A boy with his very features. Nose and cheeks and jawline that matched his father’s. Eyes that matched his mother’s. Hair the color between the two.
The air disappeared from his lungs, leaving him weightless, groundless for several seconds.
“Please, just stay here at Washburn for a few days,” the dowager said. “You do not belong in a coaching inn. You belong here. Stay and learn what you can, maybe remember who you are and then you can go into the marriage with the blessing of the family behind you. It is a miracle that you have returned to us.” Her words paused, sudden tears in her eyes. “A true miracle.”
With a deep breath she set the portrait down on the chair she had been occupying and her look shifted to Ness. “If I remember correctly, Mrs. Docherty—Nessia—you were such a sweet child. You were Harriet’s favorite playmate as I recall. I’m sure you will make Conner a fine bride if you are as delightful as you once were. Please, can the elopement wait not but a few mere days?”
Her eyebrows lifted as her look went back and forth between Talen and Ness.
Ness squeezed his hand and he looked to her. She gave him a slight nod.
He hated the thought of it—of staying here.
Not when he could be headed north and making Ness his wife. Making certain she was protected. Though his given name would be important to that end, he loathed to admit.
“It is just a few days, Talen,” Ness said softly. Not imploring or demanding, just letting him know it was right by her.
His head heavy, he nodded. “We can stay. Two days is all we can afford.”
{ Chapter 24 }
“This is the spot?” At the water’s edge, Talen looked to Ness as he stopped his horse next to hers.
She glanced at him, at the rigid hold his body still held. The cords along his neck so taut they could snap with the slightest provocation.
Talen had insisted to the dowager that they needed to travel back to the coaching inn to gather a few items and let their driver know of the plans to stay at Washburn Manor for a few days, but Ness knew he’d just needed to get out of that drawing room, out of that house. He’d been near to jumping out of his skin, he’d been so tense.
No wonder, for the monstrosities that his aunt had described.
She could see full well he needed to injure someone—kill someone if he could. But there wasn’t anyone to attack, to make suffer for what had happened to his parents. Not anymore, and that was the cruelest blow of all.
Ness nodded to Talen’s question. Their trip to the coaching inn could wait an hour. He needed to breathe. Breathe air that wasn’t tainted with death and the past and this was the most secluded spot she knew on the Washburn estate.
“This is it. This is what I wanted to show you.” She looked out across the crystal-clear pond, the water always so peculiarly pure without the usual muck of ponds this size.
Tucked into a glade of the forest surrounding the main estate, the pond was lined with tall reeds on the left of the waterside, a raft of ducks floating in and out of the spikes of green.
“I spent countless hours out here with Harriet when we were young, mainly because bunnies were always nesting in the thick of the grasses at the far side of the pond where the trees skirt up from the water.” She pointed across the way. “And we loved to uncover the bunnies and play with them, holding them tight in our skirts before tucking them back into their little burrows.”
A crooked smile came to Talen’s face and he dismounted, then tied the reins of his horse to a nearby low-hanging branch. He came to her side, grabbing her by the waist and lifting her down from her mare.
So easy for him, as though she was a little scrap of tulle he barely had to extend a muscle for.
He set her down, his hands not moving from her waist as he held her stare for a long, silent moment. A twinge of uncertainty made the edges of his light blue eyes crinkle and he leaned slightly away as his left hand went to her right arm, pulling it up between them until both of his hands could clasp around her palm.
He looked down at her hand, his fingers gently tracing bones and ligaments from wrist to fingertip. “Your hand. I hurt it in there.”
“It is fine.”
His head shook, his gaze downward as the tips of his fingers ran across her knuckles and then her palm, tickling the skin. “Your hand—”
“Is fine.”
“I saw your face and I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry. I didn’t even know I had grabbed it, much less crushed it.” His head bent downward and he kissed her palm.
She reached up and set the fingers of her left hand along his jawline. “I know you would never hurt me.”
His eyes lifted to her, his look wary. “You seem so certain of it.”
“I am.”
“How?”
She shrugged. “The same reason you knew you had to protect me in London. Whatever this is between us, it’s innate. Without logical reason. All I’ve been doing during the last month is looking for logic on why I trust you so much, when maybe I just needed to accept what is between us instead of questioning it.”
He didn’t agree with her, neither did he argue. He kissed her hand again and then lowered it between them. “I don’t want you sleeping outside of my bed.”
Her look flickered off of him toward the direction of the manor house. “We promised the dowager we would stay at the house. Sharing a room isn’t proper—even if I am a widow and you are obviously a rake.”
“Then we have separate rooms, but you’ll be sleeping in mine or I’ll be sleeping in yours.”
“Talen, your aunt—”
“Can judge all she wants. I don’t give a boar’s ass about it.” His hand went along her neck, his thumb trailing down along the slope of her breasts. “And not just because I want your body under my hands. I still need you safe. Just because we’re closed in behind grand stone walls doesn’t mean I’m about to let my guard down.”
She nodded, utterly at a loss to argue the point for she didn’t want to be anywhere but in his bed.
