by Erica Ridley
They did not stop until the stars exploded for both of them.
When at last they finished, he rolled over on his back and pulled her into his embrace. His heart pounded beneath her ear. Her own had escaped her chest and belonged wholly to him. She nestled closer as their breaths slowed into a gentle, lulling rhythm.
“You didn’t give me a straight answer,” he mumbled. “Was that a yes?”
It was definitely a yes. But before she could reply, a tiny snore whistled from his mouth.
He’d fallen asleep.
A tender smile curved her lips. She brushed the damp hair from his forehead. Was it any wonder she loved him? He was perfect, inside and out. She would give him his answer when he awoke.
Goosebumps danced along her skin. She crawled to her shift and slipped it on over her head. There was no sense pulling on her gown without being able to lace it. She rescued it from its ungainly heap and folded it as neatly as she could to keep the wrinkles at bay.
She glanced over at Christopher.
Still sleeping.
Another smile tugged at her lips. The cold didn’t seem to bother him at all. However, wrinkles just might. No respected member of the ton would leave an assignation with the points of his cravat in disarray.
She snorted to herself as she folded the surprisingly wide square of silk. Soon, his waistcoat and linen shirt had joined the neckcloth in a neat pile. She reached for his coat and gave it a brisk shake to loosen the wrinkles.
Papers fluttered from an interior pocket.
“Blast,” she muttered, and grabbed them up as quick as she could before they slid beneath a bookshelf to be lost forever.
Her triumph in this mission faded the moment she realized what she held in her hands.
His ticket to India.
No. Worse. This was a pair of tickets. Dual passage for himself and his bride. A year-and-a-half voyage, most of it over treacherous seas, and to him its certainty was a foregone conclusion. Her stomach twisted.
He’d called it the trip of a lifetime. An astonishing opportunity he’d dreamed of for years. It even included a personal introduction to the subcontinent by the explorer he idolized. There was no chance of Christopher cancelling such a trip.
Just like there was no chance of Gloria going with him.
A sudden tightness in her chest made it impossible to breathe. There was only one fair response to his proposal, and it wasn’t the answer either of them wished it could be.
He deserved his perfect match, and they both knew it wasn’t her.
Her limbs trembled at the thought of goodbye. It wasn’t just that he would leave her, not just that his attraction to her could never be strong enough to make him want to stay, it was that even if he were willing to give up adventures for the sake of their marriage, she had no wish to tie him down and cause him to be resentful and unhappy.
She loved him too much to marry him.
He stirred just as she was sliding her gown back over her shift. “What are you doing?”
“We’re getting dressed.” She handed him his clothes in a neatly folded stack.
He was almost completely back to rights before he recalled their unfinished conversation. With an embarrassed smile, he looked up from his boots.
“Pretend I am down on one knee for reasons other than tying my Hessians.” He cleared his throat and flung open his arms in grand fashion. “Miss Gloria Godwin, would you do me the great honor—”
Her heart felt as though it were being ripped from her chest. She loved him more than she’d ever believed possible. And she couldn’t keep him.
“No,” she whispered.
His handsome brow lined with confusion. He struggled to his feet, one boot still untied. “N-no?”
She hated hurting him. But the life she would give him as his wife would hurt him even more.
“I can’t be what you want,” she said brokenly, “and you can’t be what I need.”
“Can’t we try?” he stammered.
“It would ruin everything.” She swallowed hard as she faced the truth. “One perfect memory is all we can have.”
Chapter 14
Christopher leaned against the uncomfortable bark of an evergreen trunk and gazed out at the swirling mass of laughing, happy skaters.
He had no wish to join them. He had lost his taste for skating. Or laughing. He had meant to leave Christmas on the morrow in the company of a bride.
Only one of those things would come to pass.
The matchmaking had not gone as planned. His careful requirements defining his ideal bride had been the first to go out the window.
Yet his final choice did not waver. He wanted Gloria as his wife.
His fist fell against the tree trunk. He had been smart enough to propose prior to taking her virginity, and foolish enough not to secure the answer until after it was too late.
But was it too late?
With renewed hope, he turned from the frozen pond. He cut through the woods in the direction of the cottages. Perhaps he had not been clear enough or romantic enough. Perhaps if he tried again, phrased things a different way, there could still be a chance.
When Madge saw it was him at the door, she ushered him into the parlor without a word.
Gloria looked up, startled. She had been reclining on her sofa with one of her travel journals.
He was tired of books. They needed to embark on the real adventure. Perhaps that was the problem.
“Is this because of India?” he demanded. That was when everything had seemed to change.
She set down her book. “Partly.”
“I would never leave you.” He pulled the tickets from his inner pocket and brandished them toward her. “I bought double passage. We can go together.”
She wrung her hands in her lap and refused to meet his eyes.
