A Groom of Her Own (Scandalous Affairs Book 1)

by Christi Caldwell

  “I’ve got to get to Paris.” Before he became any more confused by Claire or what was unfolding or what he was feeling, emotions he didn’t want to consider or think about for the ways in which they’d weaken him. “You’ll escort her. Take one of the maids as a companion.”

  “And the matter of a wife?”

  “When I return from Paris, we’ll… give that another attempt.” The thought somehow left him feeling even more sour. It felt… wrong.

  “You sure you want to go?”

  He scowled. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I… I’m just asking. You haven’t seemed to worry about—”

  “Well, I am worried about getting there.” So he could hopefully again find his damned muse and remember what he’d loved about all of this. “I just need to see the lady settled,” he snapped.

  “Of course, of course,” Wade said on a rush.

  A knock sounded at the door, and they looked up.

  A white-haired older woman with one of the widest smiles he’d ever seen let herself in. “Good afternoon, Mr. Gray, sir, I’m Mrs. Talbot. I’ve shown the young miss to her rooms, and I’ll have the evening supper ready for six o’clock.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. Thanks,” he said gruffly, reminded all over again of the reasons he wanted no part of this property, one being all the servants and people answering to him.

  “That’ll be all. Thank you,” Wade said after an awkward stretch of silence in which the old housekeeper lingered in the doorway.

  With a curtsy and another smile, she bustled off.

  “Is there anything else you need me to do?” Wade asked after she’d gone.

  “No,” he said curtly. “Nothing. I don’t need anything.”

  Wade hesitated, looking as if he wished to say something more, and Caleb dared him with his gaze, dared him to continue on with the earlier nonsense, because he was spoiling for a fight.

  He didn’t want to be served. He wanted to paint, damn it. And how dare Wade suggest that there might be something that would keep him here and distract him from the only thing that mattered to him?

  Wade left, and Caleb was alone, not sure why it felt as if he were trying to convince himself that he needed to go to Paris… and doing a rather poor job of it.

  Chapter 18

  Later that evening, when the household slept and rest proved elusive, Claire made her way around Night’s Keep.

  The walls were constructed of stone, and only a crimson red runner along the stone floor left the corridors cold.

  A handful of rusty sconces had been left lit, those tapers throwing shadows upon the faded tapestries that adorned the halls.

  She took in each and every frosty detail. No one would dare confuse this place with one that was warm and inviting. It could not be called a conventional home in any sense of the word.

  Claire reached the base of a winding set of narrow stairs that climbed high up to what would have been a parapet that, given the unfinished state of the rest of the residence, had also remained untouched by modern doings.

  Gripping the crude rail that had been affixed unevenly to the wall, Claire made the slow, long climb. The stairway went on forever and left her slightly breathless as she went. The stones, marked by age and time, shifted as her feet touched each one, little bits of pebble and dust falling loose with her every step.

  At last, she reached the summit. Claire adjusted her sketch pad, shifting it over to the crook of her opposite arm, and then pressed the handle to open the door.

  A blare of cold immediately spilled out into the already chilled stairwell, sucking the air from her lungs and turning the little puffs of breath leaving her lips into clouds of white.

  Teeth chattering, she briefly debated the path she’d traveled, and then, looking ahead, she started forward once more. As she’d predicted, the promontory was as much a moment froze in time as every other part of this former keep.

  The night air immediately brought gooseflesh rising on her limbs, and she hugged her book close to her chest even as she rubbed her arms in a bid to bring some warmth into them.

  And yet, as cold as it was, Claire wandered out, deeper onto these parapets where warrior men, and no doubt women, had waged battles to hold on to this very place that remained standing all these years later.

  Reaching the edge, Claire stared off, far into the distance, at the star-studded night sky.

  This could have been home.

  It had almost been home.

  Would it have been enough?

  Caleb had insisted she’d eventually want more.

  But how was it possible to ask for more when one was content with living a life alone? Forgotten.

  Anonymous.

  Something that she’d ceased to be.

  Claire rested her sketch pad on the top of the limestone wall, and pressing her hands along the jagged surface, she stretched her neck out and inhaled deep of the healing, cleansing winter air, welcoming the way it left her breathless.

  When Claire had discovered her family’s involvement in the disappearance of a young boy, she’d felt… lost.

  Everything about her life, everything she’d believed about her parents, the luxuries they’d enjoyed, the households they’d called home, it had all been a lie.

  Her happiness had been built upon the suffering of another. And in her failure to know that and acknowledge that the peerage made their wealth at the expense of countries and people all over the globe, she’d been complicit.

  She’d spent the days and months and eventual years attempting to find her way to the other side. Not peace. There couldn’t be that, not with all the injustice and evil she would be forever linked to. But there could be… a life outside the peerage. One where she lived on the fringe of the world, with some control and some ability to turn profits from these properties and hopefully do good with them.

  This place had represented—hope.

  “You’re going to freeze out here.”

  He was here.

  Of course he was here.

  He’d found a way to be wherever she was.

