James arrived twenty minutes later in a yellow bounder—a hired post chaise pulled by two horses. A postilion rode one of the horses.
“We’re not going far,” he explained, “and this is more private. No grooms or drivers to worry about or eavesdrop, no horses to stable.”
Alice nodded. She couldn’t even think about grooms or horses. But privacy she could appreciate. She could still hardly believe she was going to do this, even less that it was at her suggestion.
James put her valise into the boot at the back and helped her into the chaise. She’d never been in one of these conveyances before, and when he climbed in after her, it suddenly felt very small. Their bodies touched all down one side. His body felt so warm. She herself felt cold. Nerves.
They set off, and she distracted herself by looking out the window that covered the whole front of the chaise and pointing out various sights of possible interest. She feared she was babbling, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
After a few minutes it started to rain, just a soft, light spitting, but it made the window hard to see out of.
“We’ll be there in about an hour,” James told her. “I’ve rented a small cottage near a village on the outskirts of London.”
“Mmm,” she responded vaguely. In the small, close carriage, she could smell him—nothing strong or overwhelming, just the faint scent of his soap, clean linen, a hint of his shaving cologne and the underlying smell of his skin: the smell of James. She just wanted to lean over, press her face against his chest and inhale him.
If only that was all it took . . .
“So, how shall we while away the time?”
Startled, she turned to look at him.
He laughed at her expression. “Not with any improper activity,” he said. “We’ll have plenty of time for that when we get there.”
“Oh. Of course.” She swallowed.
His big warm hand closed over hers, and she immediately felt both comforted and yet, foolishly, even more nervous. “I meant,” he continued, his thumb caressing her skin, “what shall we talk about on the journey? Let’s start with you: Where did you grow up?”
She told him about her childhood at the vicarage in Chaceley and, under what she later realized was his skillful questioning, told him a great deal more than she’d intended, about her father’s passion for saving the souls of denizens, about how she’d grown up lonely—she wasn’t allowed to associate with the village children—and had always wished for brothers or sisters, but they’d never happened.
And all the time his thumb caressed her, moving back and forth over her hand, slow and rhythmic.
She found herself telling him how she’d come to marry Thaddeus. “I barely knew him, but both Mama and Papa were insistent that he was a good match for me—and he did seem to be good-looking and quite charming. So, two weeks to the day after we met, we were betrothed.” And she, poor naive fool, had thought that Thaddeus had fallen in love with her, and she’d been so excited by this unexpected whirlwind wooing by a handsome and sophisticated London viscount that she’d imagined she was in love with him, too.
Later she’d learned that she was on a list of virtuous and eligible girls his father had given him, along with an ultimatum that if he wasn’t betrothed to one of them by the end of the month, his allowance would be stopped. It was all to prevent him from marrying his mistress. She didn’t tell that to James. It was too lowering.
“And six weeks after that, I was married and living in London, and Mama and Papa had departed for foreign shores—Papa’s lost souls, you see,” she finished.
“And not long after that, they were dead.”
“Yes, it was a terrible shock. And by the time I found out, they’d actually been dead for weeks.” That was when she’d finally realized she was entirely alone in the world—except for her husband, who by then had shown his true colors. “But enough about me.” She forced a brighter tone. “What about you? Did you have a happy childhood?”
He told her about the estate in Warwickshire where he’d grown up—the one that was now his—and how his brother, Ross, being the heir, had been trained to take over the management of the estate. It was clear from his stories that he and his brother were very close—and that Nanny McCubbin had cared for them both. “She was more of a mother to Ross and me than our own mother was.”
Alice, having seen Nanny McCubbin with his daughters, could easily imagine it.
He told her about joining the army and going to war, about how he met his wife, Selina, on leave, and how her parents were adamantly opposed to the match, but how he and Selina won out in the end. He told her how Selina had traveled with the army and how well she’d taken to that life.
As he talked and told funny and dramatic stories of their adventures, Alice became more and more aware that she could never live up to his memories of Selina. Alice couldn’t even produce a baby, let alone give birth to one in the middle of a war in a tent or a dirt-floored cottage. And from the sounds of things, Selina had treated every one of those hardships as a delightful adventure.
Alice, by comparison, was dull and unadventurous: she hadn’t done much with her life at all.
“The uncertain and dangerous life we lived made us both very aware that we needed to make the most of every day,” he finished.
An excellent principle to live by, Alice thought. And she was having an adventure—if the definition of the word was to do something you’d never done before that felt risky and a bit nerve-racking.
There was no point in hoping that James would fall in love with her. His stories about Selina had convinced her of that. He wanted Alice as a mother for his daughters and a wife he was comfortable with, whose company he enjoyed. She could accept that, could even live quite happily with it, as long as she didn’t let herself crave more than he was prepared to give.
If she could bear going to bed with him, it would be enough.
The Bible said it was better to give than to receive, and Alice had a heart full of love to give. She already loved his daughters; she would just have to take care that she didn’t smother James, or embarrass him with her feelings—if she agreed to marry him, that was.
You couldn’t make someone love you—Thaddeus had taught her that.
“We’re here,” James said as the carriage pulled up outside a small, pretty cottage. “Wait here while I open it up—you don’t want to get wet.”
He leapt down and splashed through the puddles to the front door of the cottage. He unlocked the front door and returned with an umbrella for her.
While he fetched their luggage and paid off the postilion, Alice looked around. The cottage was small and simple but spotlessly clean. Four rooms, by the look of it—a sitting room and two small bedrooms, with a kitchen at the back.