Chapter 14

December 22, 1822

In the far corner of the room, no pillows and quilt offered a pitiful makeshift bed for a giant. Clara rubbed the sleep from her eyes and swung her feet to the floor. Never any trouble leaving her warm bed these days. It wasn't Atlas warm, after all, and that seemed to be the only kind of warmth she cared to lounge in any longer. Besides, she needed to flee a dream. Of him. Calling her "little mouse" as he kissed the aching, pulsing parts of her body between her legs. Little mouse. An insult. Why did it make her weak-kneed?

Because everything about him made her weak-kneed. Weeks of separation should have dulled her fancy for him. Those weeks had heightened it, magnified it a thousandfold so that her body screamed for his touch, rejoiced when he barely brushed against her.

She blamed him. He was so very good at playing his part.

Pretending would drive her mad.

On tired legs she stood, her body wavering just a bit, staring at the empty corner.

Where had Atlas gone? She did not remember him coming in last night after dinner. Had he slept at the dower house? Sometimes he did so. Good. He'd be more comfortable there, and in a few days, a week at most, she'd no longer have to gather Atlas's sleeping materials after waking, return them to the bed so the housemaid would not discover their truth.

She peeked behind the curtain dividing the room. He did not sit humming at the pianoforte.

She attempted to dress without worry, but concern for his absence followed her into the hallway and to the room where the family broke their fast. Matilda and Fanny were bright cheeked and cheery, planning for Christmas. Raph tried to hide his grins behind a book. But no Atlas sitting amongst them at the table, one large hand wrapped around a chipped cup of coffee.

"Where's your husband?" Franny asked, chewing a bite of toast.

Clara waited a moment to see if Raph answered for her, but when the silence stretched too long for comfort, she had no choice but to lie.

"At the dower house already. Working. He wished to get an early start." She hoped.

"He works much too hard." Franny sighed, but there were no more questions.

"He's fine, Mother." Raph waved a point of toast in the air. "If he needed rest, he'd take it."

Would he, though? She'd been married to the man a little less than two months and felt she knew him better, sometimes, than those gathered round this table.

"Have you considered the mistletoe, Clara?" Franny asked.

She had. Almost nonstop. Alfie wanted it badly. And Atlas had perked up at the mention of it as well. Only Clara had felt like melting through the floorboards. Hunting for mistletoe, gathering greenery—things real families did together. But her little family was fake, and she must protect her son.

"We'll need greenery as well. I would drag Raph along to get it, but"—Matilda shivered, pulled her shawl more tightly about her—"I hate the cold. I intend to stay by a fire until the air decides to be kinder to me."

Raph poured her more tea, and a tower of steam spilled upward. His wife wrapped her fingers around it, savoring the warmth.

"When will Drew arrive?" Raph asked his mother.

Franny reached into her pocket and produced a letter. She flourished it in the air. "This arrived yesterday. Drew says Theo and Cordelia will remain in London as long as possible, but we can expect them before Christmas. He also reports that he and Amelia will arrive Christmas Day. There's much to do still at their agency." She sniffed as she let the letter flutter to the table next to her plate, amongst the crumbs. "It's inexcusable for them to have married in London. And by special license." Another sniff.

Matilda raised a brow. "Raph and I married by special license."

"Yes, but that was here, where I could watch. And I was the one who provided the license. It's nice to be included. How Andrew managed it—" She shook her head. "He's always been a clever one and set on having his way. And that way is almost always too far away from the rest of us." She lifted a steaming cup of tea before her face and inhaled. "But I knew he would choose Amelia. They were fated. And they'll be here soon. Drew never comes home unless there's a wedding or a funeral, but there's neither of those this time." The dowager tore a victorious bite from her toast.

Raph groaned. "Fated, Mother? Really?"

Franny waved the sounds away as if they were balls she could bat about. "It's true. You should know, having found your fate as well."

Matilda chuckled, but she didn't argue. And Clara tried to sink through the floor. Please do not turn this conversation on me.

"And you, my dear," Franny said, beaming at Clara. "You've found your fate, too."

