonstop about nothing and everything. This was what he thought about in those dark hours when he was in so much pain. This was the bright light he longed for.

He swung her arm so that she twirled in front of him. Before she could react, he cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her. There in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the path, with the birds chirping and the sun filtering through the new leaves.

It was like coming home. It was joy and beauty all rolled into one. And his body responded. There was relief mixed in, for he had worried that his injury had affected more than his brain and his balance. One of his greatest fears had been that he would not be a husband in full to his wife. That didn’t seem to be a worry, for he was so hard it actually hurt. If they hadn’t been in the middle of the woods, he would have swept Grace up to her bedchamber and proved to himself that he was a man in full.

He kissed her more passionately, and she responded by wrapping her arms around his neck and leaning in to him so he could feel her breasts pressed against his frantically beating heart.

When he pulled away, they were breathing hard. Her eyes were glazed, her lips swollen, but there was a smile on her face that lit him from the inside out.

“I love you, Gracie.” He spoke from his heart. All those days he’d said the words to himself when he was in the throes of fever. He’d kept them close to his heart and said them over and over. Even when he couldn’t recall her face, he knew her love and his love for her.

“I love you, too, Michael.”

They walked back to the house hand in hand, and the darkness that dogged his every waking moment and haunted his dreams was pushed away for the moment.

The memory of Grace’s body pressed against his kept Michael awake that night. As he watched the shadows dance across the ceiling, his body burned for her in a way that it hadn’t in a long while.

He surged off the bed and left his room. Tarik, accustomed to Michael’s midnight wanderings, slept on in his makeshift bed.

Michael prowled through the depressing drawing room with its faded wallpaper and old, worn furniture, angry all over again to see how Grace lived. She was—had been—the dowager countess of Blackbourne, and her station called for much more luxury than this. Nigel was an ass. A self-centered ass who deserved far less than what Michael was offering. He was glad that in a few days’ time, he and Grace would be residing in the manor house.

He turned on the gaslight and folded himself into the chair at Grace’s small desk. Every time he sat here, he feared the decrepit thing would fall apart. He pulled over the ledgers that Roberts had delivered promptly that afternoon and stared at the line of numbers marching down the page.

He hated that he was so unsure of himself. Were the numbers he was seeing truly the numbers listed? Was he mixing them up, as he had mixed up his letters?

He’d wanted to call Grace in when he’d first looked at the books, but he hated relying on her and hated for her to see his uncertainty. If he couldn’t read a bloody ledger and decipher some damn numbers, then he didn’t deserve to be the earl of Blackbourne.

He shoved the ledger away and sat back to stare at the window that, in the light of day, overlooked Grace’s gardens. There was a darkness inside him that tainted everything he did and every thought he had. No matter how hard he tried to combat the darkness, it always returned, a formidable foe with weapons he could not fight against. It made him think sinister thoughts. Made him question himself. Made him believe he was less of a man than he used to be. It kept him awake at night, worrying that he had disappointed Grace because he was not the man she had sent off to war.

He surged off the chair and began prowling again. Before he knew what he was about he was climbing the steps to the upper rooms. Most of them were closed off. Only Grace’s and his rooms were open. He hadn’t had the opportunity or the inclination to look into the other ones. Did she keep them closed because it was silly to open so many rooms for just one person, or did they need such major work that she could not open them?

What did it matter now? Nigel was out of his life, out of the earldom, and out of the manor house in a few days, whereupon this house would sit silent once again. However, he vowed that one of the first things he would do would be to renovate the house.

His thoughts brought him to Grace’s closed bedroom door. He placed his hand against it and dropped his head. She was inside. The only thing keeping them apart was the door.

And his mind.

He desperately wanted to go to her, to lie with her, to hold her and kiss her and make love to her. Hell, he was already hard and aching for her. But the darkness kept him rooted. It whispered in his mind that he wasn’t good enough anymore.

His hand slid from the door and he took a step back, then another and another. The darkness drove him away. He hated that darkness, and yet part of him believed the vile voices.

He returned to his bedchamber and climbed into his cold bed to lie awake the rest of the night and stare at the shadows.

The day they moved into the manor house was warm, the sun bright, the clouds white puffs that moved lazily across the sky. To Grace, it seemed a good omen. A bright start to the leg of the journey that was the rest of their lives.

Ida and George helped, along with the rest of the staff. There were many smiles and lots of laughter. Alfred was the most jovial as he directed the servants. There was a lightness to his voice and a spring to his step; his enthusiasm was contagious.

