Chapter Thirteen

"Mother, no." Talia stepped into her sister's room, her look immediately going to Louise's face.

Near tears, her sister swayed, trying to keep her feet as three seamstresses scurried about her, sticking pins in the fine silk draped over her body.

Talia spun to her mother. "No, Mother. Louise has not recovered—it has only been days and you think to make a pin cushion out of her."

"Nonsense, Natalia." Talia's mother gave an airy smile, her fingers waggling in the air as she stood by the armoire, her eyes not moving from the seamstresses. "Louise is as docile as a plump kitten. She did not argue with me in the slightest. She is not doing anything she does not want to."

Talia moved to her mother's side, her voice low. "She didn't argue with you because she can barely speak, Mother. Or did that escape your notice?"

Talia stepped in front of her mother, facing the seamstresses, and clapped her hands. "That will be all for now. I can see you have enough measurements to move forth. Thank you all so much for your work today." She looked over her shoulder, glaring at her mother. "My mother will be happy to walk you down to the drawing room, where you can discuss further whatever it is that is being concocted."

Waiting until they undraped Louise, Talia ushered the seamstresses out the door and into the hallway. Her mother paused, not following until Talia cleared her throat pointedly, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. "You do not need Louise for another second, Mother—you can finish what you started with the seamstresses below."

"Do not take that tone with me, Natalia. You are still my daughter and you will treat me with the respect I am due." Her mother strode past her, her aristocratic chin high.

Talia inhaled as her mother passed, biting her tongue on the word "due." Her mother was due a lot of things.

Before their father died, before they lost everything, Talia knew her mother to be the best parent she could have asked for. But the ensuing years had shed light on all of their faults—faults that had always been concealed under the veil of wealth and power.

It wasn't until their lives were destroyed that she realized how little perseverance her mother possessed. Or how embarrassingly useless her mother was at taking care of herself.

The perfect mother she had once known was now just another thing lost to the past.

Talia closed the door, turning back to Louise. Her sister still stood in the middle of the room, her eyes on the floor, her shift the only thing to keep her warm. Her slight frame drooped, her right hand gripping her left elbow. Louise had withered during her time being held. The bones along her shoulders cut sharply out of her skin, the sight sending a lump into Talia's throat.

If only she had been faster. Found Louise sooner.

"Don't fight her. Please, Talia," Louise said, her voice quivering.

"Get back into bed. Get warm." Talia wasn't going to promise her sister anything as ridiculous as that. She stepped aside Louise, slipping a hand on her lower back to prod her to the bed. "Did you eat the soup earlier?"

Her sister shook her head as she crawled into the bed.

"Are you still nauseous?"

Louise nodded, her head settling on the pillows.

"I will get the physician. And I will have some fresh soup and tea brought up. You can try again."

Louise was asleep before Talia left the room. Closing the door, she leaned against the wood panel, her hands over her eyes as exhaustion tried to entice her to go to bed and crumple, even though it was only late afternoon.

She needed Fletch.

He would have ideas about how to help Louise. How to manage her mother.

He would also make her eat. Make her sleep. All things she hadn't done in days. He was good at those things—taking care of her.

But he was gone.

He had been absent for three days—absent since she had awoken in his bed to be greeted by cold sheets where his body had been.

Gone, and he followed it with complete avoidance.

The first day it happened, Talia had told herself Fletch was being kind, giving her space to spend time with her sister to help her readjust after the horrors she had endured.

But on day two when her mother had arrived, it had become evident that he was avoiding Talia.

Avoiding her at all costs.

After her mother had settled in, Talia had been consumed with intervening between her and Louise. Their mother wanted Louise up and out of bed, ready to pay calls about town. She wanted to pretend nothing at all had happened to Louise. While Louise only wanted to stay in her room, buried deep within the bed covers.

Talia couldn't blame Louise—she would want to hide from the world just the same. A fact their mother could not seem to understand.

