“Gabe,” he corrected. “And you’ve got a grand way with hats.” He went back to sorting. “As for my words, I’m trying to watch what I say. It’s just . . . well, this isn’t the world I’m used to. Being with a lady like you . . . it’s new to me. I may slip sometimes and say things that shock you.”
She shifted the rose, angling it one way, then another. “Just don’t say shocking things around Laney, please. I’ve tried very hard to give her a proper upbringing, and I will not be pleased if you fill her head with language a young lady shouldn’t hear, let alone say.”
“I’ll try my best.” He glanced up. “The thing is, I may say some things that I think are fine, and you’ll disapprove. Maybe you can keep track of my slips and tell me later.”
Her fingers stilled on the flower, and her gaze sought his. “Are you asking me to critique your speech?”
“Critique? Now, there’s a word.”
“It means—”
“I know what it means. I’m just not used to hearing it spoken. And, yes, that’s what I’m asking, I reckon.”
She still studied him. “You won’t grow angry if I correct you?”
It was Gabe’s turn to pause in his work. The sudden cessation of beads plopping into containers created a taut silence between them as she waited for his reply. He sensed that there was a heap of anxiety behind her question. “Not if you’re halfway nice about it. Why do you ask?”
“Because most men don’t like it when a woman finds fault with—”
“I’m not most men. I’m Gabriel Valance.” He winked at her. “We men aren’t like your beads, Nan. Don’t try to sort us into cups by size and color. All of us have imperfections, but no two of us are the same.”
He noticed she took time to glance pointedly at the cup of matched beads he was holding before she answered. Point taken, lady. You don’t believe me. “Yes, well, not growing perturbed if I criticize you may be easier said than done. My father grew furious if my mother or I even hinted that—”
Irritation stabbed Gabe low in his middle. “I’m nothing like your father, and I’d venture a bet that ninety percent of the men in Random aren’t, either.”
“You know nothing about my father!” she cried.
“I know that he was at home and allowed your fiancé to assault you in your own sitting room.”
The bright flags of color on her cheeks turned ashen, and Gabe realized, a second too late, that there was no way in hell he could have come by that information—unless he’d been talking to angels.
“How did—” The words snagged in her throat. She swallowed and tried again. “How can you possibly know if my father was home when it happened?”
Thinking fast, he said, “Because in the highfalutin society you come from, no proper young lady would entertain a gentleman if she were at home without a chaperone. Talk about a scandal. If word got out of such goings-on, a girl’s reputation would be destroyed.”
The crease between her brows deepened. “How do you know my chaperone wasn’t an older female relative?”
“An older female relative would have been stuck to your side like a tick to a hound’s back, and she would have skewered that bastard Barclay with the knitting needle.” Recalling the attack he’d witnessed through the parted clouds, Gabe felt anger roiling in the pit of his stomach. And then, before he could stifle himself, words he knew he shouldn’t say began shooting from his mouth. “Nope, your father was in the house. He deliberately left you alone with Barclay, knowing full well what would occur in his absence.” Gabe leaned forward, his gaze locked with hers. “He heard your cries for help. But he didn’t intervene, did he?”
At that, all the color, even the hints of gray, drained from Nan’s face. She shook her head. “Only a horrible excuse for a father would do something so reprehensible.”
“You said it. You had a horrible excuse for a father.” Gabe dropped a blue bead into a cup. As glass struck glass, the resultant report seemed as loud as a rifle shot. “Don’t pretend with me, Nan. You were aware then, just as you are now, that your father knew what Barclay was going to do, and he was okay with it. Otherwise, Barclay wouldn’t have dared. Men have died for doing far less. That’s why you hate men, why you distrust all of us and never wanted to be married—because the one male in this world who should have loved and protected you was a sorry, good-for-nothing, rotten son of a bitch.”
Nan released an anguished cry and, without pushing back her chair, lunged to her feet, catching the table’s edge with her hip. The bead box tipped and slid toward Gabe, along with all the sorting cups, and fast though he was with his hands, he could stop only the large container from falling, not the cups or the hundreds of beads that cascaded over the box edge to bounce and roll to all corners of the room. One got him straight in the eye. Right then, the stinging sensation was the least of his worries.