Grace brought only a few things from the dower house, for there was little she wanted to bring to this new life. The chipped plates and the mismatched flatware stayed behind. She made a mental note to throw it all away when she had the opportunity. The one thing she oversaw with tender care was the transport of her seedlings from the conservatory at the dower house to the conservatory at the manor house. She employed the help of a footman and rode in the back of the wagon with her precious plants, making sure they stayed upright. When they reached the conservatory at the manor house, she could only stare in horror.

She hadn’t expected Nigel or Clara to take care of the glass enclosure, but she had not expected this. Vines had climbed halfway up, obscuring the structure until you almost couldn’t see it. What broke her heart were the shattered panes of glass.

She hadn’t even realized Michael was near until she heard him curse.

“Who would have done this?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but we’ll get it fixed, Grace. We’ll replace the glass. I’ll send the footman to town right now to bring the glass blower up here and measure. I can get the gardener to pull down the vines and remove the weeds.”

She blinked away the tears that blurred her vision. It was just another thing in her life that was broken and needed to be fixed. For a short moment she let self-pity overtake her; some days it was too much to keep it at bay. Seeing her precious conservatory, the one place she could escape with her thoughts and lose herself in her plants, in such disrepair was almost too overwhelming.

“In the meantime, we can keep your seedlings in the house if you need to,” Michael was saying. He instructed the footman to take the seedlings to the big house and put them in the kitchen. No doubt Cook would not be pleased, but Grace didn’t have any other ideas. The plants would never survive the cool nights.

Shaking off the sadness of the conservatory she had lovingly designed and created, Grace oversaw the seedlings’ transport to the big house. Cook hurriedly cleared out a room just off the kitchen, and Grace carried her plants inside. Once she was finished, she set her mind to instructing the servants and put away the thought of the conservatory. There was nothing she could do now, so she focused on the positive. Michael was alive. They were moving home. It was just a silly glass house.

Only in her dreams had she imagined moving back into the manor house. Late at night as the tears rolled down her cheeks, missing Michael so much it was a physical ache, she dreamed that his death wasn’t real, that he would return and sweep her off her feet and they would live happily ever after.

Part of that was true. Michael had returned, and they were moving back into the house. But the rest? Well, the rest was a bit muddled. She heard Michael prowling the house at night, could feel his nervous energy, and daily she dealt with the confusion that had become his life. She was constantly searching for misplaced items, on edge that he would get angry when he couldn’t find them.

Her hope now was that this move, taking over their life and getting back on track, would be the start of something great. A new beginning. Their life would never be what it used to be, but maybe they could make something better, something stronger.

She walked into the room that had been the bedchamber of every earl before Michael. Tarik was unpacking Michael’s clothes and moving them into the wardrobe while Michael looked out the window.

“May I speak with you, my lord?” she asked. In the connecting room, the same room where many other countesses had resided, Jenny, her maid, was unpacking her clothes and putting them away.

Michael turned from the window. She searched for a smile of greeting, but as always, there was none. He smiled rarely and not since their walk in the woods. She kept that memory close to her heart because it was the closest she’d been to Michael since his return and the closest they’d been as the couple they used to be. It was also the first time that he’d approached her for any sort of physical comfort. It was a step in the right direction. A tiny step, but she would take what she could get.

“Of course, my lady. What can I do for you?”

She looked at Tarik. “Can I speak to you alone?”

Michael frowned. “Of course.”

Tarik quietly slipped out of the room and shut the door behind him.

Suddenly nervous, Grace clutched her hands in front of her and twisted her fingers.

“What’s wrong, Grace?”

“Now that we’re not in the dower house and there are more servants about, we must keep up appearances.”

“I agree.” His expression was wary, as if he was afraid she was going to ask for something he could not give her. Or maybe was not willing to give her.

“Tarik sleeping on your floor every night is highly irregular, and the servants will talk. While I understand why he is here, no one else will.”

“You would like Tarik to have his own room.”

“Yes,” she said on a relieved breath. “I think it would be best.”

“I understand and I will tell him when he returns.”

“Thank you, Michael.” But there was more to her query than keeping up appearances and the fear of the servants taking tales back to the townspeople. Grace was ready to reclaim her husband, and she couldn’t do that if Tarik was sleeping on the floor of his bedchamber.

