Unbuttoning the Innocent Miss (Wallflowers to Wives)

by Bronwyn Scott

  ‘Thomas’s ring.’ Jonathon reached for it, visibly paling as he held up the thick gold circle set with an emerald. ‘It was from our grandfather,’ he explained, his eyes touching hers. But his shock was fleeting. He was terse when he turned his attentions back to the informant. ‘Rings fall off, are lost in the mud, sometimes for years. Rings are also stolen, perhaps pried off the hands of unconscious soldiers. This is proof that someone, somewhere, encountered Thomas, nothing more.’

  The informant was undeterred. He reached inside his pocket. ‘There is also this.’ He placed a polished seashell on the table, a trinket of no value and yet Claire would have sworn she heard a moan escape Jonathon. He took the shell in gentle fingers, treating it like the most delicate of objects.

  ‘No one would bother to steal a seashell,’ the Frenchman said softly. ‘Vous comprenez?’

  Claire swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. The shell meant Jonathon could no longer argue the items were stolen and merely passed along. A seashell had no value except to the person who possessed it.

  ‘Our family went to the seashore one summer,’ he said softly to her in French, perhaps for the informant’s benefit. ‘We stayed with an old friend of my father’s. Thomas and I played on the beach every day. We were only eight or nine and he cried the day we had to leave. He loved the ocean so much.’ Jonathon paused, his throat working fiercely against the emotion of memory. She wanted to go to him and wrap him in her arms, but he would not want to be made vulnerable in front of this stranger who held so much power in these moments.

  ‘My father threatened to thrash him if he didn’t stop his crying. I slipped him this seashell when Father wasn’t looking. I’d found it on the beach our last morning there and I’d polished it up. I told him it was lucky. He carried it everywhere with him.’ Even to war. Even to death. Claire knew what he was thinking and it broke her heart. She would spare him this pain if she could.

  The informant smiled kindly, the first friendly expression Claire had seen him give. ‘It is a good story, monsieur. You and your brother were close.’

  Jonathon gathered his self-control. ‘How did you or your master come by these things?’

  ‘My master owned the farm where this man was nursed. They became friends during his convalescence. The man...’

  ‘Not the man,’ Jonathon corrected. ‘Thomas. The man has a name.’

  ‘Très bien. Thomas recovered from his wounds, which was no small accomplishment. He’d been shot several times. He was suffering from fever when his horse wandered on to our farm. To this day, we don’t know exactly how they came in our direction, we are a bit off the beaten path. It was clear though that they’d wandered for days. He’d probably got lost and then disoriented. We thought he’d die. But he didn’t. He lived.’ Here, the man paused, his eyes full of sympathy. ‘My master says he was never quite himself. He didn’t always know who he was. He thought his name was Matthew.’

  ‘That was his second name,’ Jonathon supplied.

  ‘Some days though, he knew he was Thomas, but not much else,’ the man offered in consolation. ‘But the wounds, the war, had done something to his memories. He’d scream in the night like soldiers do.’ Jonathon nodded and Claire wondered what nightmares came to him.

  ‘You said he recovered?’ Jonathon pressed.

  ‘To a point. He helped out around the farm. He liked working with the animals. On good days he rode his horse like the devil. He was something to watch. I’ve never seen a rider like that. But there weren’t that many good days. We knew he didn’t belong with us, but my master had no way to contact anyone, didn’t know who to contact. Then, last year, Thomas took sick. His wounds had damaged his health and the winter was harsh.’ The man shook his head as if he still didn’t believe what had happened. ‘One day he told my master, “My name is Thomas Lashley.” He gave my master this ring and that shell and went out riding. He wasn’t well enough and the lord knows his horse wasn’t either. The winter had ruined both of them. That horse was twenty if it was a day. He didn’t come back. That evening his horse limped in to the barnyard, coated with mud. It had been ridden hard. We fed it, cleaned it, made it warm, but the horse laid down and was dead in the morning.’