Nan whirled to leave the room. Her high-heeled boots found a carpet of tiny orbs, and her feet started shooting out from under her. For an instant she fought for balance, wheeling her arms like someone who’d stepped onto wet ice. Then down she went.
When Gabe leaped up to make sure she hadn’t hurt herself, his own boots found no purchase. His right leg shot sideways, his left skidded forward, and the next thing he knew, he fell on top of her, barely managing to catch the brunt of his weight with his hands to avoid squashing her. He ended up sprawled across her legs with his head nearly level with hers.
“You okay?” he demanded. She’d gone down hard, and she was made so delicately that he feared the impact might have broken one of her bones. His hands smarted like hell from catching himself with his palms and connecting with beads instead of planks. Needlelike pain shot to his shoulders. “Nan? Are you hurt? Talk to me.”
Her eyes met his, but he had the feeling she wasn’t seeing him at all. She looked right through him and then cupped her hands over her face. A dry, shrill cry tore up her throat, a prelude to body-wrenching sobs. Against her palms, she keened, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. He kn-knew! How c-could he d-do that to m-me? To his own d-daughter!”
Gabe realized that she was in pain, all right, but it wasn’t merely physical. He levered himself off her and sat beside her, one bent leg pressed from hip to knee against her side. Damn. He wished now that he’d left it alone. But, oh, no. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he’d gotten his back up over the “most men” comment, and defended himself and his gender without thinking. One thing had led to another, and . . . Well, shit. Now she was crying, curling up into a tight ball, and judging by how hard the sobs seemed to come, he had a bad feeling she didn’t often weep.
No surprise. In that way, he suspected he and Nan were cut from the same cloth. It was okay to reveal anger, but never any untidy emotions, no feelings that ran deep. Now he’d stripped her feelings bare, taking her back in time to an incident that had destroyed her life and haunted her to this day. Her loss of control was his fault, and he couldn’t blame her a bit for crying. But if he didn’t get the volume toned down, and soon, they’d have Laney in here to investigate, and things might go from bad to horrible.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I had no right to say those things. No business even bringing it up. I’m so sorry.” He put a tentative hand on her slender shoulder.
“You never mind about being sorry!” she practically screamed at him. “It’s true!” As he shot an alarmed glance at the hall, Nan jerked her hands from her face and white-knuckled them over the bodice of her dress. Tears poured down her cheeks, and distended veins pulsed at her temples. The tremors that ran through her slender body vibrated into his thigh and seemed to radiate up from there, sending shudders along his spine. She choked back another sob and burst out, “My father w-went to his upstairs s-study and left me there, knowing wh-what Barclay meant to d-do. He w-wanted it to h-happen so I’d feel trapped and st-stop objecting to th-the marriage!” Her voice went squeaky. She squeezed
her eyes closed, tears cascading toward each of her ears. Somewhere in the middle of all this he heard a door bang open down the hall, but he had more immediate concerns. The sobs that Nan tried to stifle tore from her chest with such force he worried that she might injure her insides. “My f-father, my own father.”
“What happened?” Laney cried from the doorway. “Did she fall? Is she hurt?”
Given the fact that Gabe was sitting beside the girl’s prostrate sister, he was amazed she didn’t fly at him with her claws bared, no questions asked. He knew this looked bad.
“No, she isn’t hurt,” he said, his voice grating in his ears like a rock on sandpaper. “The beads spilled, and her feet went out from under her, but she’s okay.”
Upon hearing Laney’s voice, Nan had gone abruptly quiet, and Gabe had a nasty suspicion she was holding her breath to accomplish the feat.
“Why’s she crying then?” Laney’s tone was laced with suspicion, and her expression made it clear that she wanted the truth, not a wagonload of bullshit.
Gabe looked up, and after holding the girl’s gaze for a second, he said, “Something I said reminded her of something her father did. She’s upset, is all. I’ll handle it. Trust me and just go back to bed.”
Instead of rushing to her sister’s side, as Gabe half expected, Laney remained in the doorway. She searched Gabe’s eyes for an interminably long moment, and then said softly, “Listen to your heart.” With a last worried look at Nan, she wheeled away down the hall.
This was no time to let his throat close up at Laney’s expression of faith in him. He felt like an idiot for losing control of his tongue and mucking everything up this way. Now that Nan felt sure her sister had left, she was sobbing again, and Gabe suspected that it would be a while before she stopped. He felt like an organ monkey that had just pulled the cork from a shaken-up bottle of root beer.