Clara stood, abandoning her plate barely touched. Was her fate, then, to care for a man who would leave her? She'd thought to heal slowly from wanting over the last several weeks. The ache of her need had grown hotter, deeper, impossible to hold in a single body. It weighed her down like an ocean, pressing her bones into dust.

"I must be off. Much to do today." She barely registered the farewells as she left the room, left the house, and set her feet down the path toward the dower house.

Mistletoe. Should she allow it? Would a single day's outing solidify that bond between man and child she'd been trying so desperately to sever?

The dower house rose before her, all gray stone and climbing vines. Dead vines. It needed landscaping. And the hinges squeaked when she threw open the door and stepped into its shadows. No fire crackled here, though Atlas had managed to see the chimneys cleaned before she'd arrived. She'd thought it a tiny castle when she first laid eyes on it the morning after her wedding night. It seemed colder in all ways than Briarcliff, likely because no one lived here to warm it up, to put life into its window eyes.

"Atlas?" she whispered, adding oil door hinges to the list of tasks she must complete before the house was put to its purpose.

No answer. She busied herself with the tinder box at the fireplace until a fire roared there, then she stood, warming herself for several minutes, rubbing her hands, breathing into them. Then, finally, she crept up the stairs, feeling as if she climbed toward… some important fate. Ridiculous Franny, seeding such notions between Clara's ears. If he had not slept here last night… she would not ask him, when she saw him, where he had rested his head and that big, delicious body.

She missed that body. Missed him. Loneliness had curled about her like a sour London fog. Thicker, more impenetrable because the man she wanted to end her loneliness with existed so close to hand. She could touch him. He often touched her.

Under the watchful gaze of his mother.

Pretend or otherwise, those touches burned her. Licks of flames from wanting. Hotter ones from the futility of that desire. Sometimes his touches felt too real, threatened to ruin her, send her sanity spinning into the ether. Because if his desire was as real as her own…

Why couldn't they have each other?

Because she was a mother first and a woman second, and she refused to risk her son's heart.

Truth, Clara.

Very well. Her own heart, too.

Because more than she missed his body, she missed standing at the window with him, watching Alfie dash down a tree, discussing plans for the dower house, collecting words to give to the both of them so she could hear them laugh as they created the silliest rhymes.

On the landing, all doors were open but for the one in the far-right corner. She opened it and found him curled on his side on a small bed there. And something like relief sailed through her. A moment only, though. Because his big body, shaped in such a pose of innocence, of vulnerability, that back put to the world as if he expected it to hurt him…

She pressed her eyes tightly closed against the tears, inhaled to pull them into a retreat behind the walls of her heart. He had been hurt, and he knew what he needed to do to heal. She could never deny him that. No matter how real her own desire for him, no matter how real his felt for her at times.

"Atlas," she said, his name barely a whisper.

He shifted his top shoulder, rolling him onto his back, revealing his stubbled profile. How could such a large man, a former soldier, be so pretty, too? His dark lashes fanned across his tanned skin, and even in sleep, that square jaw of his clenched tightly, his lips thinned. What visions did he see in sleep that put such a pallor on his face? He'd seen things he did not wish to remember, but dreams did not care for preference. You took what they gave you, whether it made you scream or not.

She'd married this man, made love to him, thinking him nothing but a jolly fellow willing to sacrifice to help others. He was that. But not only that. He hid his pain so well, hid even his plans to heal it.

How lonely that must be.

And she'd made him lonelier. She'd married him to save herself and her son. She'd stayed in his bed for weeks to please herself, revel in her own surprising joy. Then she'd pushed him away for Alfie's sake. And at every turn, he'd done exactly as she'd asked.

He'd given her so much.

She owed him more than she currently gave him.

She knelt beside him, having floated there without much thought, and trailed her fingers down his cheek. "Atlas."

His eyelashes fluttered, and then his eyes opened, and his jaw softened, a blush rushed across his cheeks, wiping the pallor away. His lips fleshed out into a sleepy smile, eradicating the narrow worry he'd worn in sleep, and he clasped her hand, kissed her palm, sighed into it, his eyes closing once more. "Clara."

Caught. And kept in such delicious chains, the palms of his hand about hers rough with the evidence of his daily labor, strong and warm and her name on his lips something like a benediction, a prayer.