  “I’m fine, Caleb,” she said tiredly. “I’m a grown woman.” Not the young girl he’d sought to look after since the Rotted Rooster. Her mouth soured.

  “I know you are.” His baritone enveloped those four words in a husky quality that recalled all the passionate moments she’d stolen in his arms, and her body quickened, because it didn’t care that he’d both betrayed her and stolen the future she’d dreamed of. Rather, her body knew only the pleasure he’d shown her, and she despised herself for that weakness.

  That managed to steady her resolve.

  “You didn’t come to dinner,” he murmured.

  Claire had skipped the invitation to dinner and instead taken the evening meal alone in her rooms. Not the chambers belonging to the mistress of the household, but rather, chambers for a guest. “I took my meal in the guest chambers.” Claire didn’t turn to face him. Or was it that she was unable to? It was all confused at the moment.

  “Yeah, that was kinda what I just said.” There was the faintest hint of his usual drollness, but there was a hesitancy that she’d never heard from him.

  Was it that he felt guilty? Or ashamed? Or… regretful in other ways?

  She hugged her arms tighter to her middle, hating herself for desperately wanting the answer to be the latter.

  She felt him near her shoulder. The heat emanating from his broad, powerful frame spilled out, enveloping her, chasing away the cold. Go. Just go, she silently pleaded, needing to be alone and away from him so that she didn’t recall that she’d come to like him and… care.

  Alas…

  He rested his palms along the stone wall. His fingers brushed her sketch pad, and much the way she’d done earlier, he sucked in a deep breath. “Another visit from your muse?”

  That’s why he would think she was out here. She had her book, and he knew the hours when she found her greatest joy of creating. Because that
was just one more part of herself that she’d shared with him.

  “My muse is gone, Mr. Gray,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness back. At least in this moment.

  “I know the feeling.”

  He’d said as much at the Rotted Rooster and yet… “Do you really, though?” she snapped, finding solace in her fury. She whipped to face him. “Do you truly know anything about it?” He and his great masterpieces, and his adoring crowds. Even his mediocre work was greater than anything she’d ever put to paper.

  “I told you, Claire, I do know what it is to struggle with this craft. I’ve been searching for my muse for several years now.” His somber admission was directed out, as it had been at the North Yorkshire hills.

  She thought of how little she’d detected his hand move while he’d had his own sketch pad open.

  “Yeah, it happens to every artist.” With his face still in profile as it was, she caught the pull of his muscles into a grimace. “Or, that’s what I’ve told myself to ease some of the panic. I was looking for this place to provide some income so I can go out and do my work. Find myself.”

  “Oh.” That soft little exhale slipped out. And suddenly, she hated herself for questioning that great struggle he now faced. “One would never know from the pieces you’ve created, Caleb.”

  “You mean, you can’t take a look at my paintings and tell they are empty?” he drawled.

  She remembered that volatile exchange they’d had, when she’d gone to put one more appeal to him for lessons, and also when she’d called out his work for being passionless.

  He faced her. “I think that’s been part of my resentment of you, Claire. It wasn’t fair, and it was petty and wrong.”

  “You will find yourself again.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said sadly. “All I catch are fleeting glimpses of her.”

  No. She didn’t.

  She wanted to hate him. She wanted to let her resentment fester and her anger linger. What she didn’t want was to feel this… this connection to him. A need to erase the worry not even the dark night sky could conceal.

  Claire presented her back to the countryside and perched herself on the stone balustrade. “Sometimes, when you’re searching too hard for something, you direct your gaze outward so much that you miss what is right before you, the beauty to be captured.”

  “It’s hard not to look when you’re searching to find something.”

  “No,” she murmured. “That is true.” And also something that resonated on so very many levels.

  Just like that, he dragged them back to the very reason she was out here in North Yorkshire, with him now.

  “I didn’t know, Claire,” he said quietly. “Until at the inn,” he conceded. “When you handed me the directions, but by that point, I was trying to figure out how to tell you.”

  And she found herself… believing him.

  She sighed. What could he have said, though? No matter the timing of that admission, it would have always been terrible. That detail didn’t change anything. It didn’t resurrect the arrangement that had brought her out on this, the most daring, outrageous moment in her life. One that would have seen her independent.

  A little fleck of white appeared before her vision. And then another. And another.

  Stretching a palm out distractedly toward them, she attempted to catch one of those tiniest of snowflakes. Each one, however, proved as elusive as happiness was for her.

  “Snow,” she murmured. “I used to love snow, but it is… so rare here.”

  “Snows all the time where I’m from.”

  She wondered about the place of his birth, a place he’d left… Was he searching or running? “Do you plan to return ever?” she asked, rubbing at her arms.

  “Here.” Caleb shrugged out of his jacket and swung the article over her shoulders, and she was instantly enveloped in the warmth left by him. The faint ashy smell of charcoal contained within the folds of the fabric so perfectly suited this man, unlike the citrusy bergamots and sandalwoods of the lords in London.