“I can’t think of anyone I’d prefer to share this opportunity with.” He jabbed a finger at the spines on her shelf. “Do you see the name on these spines? We don’t have to read about such wonders from books. The great explorer himself will personally show us about.”
Her lip trembled. She closed her eyes as if in pain.
He hurried over to the sofa and dropped down to his knees to force her to look at him. “I don’t ever want to leave you behind. I want you to come with me.”
“I want you to stay here,” she said in a tiny voice. “You see the problem. We are not meant to be together.”
“I’ll be happy to stay here,” he promised her. “Multiple months out of the year if we must. But Christmas is not all there is. I can’t give up the trip of a lifetime at the drop of a hat—”
“I’m a hat?” she said wryly.
He sighed. “You’re an impossible bit of baggage and I want to bring you with me.”
“If you knew me at all, you would know better than to ask.” Her voice shook. “I’ve told you time and again. No boats. No water. I don’t want to leave home.”
“Even as my wife?”
Her eyes pleaded with him to understand.
He did not. His heart ached.
Refusing to come with him hurt as bad as being left.
He looked down at the tickets in his hands. He crumpled them into a ball and sprang to his feet.
“Fine,” he said. “No India. Where can we go?”
She winced and looked away.
“Sicily?” he demanded.
She shook her head.
“Ireland?” he suggested
She stared at him in obvious pain.
“London?” he said desperately. “We won’t have to take a boat!”
She gave another small, miserable shake of her head.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “It reminds me to much of… everything. That was the last time I went anywhere.”
His voice rose in hurt and disbelief. “Only if I agree to never again step foot outside this godforsaken village, only then would you agree to marry me?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
>
His heart thudded in bitter disillusionment.
This was the “forever” she was willing to offer. No adventure. No freedom. Never leaving the radius of a single, tiny village.
It wasn’t a matter of metaphorical leg shackles. If she could imprison them both in place with literal cuffs of iron, she would do it in a trice.
He looked down at the crumpled ball in his hand and unfolded the wrinkled paper back into a ticket.
This was it.
Gloria would never allow a husband to climb on a boat and leave her, and she bloody well had no inclination to board a vessel herself.
The rules were simple. Have his dreams, adventure, the life he’d always wanted… Or stay here, stuck in the same tiny corner with her.
He lifted his gaze to hers. “I can’t just… wallow about playing at snapdragon and caroling for the rest of my life.”
Her eyes were tortured and red. “I know.”
He shoved the ticket back into his pocket and tried one last time. “Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”
Chapter 15
Gloria’s legs shook beneath her as she pushed to her feet. This was even harder than she’d feared.
She hugged her arms about herself and wished more than anything else that their differences were nothing more complex than some device she could take apart and put back together. Find a new pattern that worked for them both.
Christopher was so sweet, so smart, so fearless. He needed to leave, and he deserved to find someone with the same adventurous spirit to journey with him. Her heart ached.
If she hadn’t already loved him to the point of bursting, his presence here today would have done the trick. He wasn’t trying to give her an ultimatum. He was trying to compromise. She was the one destroying her own dreams.
There was no middle ground between yes and no, between here and there, between stay and go. They were planets orbiting a closed system with precisely two states: on or off. Since they couldn’t be on, that left only one choice.
She would have to be the one strong enough to make it.
“I can’t go, and you can’t stay.” She took a scratchy breath. “That’s not a marriage. That’s martyrdom.”
He opened his mouth.
She would not allow him to give up his soul. “Keep your ticket. Travel makes you happy. I will not be the cause of you forsaking your dreams.” She tried to smile. “Go live them. You deserve it.”
He looked at her a long moment without moving, without saying a word, without wobbling on his orbit. Without any sign of life at all. Then he turned and walked away.
There was nothing she wanted more than to chase after him. To pull him to her, bury her face in his chest and vow to stay with him for always. But where? In the middle of the vast ocean on a rocky ferry, inching toward India with no help for miles and no sign of land for months and months on end? Her flesh crawled.
All she could promise was to love him with all her heart, from right here in Christmas where she belonged.
Even if it meant living without him.
Chapter 16
The following morning, Christopher watched in silence as the castle’s footmen carried the last traces of his presence out of his guest chamber and down to his carriage.
He’d already returned the chariot, and the high-perch phaeton. It would be a long while before he had any inclination to take a jaunt in another one of those again.
He glanced at his reflection in the looking-glass. The smudges beneath his eyes would only get worse on the long trip down to London. He wouldn’t sleep well for a week. Or possibly ever again.
He turned from the chamber and plodded down seven flights of stairs. His holiday was over. Huzzah. It didn’t feel as though he were setting off on adventure. It felt as though he were descending the nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno.
A purgatory of his own making.
Another footman rushed up to greet Christopher as he reached the bottom step.