Something shifted inside her. If saying her name, holding her hand, seeing her upon waking placed such a look of peace upon his face, perhaps… Was it possible thatshe did give him something, without even trying?

He sat up with a groan. "Good morning." He released her hand and swung his legs to the floor to stand, stretching as he did so.

She followed him to her feet, unable to look away. Would not, had someone paid her to do so. He wore only buckskins and a thin linen shirt, and beneath that linen, muscle bunched and flexed. A fine sight. She knew the feel of him, too. The taste of him.

"Did you sleep well?" she managed to say, each word weaker than the previous one.

He found his waistcoat and shrugged into it. "No better or worse than usual."

"You should sleep here more often. It is not right for you to curl up on the floor each night."

"It is no bother." But his fingers stroked up and down the outside of his wounded thigh, and the muscle of that leg bunched and loosened, a rhythmic contraction and relaxation she'd seen often from him before. The damn leg pained him, though he wouldn't admit it. "I will find better accommodations soon."

After they told his mother the truth.

He stood before the window, shoulders almost as wide as it, and looked out onto the morning. "I worked most of the night." Turning, he gazed over the room, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. "But I finished it."

She spun in a slow circle, taking in the molding and the door frame, work he'd completed on the fireplace mantel and the bad spot in the floor. All finished. And well, too.

"Where did you learn carpentry?" she asked. Why had she not asked it before? A natural question, considering his father had been a marquess.

"A man in the village taught me a bit. A furniture maker who used to attend my father's yearly house party taught me some as well. My father encouraged it from the artist, but less so from the skilled laborer." He snorted. "Likely why I preferred working with old Franklin over Mr. Credinsly."

"Credinsly?" She wrinkled her nose. "I know him. Stole my papa's design for a wardrobe once."

"Not surprised." He bowed over her, the shadows of his own body hiding his face. When had he crept so close? How had she not noticed?

She cleared her throat and retreated toward the fireplace. "You're quite good."

He uncurved his body, his shoulders snapping back into their military queue. "Not as good as you."

The mantel he'd installed was simple. She'd carve a simple flower design around the edge. The task became an item on her ever-growing list. Ever growing, but ever shrinking, too. Soon they'd be done. She smoothed her fingers over the top edge of the mantel—smooth and sturdy, elegant and unfinished. She'd have to paint it as well. More items to add to her list.

Not done quite yet.

"What next?" he asked. "I had planned to work in the room across the hall today. Will that suit you?"

"No. Not yet. You've not even broken your fast, and you were up all night according to your own admission, and—" She gasped, her gaze flying skyward to the ornate molding circling the room. It had not been mounted when they'd left yesterday afternoon. She swung on him, marched a finger into his chest. "You did that"—she pointed to the molding—"alone? Last night?"

He lifted a brow. "I did."

"Dangerous!"

"I did it, didn't I? And here I am, healthy as ever." He held his arms out wide, an invitation to look her fill at him.

No, thank you. She did that enough without invitation.

"Balancing the stuff on your shoulder as if it were a measuring stick and climbing a ladder all at once, no one to hear you fall and run to help if you're hurt." Ah, yes, the stiff jaw returned as he planted his feet wide apart and crossed his arms over his chest. "Stubborn man. You're not working yet today. Follow me."

With a chuckle, he obliged, right out of the dower house and back to Briarcliff. The room she'd abandoned before had been cleared of its morning clutter, but not its inhabitants. Franny sat near the window with Matilda, their hands busy with needles and thread. Tiny stitches for tiny caps and gowns.

"Sit," Clara instructed. "I'll visit the kitchen to see what I can find."

"I need nothing." But Atlas sat just where she pointed.

"You found your husband, I see," Franny said.

"And now I'm feeding him." Clara made for the door.

"No, no. I'll see to it." Franny put her sewing aside and patted Clara's shoulder on her way into the hallway.

Clara sat next to Atlas, the awkwardness of near solitude creeping over her skin. Matilda paid them no mind, but Franny might reappear at any moment, requiring Clara to set to work pretending to love Atlas.

He slumped in his chair, hair falling over his eyes. Exhaustion ran tense through every inch of him. Her fingers itched to push that hair back, massage his leg, find him something to prop his foot on. Anything. But she couldn't. Not unless they had an audience.