  Claire covered her mouth, stifling a sob. Jonathon reached out for her hand and she let him take it, knowing that touching her was not only for her comfort but his. ‘Oh, Jonathon.’

  Jonathon was bravery itself. He nodded his head, acknowledging the story. ‘Thank you for telling me. May I ask? Did you find a body?’

  The man shook his head and Claire thought she saw a spark light Jonathon’s eyes. ‘We went out the next day to look for him. We did not find him, although we found the place he must have fallen.’

  ‘Thomas does not fall,’ Jonathon said staunchly, automatically. Claire shot him a worried look. He was being stubborn, but surely he had to admit the search was over.

  ‘Monsieur,’ the informant offered patiently, ‘the ground was churned up. There had been an event of some sort. The horse came back and he did not. He loved that horse. He would never have deserted it. There are wolves in the forests.’ He caught Claire’s eye. ‘My apologies, madame, but I must speak plainly or monsieur will harbour false hope. There are plenty of reasons a body wasn’t found. Perhaps wild animals, or perhaps simply a man went off into the forest to die alone the way animals do when they can no longer be of use to their pack. Animals know when it’s their time. I think your brother did, too. He knew he was failing. He knew death was coming.’ He paused to let Jonathon mull it over. ‘We had only the one piece of information to go on, just his name. I am sorry it took us the better part of the year to reach you.’ It was the informant’s way of saying the conversation was over. There was nothing more he could tell Jonathon.

  ‘We are grateful, thank you,’ Claire offered in French when Jonathon remained silent. She nudged Jonathon. He drew out the second money clip and numbly placed it on the table. Whatever strength, whatever power of will he’d possessed to make it this far, to conduct this interview in French, to have fought for this moment all these years when others had given up, was gone now. The rest was up to her. He needed her to step into the breach.

  Claire rose and walked the man to the door. ‘Thank you for coming. You will find there’s enough there to pay for your travels and a reward for your information as well.’

  ‘Is he gone?’ Jonathon’s voice asked dully behind her.

  ‘Yes.’ She crossed the room and knelt beside him, gripping his hands. ‘It was worth it to come. Now you know.’

  That was when Jonathon broke. He slipped from the chair into her arms, sobs racking his body as she held him against her. ‘He was alive, Claire. Good God, for six years, he was alive. I should have tried harder.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The guilt and grief of seven years took him in its relentless grip. All she could do was hold him and let him sob even though her helplessness to do more tore at her heart. In this regard, hope had not been his friend, it had prevented him from truly grieving. Only now, when the hope was gone, could he let go and move on. But that was a choice only Jonathon could make for himself.

  Moving on meant acknowledging the search was over, that there was nothing more he could do. Defeat was not a circumstance Jonathon embraced well. He’d not given up on his French, he’d not given up on her. It was natural he didn’t want to give up on his brother. She’d heard it in his voice when he’d challenged the informant about the lack of a body.

  ‘I should have done more.’ That was the guilt talking.

  ‘What more could you have done?’ Her voice was intentionally sharp, slicing through the haze of pain. She wasn’t offering the words as a trite consolation. She was asking, as if the answer mattered. Because it did. Jonathon had to move on and he couldn’t if he wouldn’t let go of the past.

  Jonathon
pulled back, meeting her eyes with a tear-clouded gaze. ‘I could never have left. I should have stayed, I should have found him before the trail grew cold. Then none of this would have happened.’

  ‘You were shot, dying yourself,’ Claire reminded him. ‘There was little you could do.’ It seemed to Claire that if he couldn’t let go of the past today when all had been revealed, then he never would. What happened here on the wood floor of the Antwerp Hotel suddenly mattered in the extreme. It was an odd place to do battle for a man’s soul, but that’s what this was.

  Now that she’d seen the very core of him exposed, she understood the darkest secret he carried. It wasn’t that he’d been to war and seen people killed, nor was it that the war haunted him, or even that the war and the guilt over his brother had stolen his French, messed with his head in a way that prevented him from retrieving that skill until now. No, the darkest secret Jonathon Lashley carried in his depths was that he believed he didn’t deserve to be happy. His guilt demanded his life be lived in sacrifice.

