Chapter 13
Caleb and Claire didn’t speak for the next hour.
Unlike before, however, this silence hadn’t anything to do with the argument that had resulted following his interference at the Rotted Rooster. That tension between them had since been put to bed.
This silence, instead, was born of everything she’d shared.
All these years, he’d carried certain and specific resentments, all surrounding his life and his craft.
He’d not thought of his being required to put his work on display in the way she’d spoken of.
He’d not seen his privilege.
He’d not seen it as being a choice, one that allowed him to freely create art.
Having to put his art on display in galleries for people to gawk at had represented just one more thing he was being forced to do. He’d inextricably linked that to the powerlessness he’d known after being impressed. Then, he’d been forced to do the work of the British navy, and when he’d refused to create the maps they required or sketch the damned images of the lands they intended to take over, he’d found himself thrown into the prison below.
But ultimately, he’d been sprung from that prison, freed to live his life, with the only constraints being those financial limitations that necessitated his sharing his artwork.
Unlike Claire…
He stared openly at her.
Claire, who only that morn had been absorbed in her sketch, now sat with the book closed on her lap as she stared forlornly out the window.
The lead pane revealed every sadness contained within the contours of her heart-shaped face.
Claire, who when they completed this journey would move forward, just as she’d said, and commit herself in name, body, and soul to some English fellow, whom she didn’t altogether know if she could trust. Worries that weren’t cynical, but rather, realistic in that they were born of knowing the unpredictability of man.
Hell, he knew that better than anyone.
He stared at her visage reflected in the glass. She’d rested her chin atop her fist and watched the jagged rock landscape, melded with a faded green, pass by.
Even if he turned the carriage around and headed back to London with her, against her wishes, he knew her stubborn spirit. She’d eventually find her way to whomever she’d gone and fallen in love with.
This time, instead of the visceral jealousy that had slithered about at the thought of some white-faced, limp-handed lord handling her, Caleb saw the details he’d previously neglected to note. The worry she had. The words she’d spoken.
What is my fate beyond this? Everything for a woman is uncertain.
Those weren’t the words of a woman in love. They belonged to a lady who had resigned herself to the course she’d set.
Caleb shot a hand up and knocked hard on the roof.
His driver navigated carefully along the high road, guiding them down the rise until they reached a lower, less-steep portion of the roadway through Malham.
The moment the conveyance had come to a full stop, Claire frowned. “I forbid you from turning this carriage back, Caleb. I am doing this.” With or without his assistance.
It was precisely as he’d known.
Reaching past her, he pressed the door handle and shoved the panel open.
A blast of cold immediately buffeted the carriage, whistling fast.
Claire gasped and drew her cloak closer. “N-never say you intend to a-abandon me here,” she sputtered with outrage.
He chuckled. “Not this time, sweetheart.” Not ever again.
Between everything he’d learned about her and everything they’d shared with each other since the Rotted Rooster, he’d never be able to go back to the way he’d viewed her.
Caleb jumped out, and the moment his feet found purchase, he bent them, stretching them to adjust his blood flow to the change in positioning. During the time he’d been impressed, he’d spent so many hours locked up in cramped quarters that his muscles still paid a price for the misery inflicted upon them. In the distance, the winter wind howled a mournful wail, echoing from the nearby caverns. He lifted his arms up toward the heavily clouded white sky.
Claire ducked her head out. “Did you need to stretch?” she called down.
“Yeah.” But that wasn’t, however, the reason he’d stopped the carriage.
Shaking his forearms out once more, he reached a hand back toward her, gesturing her forward with four fingers.
Clutching her sketch pad in her right arm, Claire eyed his hand warily.
He chuckled. “Never tell me you’re going to turn shy now, Claire Poplar?”
That challenge served the purpose he’d intended. Tilting her chin up at its usual mutinous bend, she held her palm out.
Ignoring that offering, Caleb caught her around the waist, pulling a little squeak from her lips.
When her feet touched the ground, he lingered his hands there, on those points just above her generously curved hips. And God help him, something so innocuous should send a wave of hungering rippling through him, bringing him back to the previous times he’d held her in his arms.
Her lips parted the tiniest fraction, enough that a little puff of white from her breath melding with the cold fanned the air. Her mouth, kissed from the cold, had a greater shade of red in that pouty flesh. And God, how he wanted to taste her. Again. He hungered to claim her lips, lick that seam, and lash his tongue against hers.
And it was the first time he understood or appreciated the struggle his brother had spoken to him about upon his return, when he’d revealed his marriage to Caleb’s fiancée. God help him, that temptation of sin that came from wanting what you oughtn’t was one he now understood all too well.
It took a physical effort, but he managed to release her.
Caleb offered her his arm instead. “Come on,” he said gruffly, angling his head, urging her to follow him.
“My, you grow more gallant with every exchange, Mr. Gray,” she said teasingly, and it was different than their usual sparring, and he relished this newfound levity between them. This time, there was no hesitancy in the hand she placed upon his sleeve.
His muscles rolled under her touch, so innocuous, and yet, everything, since she’d come undone in his arms, had become keener. Sharper. He struggled for a levity it was hard to feel under his body’s every awareness of her. “Yeah, don’t go around telling anyone and ruining my image.” He followed that playful rebuke with a wink.
He led them onward to the large open field down a small incline that emptied out onto an expansive field.
As the grounds grew more uneven, the terrain rougher, Caleb was sure to slow his longer steps. At his side, Claire adjusted the grip she had on her sketch pad, and he held a hand out to take that burden from her.
As an artist himself, knowing how he guarded his work and how she valued hers, it was a testament to some great cosmic shift that had occurred these past couple of days that she so effortlessly entrusted that book to his care.
“You know, if you’ve tired of traveling with me,” she said, slightly out of breath from the length of the walk they’d undertaken, “you could have just left me at the Rotted Rooster, like I’d wanted.”
“Ah, but where would be the fun in that?” he said, keeping his expression deadpan, startling a laugh from Claire, and he joined in.
Nor was that expression of mirth born of sarcasm or mockery as it had been for so long, emptied of all amusement after his capture so that he’d believed himself impossible of that sentiment. Only to find it again, with and because of the last person he would have ever expected.