  “I never gave it much thought,” he confessed. “When I returned and learned… everything I did”—that his brother and fiancée had betrayed him in the worst of ways—“I first buried myself in my art, losing myself in my work. Locked myself away in a room for nearly a year, rarely coming out and then only when I could be assured that most of my family wasn’t around. When I’d finished, there were thirty-five canvases complete.”

  “And a legacy built,” she said, admiring him even more for what he’d managed to accomplish amidst such grief.

  “A legacy that brought with it an opportunity.” He glanced out, but his gaze was directed inward. “And pressure.”

  There it was again. That struggle he faced, the most intimate of details for an artist to confess, and he’d shared it with her. What did that mean, exactly? For surely it said… something about them?

  “Wade’s gonna escort you home tomorrow morn,” Caleb said casually, so jarringly that he effectively cut across her whirling thoughts.

  “W-Wade?” she repeated blankly.

  “He’s my man of affairs. A friend from America. We were impressed together. I trust him with my own life.”

  And so he knew she’d be safe in his care. That was supposed to bring her solace? Or comfort or… or… what?

  Claire sank her lower teeth into her lip to steady a tremble that had nothing to do with the cold. “A-and what of y-you?” she brought herself to ask, praying he’d mistake that tremor in her voice as a product of the winter air.

  He rocked on his heels. His eyes briefly went to hers before shifting away to take in the night-covered countryside. “I’ll head on to Paris.”

  For his art.

  Only, that wasn’t what she was asking. Not truly.

  It wasn’t Caleb’s immediate future that she wondered about, but rather, now that he’d not landed the bride he’d thought he had, had he simply given up on his advert? Claire wouldn’t be his bride or the mistress of this great household, but eventually another would. Given her quest for freedom, it should be the latter thought that hurt most. It was, however, the former that threatened to cleave her chest in two.

  Chapter 19

  After he and Claire had parted ways following their meeting out on the promontory, Caleb had spent the better part of a restless night converting the crumbling ballroom into an improvised art studio.

  It was the first thing he did whenever he made a new residence, no matter how temporary a home it was.

  It was a great distraction from the past and the nightmares.

  In focusing on the transformation of some previously irrelevant-to-him space into the room that mattered most, he found escape, even if it was just for the briefest of times.

  This particular time, however, that escape had eluded him.

  Somewhere around three o’clock in the morning, he’d at last managed to find solace in sleep, once he’d found a quiet acceptance of Claire’s parting.

  It was when he awakened three hours later to see her and Wade off that he found he’d been thwarted.

  Damn it all to hell. He’d finally come to terms with their parting. He’d put his thoughts back into a proper order, reminded himself just where his focus should be.

  Now, shoulder to shoulder at one of the floor-to-ceiling ballroom windows, Caleb and Wade assessed the current conditions beyond those frosted panels. The snowstorm that had raged into the early morn hours, leaving a deep blanket across the countryside, had receded to a slow trickling down of those small flakes, as if the thick clouding overhead were shaking loose the last remnants of those flecks.

  “You’re not truly thinking of sending her out in this?” Wade asked, skepticism heavy in that query.

  “I didn’t say I was,” Caleb said tightly. The roads were likely impassible and would be until the weather shifted back to its usual warmer, rainier form of precipitation. Caleb cursed. “For the love of God, it doesn’t even snow in England.”

>   His friend leaned forward and peered outside. “Yeah, except it appears that it does.”

  “I know. I was just saying…” He caught the amused glint in the other man’s eyes and growled. “Oh, go to hell,” he snapped.

  Now, it should snow. Not just snow. But snow snow. A New England kind of blizzard that slowed travel and made it perilous to venture out.

  It appeared the universe, fate, whatever the hell it was, intended to thwart him at every corner. He wouldn’t be making his damned trip to Paris, and there was no way in hell he could send Claire out into this.

  Which meant he’d be forced into continued close quarters with her.

  No, it didn’t necessarily mean that. With a stream of curses, he stalked over to the worktable he’d set up last night. There was no reason he and Claire had to be in each other’s company here. Not any longer. It had been one thing when they’d been at the Rotted Rooster, and she’d had no room, and he’d needed to make sure that she didn’t get herself into any fights with the surly people there. And then there’d been the carriage ride they’d been forced to take together.

  Liar. You are a goddamned liar.

  Frustration whipped through him. Stop! He’d finally come around to putting the matter of Claire Poplar to rest, and now here they were, locked away together once more.

  Caleb assessed the various-sized pigments laid out, and opting for the larger grains, he grabbed his hammer and proceeded to pound all the frustration with this damned day into the creation of oil paint.

  “This is how you’re spending your day?” Wade drawled from his place by the window.

  “How else do you expect me to spend it?” he shot back, directing his answer to the table.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  He’d become entirely too weak where Claire Poplar was concerned.

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s true. You’re not going to not work on your art just because you’ve got the baroness’s sister here as a guest,” Wade allowed.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Except, they didn’t have to be together here. “Exactly.”

  “I was being sarcastic,” the other man said dryly.