  Hadn’t he lost enough already?

  Wait.

  A thought came to her. What had he said that night in her bedroom? He came home feverish, raving mad in French. She’d not thought anything of it. At the time. She’d been rather focused on other things and understandably so. A man had just climbed into her room. But today, the mention was important. That trip home had been the last time he’d spoken French without extreme conscious effort. She’d heard of cases where guilt was so traumatic it blocked certain things out of one’s mind. There’d been a widow in Little Westbury whose grief over her husband’s death was so severe she couldn’t actually remember he had died. She would keep asking where he was.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me the real reason you couldn’t speak or read French any more?’ She laced her fingers through his.

  The question seemed to settle him, his control was coming back. That was a good sign. Jonathon pushed his free hand through his hair. ‘I didn’t want you to give up on me. I didn’t want to hear that my problem wasn’t teachable. I had to get my French back if I was to get to Vienna, I had to try. There was too much at stake not to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have given up on you.’ A hint of a smile crossed her lips as she remembered the disaster of that first lesson. She knit her brow, seeing the flaw in her reasoning. ‘If it’s the guilt holding your memory of French back, why have we succeeded in getting you this far?’

  A tic jumped in his jaw. ‘What I needed was you. You made me forget, you helped my mind free itself. When we walked in the garden and laughed and talked, I could forget for a while.’ He gave a ghost of his usual smile. ‘I think you might have been the saving of me, Claire.’ It was a lovely thing to hear, to cherish.

  She moved into him, stroking his jaw with her hand. ‘How ironic. All this time, I thought you were redeeming me.’

  He kissed her then, long and slow and full of feeling. ‘I was unaware you needed redeeming. You seemed to be doing a pretty good job of that all on your own. You had told Rufus Sheriden to go to hell and the rest of society, too. Such courage makes a man jealous.’

  ‘Not everyone understands that.’ He made her feel like a queen. The hunger was building between them, a spark of celebration beginning to stir. Out of the ashes something affirming rose.

  ‘I do,’ Jonathon murmured against her neck.

  And she understood him. Enough to give him up, but not yet. She reached for him, her hand closing over his length through the fabric of his trousers, signalling her own need.

  ‘You’ll be sore, Claire,’ he cautioned.

  There was challenge in her eyes. ‘I have the rest of my life to be sore.’ She tugged him to her, pushing his trousers down past his hips until he was free. Jonathon rose above her, the muscles of his arms taut beneath his coat as he took her, hard and fast. He was a primordial god in those moments, primitive and fierce in his desire, and she answered him, a goddess of desire in her own right. Her hips rose to his, joining him in the rhythm without hesitation, her body arching into him. Pleasure would come fast, pushing him to the brink. Her legs wrapped tight around him, urging him to the cliff. He gave a hard, final thrust and they flew. Together. Her cries mingled with his, their bodies tangled, his soul, if not fully retrieved, at least safe from the abyss.

  She held him to her as long as she could, holding him close, her body loath to part with his until they had reconciled themselves to the earth once again, where all good things had to come to an end.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jonathon whispered at her ear.

  ‘We go home.’

  And I give you up one more time.

  She murmured, turning in to him, glad he couldn’t see her face, glad he didn’t guess the direction of her thoughts. He wouldn’t like them. He’d want to argue. But she knew what was right and best. She had promised herself she would take whatever pleasure the moments with Jonathon offered her and not wish for more the first time she’d crossed this bridge back when he’d climbed into her bedroom.

  In coming to Dover, she’d crossed another bridge, giving herself permission to love him and permission to keep him for as long as possible, knowing from the start loving him was not synonymous with keeping him, that ‘for as long as possible’ was a finite amount of time. Of course, she’d hoped that time would have lasted longer than one night in Dover. It hadn’t. Sometimes the people a person loved the most were the ones that couldn’t be kept, the ones that had to be set free. She could love Jonathon, but she had to let him go.