“Your carriage is just outside, milord.” The footman motioned toward the exit. “Your driver awaits at his perch.”
Christopher nodded. All was exactly as he had requested.
He despised it.
“Thank you,” he murmured to the footman, and pushed his way outside the castle.
There it was. His trusty coach. His trusty horses. His trusty driver.
A castle footman rushed forward to open the carriage door for him. “Staff has taken the liberty to place a warming brick inside so that you are not cold on your journey, milord.”
Christopher stared at the cloth-wrapped brick on the coach floor. It was a thoughtful gesture.
It wouldn’t make any difference.
The cold he fought did not come from the weather but deep inside his chest. Against all odds, he had finally found love. Now he was leaving, just like he’d always said he would. One month and done. Never a day longer in any one place. Mr. Adventure, off on his next journey.
Was this really the life he intended to choose?
“Sir?” the footman asked hesitantly.
“Thank you for the brick.” Christopher spun away from the coach and started walking.
“Will you be back?” the startled footman called after him. “Shall I keep your brick warm?”
“I don’t know,” Christopher said without turning around or slowing down. “Do what you think you must.”
That was what he was doing, starting right now. Doing what he must.
Gloria had accused him of running away. Of traveling not for love of adventure, but for the sake of leaving.
Even Penelope had likened Christopher’s restlessness to Nick’s rakish misbehavior. Flitting from affair to affair in order to guard his heart from something as permanent as love.
Perhaps Christopher had been playing the same game. Hopping from ship to ship, careful never to stay anywhere long enough to put down roots. Always in search of the next new thing because he was too afraid to risk falling in love with any one place or any one person.
He ducked his head to the wind. It didn’t matter how scared he was. Love had found him. He hadn’t been able to move fast enough to avoid being caught. Cupid had struck not in India or Paris or Rome or Russia, but right here in a tiny mountaintop village.
Only a fool would give up without a fight.
He banged on Gloria’s front door.
She flung it open, her dark eyes red-rimmed and puffy. “Did you come for your telescope?”
He’d forgotten all about his telescope. “I came for you.”
“I’m not going.” She edged a half-step back.
“I’m not taking you.” He took a deep breath. “I’m choosing you.”
She stared up at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m here,” he said. “Right here, with you. For as long as you want me.”
She bit her lip. “I thought you were leaving.”
“I was looking for the place where I fit in.” He held up his palms “It turns out that place is right here with you.”
“I thought you wanted a wife you could travel with,” she stammered.
“I’d like that,” he admitted. “But I love you. You’re the dream I pick.”
Her expression was anguished. “You’ll come to resent me. That’s the last thing I want.”
“I’d resent losing you,” he said. “I would rather be together.”
She shook her head. “What about India?”
“India will always be there.” He lifted her chin with his knuckle. “I don’t want to miss a single day with you.”
“Neither do I,” she said, her voice cracking. “But I don’t want to make you give up something you love.”
“You didn’t hear me.” He took her hands and pressed them to his heart. “I like to travel. I love you. I would give up breathing if it meant spending one more moment together.”
She stared up at him, her face pale.
He lowered her hands. “If you don’t feel the
same, I’ll respect your decision and walk away.”
Even if it tore him apart.
Chapter 17
Gloria pressed Christopher’s hands to her galloping heart.
He loved her.
And if she couldn’t find some way to meld their orbits into one, his trajectory would take him a world away. She would never have another chance.
Her mind raced. She had been wrong to think like a machine. Yes, no. On, off. Here, there. Between any fixed points, there was always space. One just had to look hard enough to find it.
Christopher was willing to give up everything he’d ever thought he wanted because he believed what they had was worth so much more together. She needed to be willing to do the same.
The fate of their future was the ice. Not a safe surface like the pond, frozen over with inches and inches of dense ice for stability. This was a thin wafer. A flimsy scrap of an iceberg, floating in the scariest ocean she could imagine.
She had to tie on her skates and race out to meet him anyway.
“I love you,” she said in a rush, before fear could hold her back. “Sometimes I lose my breath from the force of it. I look at you and all I can think is that I never knew my heart could stretch so big to fit this much inside.”
His hopeful gaze flew up to hers.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Terrified, actually. But a wise man once said to me, ‘If you want to move the horses you have to pick up the reins and try to drive them.’”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Was it me?”
She nodded. “It was you.”
He squinted at her. “Am I the horses or the reins?”
“You’re the love of my life,” she said with a choking laugh. “I don’t want to live without you. Not for a single day.”
His grip on her hands slackened. “But?”
“I’m not ready to get on the boat,” she admitted in a tiny voice. “But if you’re willing to start with something small and work together toward something big, I’m willing to start taking risks.”
“Are you sure?” His eyes searched hers.
She had never been more certain of anything. “You are worth the adventure.”