In that regard, passion proved not so very different.
Claire stiffened as reality reared its ugly, cruel, jeering head.
As it should.
Oh, God.
Just as Caleb had predicted, when the cloud lifted, reality would return, and one was left with… what one had done. More specifically, in Claire’s case, what awaited her.
Her husband.
Since she’d sent on the response to the bridal advertisement and received word that she’d been selected, she’d made herself speak those two words aloud often so that she could become accustomed to them. So that she might drive back the unease that came in what they meant.
That same bridegroom who now awaited her while she’d been making love with the always-ornery Caleb Gray.
She directed her stare out at the passing landscape, the thick gray clouds hanging in the sky and the barren lands a perfect fit for her sudden gloom.
For, it was one thing that it was Caleb Gray, who’d despised her with the same intensity of a thousand burning suns. That would have been reason enough for her surrender here to be unforgivable. But that she should have done so when she’d vowed after the last time to be faithful to the man waiting for her? This, when she’d vowed to Caleb that what had occurred at the inn would never happen again? She’d spoken with a sureness born of what she’d believed had been the truth. But she’d lied. And she’d been dishonorable.
Caleb spoke, his somber, deep baritone cutting across the quiet. “We’re getting close.”
Close… to the inn where she was to meet not her husband, but his man of affairs, something that had been only a detail in the missives she’d exchanged about her arrangement, but now shed light on how informal, how impersonal her marriage would be. Tears pricked her lashes, and she blinked them back. “Yes,” she managed, her voice threadbare.
And she hated it, wishing she’d not added her tremulous voice to the carriage.
“You got regrets.”
It wasn’t a question, rather a statement of fact from a man whom she’d shared so very much with these past days. Only, it was unclear about what he referenced: the passion they’d shared together this day? Or her impending marriage?
“Do you?” she countered, too much of a coward to commit to either. “You don’t dally with entangled women.” Which she was, but not in the way he thought.
Swamped by bitterness, Claire glanced down at her white-knuckled grip.
“Look at me, Claire.” The command in his voice brought her eyes to his, and the look there stole her breath. “I don’t have any regrets about what we did. I should,” he added. “I value honor, and I didn’t show any here to the man you’re gonna marry, and I know what that’s like.”
Her own misery faded as she grasped on to that morsel he’d just revealed. “You—”
“I was engaged,” he cut her off. “My family made their wealth equipping privateers during the revolution. Became respectable merchants after that. Respectable merchant families mingle with respectable merchant families. And—”
“And sons of respectable merchant families marry the daughters of other respectable merchant families,” she predicted.
He pointed a finger her way. “Exactly.”
That was the way of the whole world, then. Not that she was surprised by as much. The English and Americans weren’t very different in that regard, however. Certain marital pools existed, and few married outside of those established bounds of respectability.
“So your match was arranged,” she said, finding the most peculiar sense of relief at—
“No. The opposite.”
Her heart slipped in her chest at the directness of that admission. “Oh,” she said dumbly.
“Our families got on. We were friends as children. She spit and cursed and raced with the best of them. Alicia is her name.”
In short, the young woman he described was the manner of free spirit Claire had only secretly been when she’d managed to escape her governess. And suddenly, Claire found all manner of different envies stirring within, one she didn’t wish to examine too closely. One connected to the fact of her relationship with Caleb Gray.
“We were friends, me and my younger brother, Toby, and her. The best of ’em.” Did she imagine the trace of bitterness in that admission? It was gone so quick as he resumed his telling that she’d surely imagined it.
“She went away to finishing school around the time I went to King’s College. And she returned—”
Claire already knew before he spoke. She’d left a duck and returned a swan.
“—changed, but miserable for it. We met up at another merchant’s gala. It was the dead of summer. Oppressively hot. Miserable. So we snuck off and did all the things we did as children…”
His was a romantic telling; the kind that as a girl, she’d only dreamed of for herself. But there had never been such a man for her. Just one suitor who’d turned tail and ran the moment her family’s crimes had come to light.
She dropped a chin atop her hand. “That is so romantic,” she said softly, envy eating her alive all over again for so many reasons. Except… Claire’s brow dipped. “What happened?”
What happened?
What hadn’t happened in those years of his youth, and then in the ones that followed?
But more, why was he telling her any of this? He didn’t speak about his past or his family or the betrayal that had left him heartbroken after he’d returned, in every way a man could be broken.
It was as though her garrulousness these past days had proven contagious, and he now had the same talking disease that afflicted Claire Poplar. Only, he knew it was more than that. He’d found an ease he’d thought to never again know around another person. One that caused sweat to slick his palms. Eager to have it done, frustrated with himself for having even brought it up, when he’d not thought about it for more years than he could remember, Caleb hurried through the rest of his telling.
“My brother, Toby, didn’t go to college. He was always working for my father.” And Caleb had always been painting. “That day, I offered to handle a delivery of papers to another merchant for him.” He lingered his gaze on the distant horizon as a slice of sun cut through the heavy blanket of clouds, that brightness at odds with the remembrances he now spoke of. Unable to take that spot of cheer, he faced Claire. “The British were seizing soldiers, using them to man their ships and fight their wars for them…”
The color slipped from her cheeks. “I…”
“Didn’t know the British engaged in such tactics?” he supplied for her, this time providing the story he’d only begun at the inn in full. “Yeah. They did. They—” Kidnapped me. Robbed me of my freedom and identity. Demanded I use my talents for their mercenary plans. A painful wad of emotion built in his throat. And here, after all these years, he’d believed himself immune to what had happened to him. No, what had been done to him.
She rested a hand on his sleeve, and Caleb jumped. “They took you?” she asked. Her eyes mirrored the pain ravaging him still, a wound that would never heal, a nightmare that would always be there.
“Yeah, they took me,” he said flatly. “They put me to work alongside the others on their ship. Until they learned I had a skill they could use.”