Franny sailed back into the room. "Cook will bring up a tray right away."

Clara jumped to her feet. "Excellent." Now she fussed with her husband, pushing his chin up with her knuckles and brushing his hair off his face. His lovely lips curled up with her every touch, and slow and heavy as a rising tide, he lifted his arm to settle it about her waist.

She gasped. He grinned, a rogue's wink in his eye, before he pulled her atop his lap.

"Atlas." A warning.

He nuzzled her neck. "Yes?"

"We've company."

"Precisely," he growled, one huge hand tight at her waist, the other a claw behind her neck. He would not let her escape. His forehead fell against her, his eyes hard, demanding, searing. And, caught in this never-ending theatrical of her own making, she did not wrestle out of his hold. Could not or she might alert Franny.

Lies.

She did not want to be anywhere but where she was. Closing her eyes, she let herself feel his heat, hear his heart, pretend until hard reality faded away.

"Here ye are, Lord Atlas." Cook's voice and the rattle of a tray.

Clara opened her eyes and stood. Tried to. Atlas would not let her. As Cook settled the plate before them and left, he held her fast, picked up a point of toast and held it to her lips. "Eat."

"I'm not hungry. I'm in no need. You are."

"Need. Yes." He tore into the toast then offered it to her once more. "I am in need."

Clara glanced at her mother-in-law and Matilda. Their heads were bent at their work, but their cheeks were red as berries. Mortifying. These were moments best left for private, but she and Atlas had forced themselves to serve them up for public appraisal.

She nudged the toast aside and leaned close to whisper in Atlas's ear. "You go too far. You must release me."

"If it bothers them, let them leave." His thumb stroked across her bottom lip, melting her resolve, melting her.

"You are acting the scoundrel."

"The rogue?"

"Precisely."

He pulled her so tightly against his body she felt the planes of flexing muscle beneath the thin linen. When he whispered into her ear, his lips caressed her skin, his breath burned fire into her being. "The longer we continue, the more rogue I become. You make me feel like my old self. You make me want to misbehave." She shivered, and he stroked his thumb down the exposed length of her neck. "You make me want to take something, for the first time in a long while, for myself."

"You wouldn't." Not a dare or a challenge. A truth. This man never took for himself. She escaped his hold and pushed the food closer to him. "Eat, Atlas. Please?" As she settled in a chair at the other end of the room with Franny and Matilda, he reached for the plate, slowly at first then with greater gusto, digging into the pile the cook had brought him.

Good. He needed his strength. To fix a house. To fight his demons. To pretend he loved her. Everything for everyone else.

But what about Atlas?

"So," Franny said, looking up from her needlework, "have you decided about the mistletoe?"

"Do leave the woman in peace, Franny," Matilda said, placing a white stitch in the white linen. "She will make the decision in her own time."

"Alfie would enjoy it, is all." Franny pushed her work aside. "When I took him up to the nursery this morning, he could speak of nothing else."

Words wriggled through Clara, squirmy, unclear until she said them. "Alfie's happiness is always my priority, Franny. But Atlas is my husband, and what he needs must be of some importance, too. He is exhausted." Her worry for Atlas real even if it was not why she did not approve of the mistletoe outing. She glanced over her shoulder. Atlas paid them no mind, his hungry focus solely on his plate. "He works himself to the bone for you and Raph, to complete the dower house. And he follows Raph wherever he is asked to follow. He's gardener, stable master, footman whenever the situation calls for it. What if he should rest instead of gather greenery? Why cannot someone else do it?"

Franny's open face, closed like a door, and as red flamed across her cheeks, her hands worked more quickly at her needlework, tangling up a form that had promised to be a flower but now resembled more a bramble of thorns. Then her hands stilled altogether, and she, too, glanced at Atlas. "Is he tired?"

Clara could not give away the truths Atlas did not wish others to have. "He would not say so."

Franny nodded slowly. "Being a mother is most difficult. You would think after over thirty years of practice, I'd have the hang of it. 'Tis a difficult line women tread, pleasing everyone. Which are we first? Mother or wife? I never quite figured it out. Most of my mistakes occurred because I lost sight of one while being the other."