Samuel Roberts, the steward of the estate, arrived early the next morning. Grace watched Michael fidget through breakfast, barely touching his food. Since his return, he’d gained a few pounds, and the gauntness in his face wasn’t as pronounced as when he first arrived, but he still had a few more pounds to gain. Grace got the impression that he ate because he had to and not because he wanted to.

When Alfred announced Roberts’s arrival, Michael placed his napkin on the table and pushed his chair away.

“Roberts can wait a bit if you’d like to finish your breakfast,” Grace said.

“I’m not hungry, and we have a long morning ahead of us.”

Grace watched him in worry as he rounded the table to kiss the top of her head. When they’d reconstructed his letter to Roberts, she’d witnessed Michael’s exhaustion as they worked; his attention had waned and his eyes had grown weary. She feared he was taking on too much too quickly. But what was he supposed to do? He was the earl, newly returned. People expected him to take over his duties forthwith. To wait would have caused questions and raised eyebrows, and Michael didn’t want that.

“I have my festival committee meeting this afternoon at Mrs. Davison’s house,” she said.

“Have a good time with your friends,” he said absently.

She snagged his arm. “Promise me that you’ll take a break for lunch.”

His brows furrowed, and there was a spark of irritation in his eyes. “Whatever for?”

“Just promise me.”

“You worry too much.”

“Of course I worry. You’re my husband.”

“I don’t need a mother hen, Grace. I can take care of myself.”

He shouldn’t have snapped at Grace, but he was irked that she was treating him as a child, and he was nervous about his meeting with Roberts. At one time such meetings had been common and even monotonous. But that was when numbers didn’t swim before his eyes and he could actually remember the topic he was conversing about.

Roberts was waiting for him in the study with the papers and ledgers spread out. He stood and smiled when Michael walked in. “My lord, it’s good to see you hale and hearty.”

“Thank you, Roberts. And thank you for delivering the ledgers so I may study them before our meeting,” Michael said as he sat at his desk.

“Not at all, my lord. I would expect no less. I’ve enjoyed working with you in the past. Your quick mind and willingness to try new things were always refreshing.”

“Yes. Well.” Bloody hell. And what was he supposed to say to that?
My mind isn’t quick anymore
?
Beware, Roberts, things aren’t what they seem
? Instead, he moved on. “Shall we begin?”

They began by discussing the ledgers—money in and money out. They talked of sheep and crops, of rents and taxes, of irrigation and exportation and so many other things. At one time Michael had been adept at juggling it all effortlessly. He and Roberts had always had the same vision for the estate, and they got along well. But now his mind was taxed and his thoughts were scattered.

He had known this would be a difficult meeting, but he hadn’t realized how difficult. It was disheartening to realize that his lapses of memory were far worse than he had originally thought. Conversing with only Tarik day after day and then holing up in the house with just Grace and a few servants had given him a false sense of security.

“So what you’re saying is that Nigel raised the rents?” He was confused and felt he was missing part of the conversation that would make it all clear to him. On top of that, his head was beginning to ache.

Roberts hesitated. “Yes, my lord. As we discussed, he had claimed to raise the rents so he could improve the land for grazing and such, but he never got around to it.”

As we discussed.
So they had already discussed this? Bloody, bloody hell.

“Never got around to it or conveniently forgot?”
Just keep going. Push through. Fake it if you have to. Don’t let him see that you’re agitated or confused.

Roberts refused to meet Michael’s eyes. “I can’t rightly say, my lord. The former earl and I did not meet frequently, and when we did, we did not agree on certain aspects of running the estate.”

“I seem to remember, the last we spoke before I left for the Crimea, that we were going to diversify.” It wasn’t odd for Michael to remember the tiniest details from months, even years, before his injury, and he clearly remembered the endless discussions he and Samuel had about diversifying. It was a monumental decision that needed the approval of William. To Michael’s surprise, William had agreed. “Was that done?” he asked.

“No, my lord. The former earl did not feel the need.”

“Of course not.” Michael sighed. “I may have been gone for a year, and I have not been fully apprised of all that has happened in my absence, but I still believe that the future lies less in agriculture and more in industry.” It was the wave of the future, and he knew Roberts agreed with him. Agriculture was dying, replaced by industry, and those estates that did not keep up with the changing times would soon find themselves in financial straits. Michael had not wanted to see that happen to Blackbourne Manor before he left for war, and now that he was earl, he did not want to be the one responsible for losing the family seat that had been in the Ashworth family for centuries.