She could clearly see Louise was deeply damaged from her ordeal. The only bright spot in the past few days were the visits from the physician Fletch had hired, Mr. Flemstone. He was kind and funny and did not mind that Louise couldn't always conjure a laugh at his oddball jokes. But Louise did brighten around him—or at least she sat up in bed and attempted to carry on conversation.

It gave Talia hope. She liked the man, even if she was nervous about the laudanum he was giving Louise to calm her. But Talia was comforted by the fact that he worked at Lord Wotherfeld's research hospital, which meant, unlike most physicians, he had a combination of the best traditional and surgical medical training.

The whole of it combined—curtailing her mother, worry on her sister, and Fletch's avoidance—had turned her days into exhaustion. All Talia wanted was to curl up with Fletch at night. To be held warm in his thick arms.

His avoidance had become almost unbearable, mostly because Talia didn't know why Fletch had disappeared. She had thought what they had done—what she had made him do, finish deep within her—would prove to him how much she wanted him—curse be damned. She knew he wasn't going to die on her. And there had been no other way she could have shown him—she had needed him to feel how much he meant to her.

But something had undeniably shifted in that moment. He had removed himself from her life, from the townhouse, and Talia had begun to question every moment they had been together. He was avoiding her for a reason. Had she pushed him too far? Did he decide he did not care for her now that her sister was found—an obligation satisfied? Or was he so determined to meet death soon that he was hastening the event along?

Talia worried on it for days, worried on it every moment she wasn't worried on her sister.

Her hand dropped from her face, and she stepped from her sister's door only to have her head spin. She fell back against the door, taking deep breaths. Her dizziness was not helped by the fact that she could barely eat for the worry in her stomach, and her head had begun to spin far too often.

She apparently needed to eat some soup as well.

Walking down the stairs, she made her way quietly past the drawing room so her mother didn't call her in, moving to the rear of the house to talk to Cook.

She paused at Fletch's study to look in, unable to bridle her fool's hope that he would be behind his desk and look up to see her. And he would smile. His warm, off-kilter smile that he reserved for her alone, as if she was a wonderment he was trying to decipher. That very smile had sparked a glow deep in her chest from the very first, and she never would have imagined how much she missed it.

No Fletch. Just cool air inside. Only a few stray coals glowed in the fireplace, nothing to heat the room. Fletch was gone during the day, gone during the evening. The staff had made little note of his absence, the household running the same without his presence.

Talia thought she had heard him once, late at night in his chambers. But he did not enter her rooms. And before she got out of her bed to investigate, she realized she had probably just dreamed the noise.

Talia turned from the study, aching for anything she could do to make him appear. But she didn't even know where he was.

She stopped. What if it hadn't been a dream? What if he had been in his rooms, and she had missed him?

Hope brewing, Talia realized she had been far too passive.

If her husband was going to appear, she was going to make sure she didn't miss him.

***

Deep into the fifth night of Fletch's absence, Talia woke from the rustle of the bed, the coverlet lifting and cool air invading the warmth of her cocoon.

She popped up, squinting in the glow of the low coals in the fireplace to see Fletch jumping back out of the bed.

"Fletch."

"Blast it, Talia, I didn't see you in there." He jerked on his robe, hiding his bare skin. "Get a damn shift on."

Surprised, Talia glanced down to see her naked breasts above the coverlet—she had forgotten she had decided naked in his bed would be best. She scampered out of his bed, following his path. "No. Fletch, stop."

He spun from her, walking toward the door.

She grabbed his forearm, trying to stop his exit. "I need to talk to you, Fletch."

He paused for a second, looking over his shoulder at her. "Is something amiss? Your sister?"

"No. Not Louise." Talia tugged on his arm. "You. Where have you been sleeping?"

He exhaled a long sigh, turning to her. "It is late, Talia. Let us not do this now."

"This is the only way I have cornered you, Fletch, so yes, now." She could feel the muscles on his arm flex at her demand. She didn't care. "Where have you been sleeping?"

His grey eyes settled on her, his gaze guarded. "The club."