“Good. We are here for a few days, no more. We’ll tell the coachman to come round when the roads are passable. Then we’ll leave. We’ll leave no matter what. Whether or not her son arrives by that time.”
“Agreed.” Ness exhaled relief. She too, would rather be traveling north. Staying here a few days wasn’t ideal, but she would be safe enough. And Talen needed this, needed to find some memory of happiness that he could hold onto. She needed it. Needed him not to be left with only the terror of what had happened to his parents. “We can always return on our way back south.”
He turned from her, his eyes on the water, not committing to any future visits to Washburn.
She followed his gaze, watching the ducks sending ripples across the sheen of water. “I never knew why this pond was always so clear. There must be a spring under it.”
He inclined his head toward the water. “Why bring me here?”
“You needed to be still for a moment.” She looked up at him, studying the strong lines of his profile that made her heart tighten in her chest. “You needed to not be in that house. Not riding. Not arranging the future. Not thinking of the border and marrying me. Still.” Her hand flicked forward. “So I thought this place appropriate.”
“I needed this?” He glanced at her, his eyes pondering her face for a long moment. “And?”
She expelled a breathless chuckle, her mouth quirking to the side. “And I have a memory of you here.”
“Do tell.”
“It is a sweet one. One where you weren’t putting toads in my slippers.”
“I hardly believe it.”
She stepped toward the water’s edge, the toes of her boots pressing into the ground where it started to sag with moisture and Talen followed, staying by her side. “Over there, where the ducks like to nest, the ground turns into mud, but one can’t really see it until one’s feet are locked deep into the muck.”
“Which happened?”
“It did.
One of the first times I was here. I was stuck for some time, but then I managed to get my feet out. But I lost one of my slippers in the process and I was crying about it and Harriet didn’t know what to do with me. I knew I couldn’t go back to the house with one missing shoe or my father would be mad at me and he was harsh, so I refused to go back.”
“Why would your father even care if you lost a shoe?”
Her shoulders lifted. “I don’t know that he would have even cared about the shoe. But he liked to be angry with me. Angry with my mama. Anything could spark it. The smallest thing like a lost shoe.”
A spark flashed in the blue of his irises and his eyes went wide. “Did you have ribbons in your hair?”
She stilled, her look riveted on him. “I did.”
His eyes closed, his head shaking slightly. “The vision is fuzzy, but they are there. Orange. They were orange. So strange. I’d never seen a girl with orange ribbons in her hair. Yellow, pink, white, red, but never orange. Orange against the dark chestnut curls. So stark. So odd. Orange.”
Tears welled in her eyes as she stared at his face. She ached to reach out and grab him, shake him, shake every memory free from the web in his brain, but she held her hands at her sides, afraid to interfere with how close he was to finding the memory in his mind. “You remember?”
His eyes opened to her.
“Maybe.” His voice was a whisper. “Maybe I do.”
“That was the first time I met you.”
He looked to the mud creeping along the edge of the pond. “Did I get the shoe out?”
“You did, but in the process, you fell in, getting muck up to your waist. You said your mother wouldn’t care. You even struggled farther out into the lake, mostly on your belly, getting mud all over your white shirt so you could reach clear water and wash my shoe clean. You were my hero.”
His look darted back to her. “I’m not your hero, Ness.”
She smiled, unwilling to argue with him. “But you were that day. And you’ll not take that away from me.”
His gaze swung away from her, glossing over as he studied the edge of the pond for long seconds. Whether he remembered more or not, he wasn’t admitting to.
His lips parted, his words coming slowly. “That image—that image of you with the orange ribbons and the fat chestnut curls. I want that. I want that memory. But I don’t know if I want the rest.”
She stepped closer to him, slipping her left arm under his, entwining the splint down along his forearm and curling the tips of her fingers into his palm. Her cheek went onto his upper arm, the wool of his tailcoat rubbing her skin as she looked up at him. “I don’t blame you. I didn’t know what had happened here, Talen. I never could have imagined. But if I had…if I had known all of it was as horrific as that, I never would have brought you here. Never would have insisted. You were right to avoid this place.”
His chest lifted in a deep sigh. “But now we’re here.”
“We are.” She shifted her look to the water, leaning into him, her temple resting on his arm. “And I don’t know what is the right thing to do now. I wanted you here to remember the good, not the bad. That was all.”
“I don’t know either.” The rasp in his voice hitched, his words a low rumble over the water, pain etched in the crevices.
They stood, silent minutes passing, watching the ducks dive and peck away at invisible delicacies under the water.
“She didn’t say it.” The words blurted from Ness’s mouth, the thought that had been heavy in her mind since they’d left the manor house.
Talen looked down at her. “Didn’t say what?”
Ness straightened next to him. “The dowager didn’t say that her son is the earl and it’s a title that is, by rights, not his. Not with you alive.”
His eyebrows lifted, deep lines etching into his skin. “My aunt seemed overwhelmed by the whole of today, and understandably so. Our appearance. What she had to tell me of what had happened to my parents. Secrets like that are maggots on one’s soul and she handled the whole of it with more grace than I thought a woman like her capable of.”