"I think," Matilda said, her hands going quiet atop her own needlework, "we are… us first. And if we listen to that part of ourselves, the us part, we can better manage the other things we are. Wife, mother, marchioness. I hope so at least." She laughed, resting a hand on her growing belly. "I do worry."

Franny patted Matilda's arm. "I do not. For you. You've managed so many grouchy old women in your past life as companion, you'll have no problem with a babe and a beefwit for a husband. You, too, Clara. You are a most excellent mother. And your heart is clearly big enough to love your son and mine. I concede to you. If you say Atlas is too tired for mistletoe, I will simply not ask about it anymore."

Did Clara have the balance right? Since her marriage, she seemed more torn. For the first weeks, she'd reveled in her own bliss, celebrating the pleasure that benefited only her. And then she'd acted for Alfie's sake alone, cutting off her pleasure and, yes, Atlas's too.

"Franny," Clara said, "those mistakes you made, when you lost sight of a part of yourself… what do you wish you'd done instead?"

"Listened." Franny unpicked her tangled stitches, smoothing out the mess she'd made. "To my children. A rather unheard-of concept, I'm afraid. We ship our children off. To wet nurses and governesses and schools and go about our merry ways. But I've always gone my own way in all else. I could have swum against the current there as well. And if I had, perhaps I would have been able to keep my husband from wasting his inheritance, from hurting so many people. Some lessons we learn too late in life."

"But you are learning now, Franny," Matilda said. "It is never too late."

Clara jumped to her feet. "Excuse me. I must…" She made for the door.

The chair toppled behind Atlas as he stood too quickly. "Are you unwell, Clara?"

"I'm perfectly fine. I'll return." She found Alfie in the nursery with a pile of books. He'd built them into a fort and walked the figures Atlas had made him across the top as if they kept watch from a castle rampart.

He looked up and waved as she approached. "Will you play with me?"

She sank down beside him and took up an abandoned figure. "I will. But first… I wish to ask you a question."

He frowned, sat up taller. "What question?"

"It's about Atlas."

Alfie's frown deepened, and he sank low behind the books, the figures he held in each hand toppling to the ground.

Oh no.

"Alfie—"

"He doesn't like me anymore."

Well. That answered the question. "He does, love," she reassured him.

"No. I know the window's not nailed shut. He just doesn't want me up there with him. And he stopped making me toys."

"He has other things to do."

"He's stopped giving me words to rhyme." That said as if it settled the matter. No more rhymes meant no more affection.

She wrapped her arms tightly around her son. Too big to pull into her lap, but not too big for a hug. Loving him was the easiest part of being a mother. Everything else about motherhood—bloody difficult.

"Would you like to go mistletoe hunting with Atlas, then? He'd like you to."

Alfie sat up so quickly, his head rammed into her chin. She rubbed it, her son's shining eyes a healing balm. "Sorry, Mama. But is it true?"

"If you wish it, then we will do it." Keeping them apart had not saved her son from pain, only passed it on to everyone else. "Alfie, I've one more question."

He picked up his toys and marched them across the book fort once more.

She stroked her hand down the back of his head. "If Atlas were to leave one day, go on a… holiday to the Continent, what would you?—"

"Are we going with him?" Alfie jumped to his feet, eyes rare gems once more.

"Likely not."

"Oh." He deflated, frowned. "Well, he'd better bring me something back, then."

"You would not be… sad?"

He shrugged. "He'll come back. And maybe he'll take us next time."

"You were very sad when your papa passed away."

"But going to the Continent isn't dying. Atlas will be back." He blinked up at her. "Is he truly going somewhere?"

She hugged Alfie to her side. "Not yet. Do not worry about it."

And he wouldn't. Clearly. She'd botched everything, hadn't she? High on her own happiness, she'd worried she'd paid too little attention to her son's well-being. She'd paid even less attention to her husband's.

No more. Surely she could find the way to protect them both.

When she'd woken him this morning, he seemed to have come to lovely life beneath her touch. From stone to smiling blood and bone as soon as he saw her face. No time to dissemble. Only truth in that groggy, early morning moment. She held the power to soothe him, to take away his pain. As long as he remained at Briarcliff, she'd do just that.