"You have been avoiding me, Fletch."

"Have I?"

"Yes, dammit." Her grip on his arm stiffened. "And I want to know why. Did I do something?"

"You did, Talia."

"What?"

"You made me believe in what is not possible." His look turned cool in the scant light. "Belief I cannot afford. Belief you cannot afford."

He was protecting her.

The realization swirled in her mind. A fool, she had not considered that very thing. Why wouldn't Fletch try to protect her from what he believed was his impending death—he had spent the entire time they had been together protecting her at every turn.

She grabbed his other arm, looking up at him. "You did not marry a weak woman, Fletch. I want all of you, for as long as I have you. You think that will be a short time, but I think it will be a very long time."

She drew a long breath, searching for words as her fingernails dug into his muscles through his robe. "But I cannot have you if you are not here. And you are wrong—this belief I have—I can afford it because I know, to the bottom of my soul, you are going to be at my side until we are old and wrinkled and grandchildren are crowding our feet."

"And if your soul is wrong?"

His grey eyes pierced her.

She suddenly felt every wisp of the cool air on her naked skin, making her vulnerable, wishing she had put on her robe. She steadied herself against his look, pulling her spine straight. She was not weak. She had said it, and now she had to mean it.

She met his stare. "Then my soul will take solace in the fact that every single day we had together I gave you everything of me, and you gave me everything of you. That we did not waste a moment that we were destined to be together."

His glare did not falter. "What if there is a babe?"

"That babe will be loved just the same, every single day of his or her life."

His jawline tightened as his head gave a slight shake.

He was not about to concede this battle.

Neither was she.

Her chest heaved as her hands moved up, gripping his upper arms. Fletch had never had a day of hope in his whole life. He had been given this death sentence the day he was born. He didn't even know what hope was.

She wasn't just fighting him. She was fighting decades of cruel fate. Generations that believed they were cursed because it was the only explanation. She needed to move him from a lifetime of that one constant. She couldn't lose him.

She closed the distance between them, her breasts touching his chest. He looked to the side, refusing to watch her.

"Fletch, I believed for years that only bad things were destined to happen for me. But it didn't start that way—even leaving Rosevin, I had boundless hope. But then day after day, I lost a little piece of it, until one day, I had no hope left. None."

She shook his arms. "Ask me what happened."

His tongue jutted into the side of his cheek as he exhaled, still refusing to look at her.

Silence pounded in the heavy heartbeats between them, neither moving.

Fletch opened his mouth. "What happened?"

"Your feet. Your boots appeared before me, buried in dung behind that brothel." She reached up, grabbing his jaw in her hands and forcing him to look down at her. "Everything changed in that one moment, Fletch. Everything. You gave me hope. Let me do the same for you."

"Hope will not change the future, Talia."

"Dammit, Fletch." Her voice spiked. "Then you leave me my hope—you do not get to tear that away from me. But I want you. I want you now. Here, while you are alive, and it is not fair that you remove yourself from me."

"Why is that not fair, Talia? It is what you will live with the rest of your life after I die, so what does it matter if I hasten my absence along?"

She slapped him, the sting still vibrating through her palm as she captured his face between her hands in her next motion, her voice cracking. "You are alive, that is why. Here and now. You may not want your life to mean anything, Fletch, but you cannot ask me to deny how very much you mean to me. That you are alive. That your life, that you, are important to me. You mean something. Do not dare to insist that I deny that."

She went to her toes, dragging his face down to hers, kissing him. Her lips met his with brutal force—anger, frustration, need—driving her mouth on his, forging through his resistance and drawing him open to her.

For a long moment, he could not refuse her.

Then he growled, ripping himself away.

He yanked her hands from his face.

Turning, he left. The door slammed behind him.

Talia stood, naked, staring at the door, her lips still pulsating from the kiss. Slowly, her arms curled around her stomach, holding in the waves of nausea starting to twist her belly.

She hadn't given him hope.

Nothing of the sort.

She had only driven him away.

Further.