Ness’s lips pursed and she nodded. True, the dowager had been under an incredible amount of stress with what she had to report.
“I hadn’t given it a thought myself,” he said. “But you found it odd?”
Her shoulders lifted. “I find this whole situation disastrous. What happened to your parents, what happened to you. You’re right, I don’t think anyone was thinking about the earldom today.” She shook her head, dismissing the thought. “When did the dowager think she would be back with the bible tomorrow? I heard you ask before you mounted your horse, but I didn’t hear her answer.”
“She thought to fetch it and be back by early evening.”
Ness smiled, leaning into his side once more. “I cannot wait to discover what your full name is.”
“Talen. Talen Blackstone better be what she comes back with.”
Ness laughed. “I will accept that as well. Prefer it, even.”
{ Chapter 25 }
His feet bare, but with trousers and a lawn shirt on, Talen stepped into the library of Washburn Manor, holding the lamp from his chamber into the shadows at this side of the library. Just another one of the expansive rooms he’d wandered through that day with Ness, trying to spark memories of the past. Memories that remained elusive.
Stubbornly so.
The dowager had been gone the whole of the day and well into nightfall. He’d been convinced she’d fled and stayed at the dower house to avoid him, but the echoes of the front door opening and closing had reached into the bowels of the house and had pulled him from bed and Ness’s warm naked body.
Not that he’d been sleeping. Not that he’d had any real sleep since arriving at this blasted place. Ness’s body—burying himself in her—had been the only thing keeping him from tearing apart this place brick by bloody brick.
A heavy wool wrap still draped over her robust form, the dowager stood bent over a table by the fireplace, her back to him, her head cocked as she tilted a book toward the light of the flames.
“You returned.”
She jumped upright with a squeak, her hand on her chest as she spun around. “Sweet lad, you frightened me. Do not sneak up upon a lady of my age or you’ll find me duly expired at your feet.”
“I believe you hardier than that, from what I have seen.”
She smiled, taking his words as a compliment. Whether or not he meant them as one he wasn’t sure himself.
He stopped a distance from her. “The travel to and from the dower house today wasn’t as quick as you had hoped?”
“No, no, it was not.” Her hand waved in the air. “My driver thought the road would be fine, but it was a slow slog, with far too many stops where the carriage had to be pushed through. Your driver was right to recommend against forging north at the moment.”
She motioned for him to come closer. “Come, see. I have it—here it is, your proper name. Come see by the firelight.”
Talen moved forward, setting his lamp on the table by the fireplace. She lifted up the book to him, holding it open to one of the first few pages. Long lines of names listed down the left and right sides of the pages. Names of people he should have known, should have heard of. People of his blood and bones.
She tilted the bible toward the fireplace and pointed to one line on the right side. “See, here you are. Right here. Conner Josiah Bartholomew Francis Burton. It was a handful, I remember that. Francis was your great-great-great-grandfather. I believe Josiah came from your mother’s lineage, though I fear I don’t recall the direct relation. And I was just studying the names of the past, as I’m not positive where Bartholomew came from. I don’t recall one in the line, but I haven’t looked at the bible in a long time.”
Talen stared at his name, written in such a fine script. Beautiful, even, where the letters looped together with the flourish of an inspired quill. His mark on history when he’d never had one.
Yet he felt no ownership on it. Couldn’t feel ownership on it. Not when this family that had created him had been the very same one that had destroyed him long ago, taking everything from him.
Taking his place in the world.
With a relieved sigh, a smile spread wide across the dowager’s face, her thick skin crinkling with age. “I look at you in this light and you look so young again, Conner. You look just like my own boy, Clayborne. It makes my heart happy to see you again. Alive. Healthy. I have worried on you for so long.”
His eyes flickered to her then back to the names scattered down the page. “My name is Talen and you see a past I don’t remember.”
She set the book onto the table and turned fully to him. “Being here hasn’t sparked any other memories? Did you visit your room in the nursery wing? I know much of that has been covered and isn’t in use now, but maybe there is something there that you would remember. A wooden horse or something akin to it?”
A caustic chuckle left his throat. “To my knowledge, I’ve never played with a wooden horse in my life.”
“But you used to, I remember that. You didn’t go anywhere without a horse in your hand.”
“I didn’t even learn to ride until I arrived in England six years ago. I have sea legs, nothing else.”
Her hands nervously smoothed down the front folds of her wool wrapper as her lips drew inward, his tone cutting off her babblings of the past. Good. He didn’t want to hear it. Hear what a happy life he had. Hear what was taken away from him.
He tapped his fingers on the corner of the bible. “This is helpful. Thank you for retrieving it.”
“Of course. Of course, anything to make this easier on you. I am so sorry for the past. For all my husband wrought upon you.”
His lips pulled back in a tight line. “You should know, aunt, that I don’t want the earldom. I imagine that is why you have been insistent on us staying until your son arrives. Honestly, I want very little to do with this place and my connection to it. The name, I’ll take that to the marriage vows only to protect Ness. Beyond that, I have my own wealth, my own life. I do not need a new one.”
Dangerous Exile (An Exile Novel Book 3) Page 17