  Vienna was more important than ever now. If he could help a region find peace, her sacrifice would be worth it for a world with no more war, or perhaps more selfishly her sacrifice would be worth it for a Jonathon who felt he’d done his penance and could live guilt free.

  * * *

  The little bitch was going to pay. Cecilia threw the pale-pink roses to the drawing-room floor and stomped on them with a vicious twist of her heel. The two of them were together! She knew it. His roses showed up on schedule, but Jonathon hadn’t been seen for three days at any of the fashionable events. Or the unfashionable. Once his absence had become noted, she’d checked. He wasn’t at his clubs either. Worse, Claire Welton was gone as well and no one seemed to know where.

  She might not know where Claire had gone, but she knew with whom. Claire and Jonathon were together. Secretly. Doing who knew what. No. Stop. She feared she knew that, too. That conniving little slut.

  An evil smile crept across her lips. She had to give Claire some credit. The girl hadn’t backed down. She’d gone after Jonathon with everything she had. But now, ‘everything’ was spent. Claire had nothing left to give Jonathon. But she did. As long as Jonathon hadn’t married Claire Welton, he was still fair game. Cecilia tapped a finger to her chin. A simple speculation from her would do it; a few words whispered in the right ears. Rumours spread like wildlife this time of year whether they were true or not. She would divide and conquer whenever they returned. She would ruin Claire and Jonathon would be desperate to distance himself from such a scandal, desperate to align himself with the right sort of woman and she would be waiting. With open arms.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Viscount Stanhope waited for them upon their return. Lights burned bright in the Welton town house like beacons calling their errant daughter home, when Jonathon’s coach rolled up to the kerb well past dark. But Jonathon was ready. He had been ready for this the moment he’d climbed the rose trellis. A man who broke into a woman’s bedroom had to be prepared for consequences or he had no business climbing that trellis in the first place.

  He jumped out and offered Claire his hand. ‘Shall we?’ He’d had the carriage ride to align himself with the new reality of his world—a world without Thomas, a world in which the question ‘what next’ was answered by the future, not the past.

  Despite the emotional outcome of hi
s journey to Dover, he was in good spirits. He wished he could say the same for Claire. The closer to London they came, the more closed she’d become. Did she doubt him? Surely, she didn’t worry he would desert her? She knew he would stand beside her. It wasn’t even an issue of doing the ‘right thing.’ He wanted to marry her. He’d told her as much before Dover.

  Jonathon took her hand. ‘You are not ruined, Claire, you are loved. By me.’

  She smiled at him then, her voice soft in the evening air. ‘It’s not that, Jonathon.’

  Inside, Claire’s father was indeed waiting for them, as was her mother, both wearing forced smiles, relieved to see their daughter home safe and yet knowing a safe return wasn’t enough. Stanhope was a tall slender man with amber eyes like his daughter. He greeted Jonathon cordially and offered him a drink while Claire’s mother hugged her tightly. Jonathon would take it as a good sign.

  ‘I trust your mission in Dover was successful?’ Lord Stanhope began, retaking his seat. ‘Danvers and Preston Worth came by to explain how important my daughter’s French skills were for the trip.’

  So that would be the official story put about whenever there was a question. Jonathon wondered if anyone would buy it. ‘Yes, the mission was successful even if the information wasn’t what I’d hoped.’ He shot a warm glance in Claire’s direction where she sat next to her mother, pale and drawn. ‘Claire was indispensable. I could not have got through it without her.’ She’d comforted him when he’d broken in the inn. She’d started him back on the road of reason and healing where Thomas was concerned, not only with her words, but with her body. She’d shown him how to start letting go of his guilt and start living for himself. Every time she touched him, he was reminded of the new lesson: he was deserving of happiness. She was the physical embodiment of that. Claire had brought him back into the light. In the carriage, he’d spoken of Thomas, told her stories of their childhood, and it had been cleansing in its own way to remember his brother.