One thing was for sure: He couldn’t leave Nan lying there on all those beads. They jabbed into the flesh like pebbles. With a sweep of his arm, he cleared a section of flooring, rose on one knee, and gathered her against his chest to stand. She didn’t resist. Instead, she hugged his neck and buried her face against his shoulder. He knew better than to take it as a personal compliment. She was barely aware of him at the moment.
Gabe carried his wife to her bedchamber. He’d never dealt with a sobbing woman, but he guessed some things just came naturally. He kicked the door closed, sat on the front edge of the mattress, and cradled her on his lap.
“It’s over,” he whispered. “I never should have brought it up. It happened a long time ago, honey. Eight years. It’s over.”
Only, Gabe knew it wasn’t over for Nan. It was a horrible event in her past that she’d never been able to forget or forgive, a terrible truth that she’d probably kept buried deep, never taking it out in the light to face it. He understood how that went. He had some dark truths of his own that he tried not to think about. He mostly pretended they never happened, unless the memory sneaked in to haunt him in a dream.
The angels had told him that Nan dreaded sleep and worked long into the night to avoid it, but they hadn’t told him why. Now he wondered if she worked to the point of exhaustion because sleeping left her vulnerable to nightmares. Maybe, like Laney, the horrible memories she kept buried resurfaced when she tried to rest and brought her awake with a scream on her lips. The thought made Gabe’s heart hurt. Though a woman grown, in many ways Nan had never moved beyond her terrible childhood. Again, he could understand; he had awakened countless times from bad dreams with his body drenched in cold sweat.
Her sobs finally turned soft and irregular, and then she quieted. Gabe knew the instant she came back to him instead of lingering in the past, because she stiffened in his embrace. She didn’t seem sure what to do with her hands. Touching him again clearly wasn’t appealing.
“Oh, my.” When she pushed against his chest with a pointy elbow, he relaxed his hold and allowed her to put some distance between their bodies. She wiped her cheeks, sniffed, and sprang from his lap. “I do a-apologize, Mr. Valance. I don’t know wh-what came over me.”
The lantern in the room hadn’t yet been lit, but moonlight poured through the parted window curtains to illuminate her face and figure. Her eyes glimmered like drenched quicksilver, huge in her small face and filled with shifting shadows.
“Don’t apologize,” he told her, his voice still gravelly. He wished . . . Hell, he didn’t know what he wished. He only knew that upsetting her this way had been unforgivable, even worse than putting a bullet in a man’s chest. At least they’d asked for it. Nan had been an innocent victim. “I’ve got this feeling,” he said softly, “that it was high time for you to let some of that out.”
As if her legs were about to buckle, she sank down beside him, shook her head, and straightened her shoulders. There was something unbearably touching to him about the way she held herself, as if she were ready to defy the whole world, alone.
“It isn’t like me—to c-cry, I mean. I never, ever cry.”
Gabe decided he must be unconsciously doing what Laney and the angels had recommended, because his heart was sure hearing that sentence. I never, ever cry, she’d said. The last two words should have been, “In public.” He believed Nan never allowed herself to weep in front of anyone, even Laney, but he didn’t buy that she was a total stranger to tears. The pain in her voice, the agony conveyed by her sobs—that kind of hurting ran clear to the bone. He suspected that she’d soaked her pillow with silent tears on many a lonely night.
“All of us need a good cry at some point.” It was all he could think to say, but at least it was neutral. He’d stuck his foot in his mouth enough for one night.
“You don’t—” A residual sob zigzagged up her throat and cut her short. She passed a hand over her eyes again, trembling so badly that her skirt hem fluttered. “You don’t s-strike me as a man who’d ever cry—over anything.”
Gabe searched for words. “Uh, well, not often. But it’s happened. And just so you know, sometimes I’m crying on the inside. You know, where no one can see.”
She hugged her trim waist and hunched her shoulders. “About what? What do you cry inside about, Gabriel Valance?”
He wasn’t sure if she was asking the question because she really cared to hear the answer, or if she was talking to forestall a void of silence. He decided whichever it was, he’d give her a straight answer, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. He owed her that.
“A lot of things. Mistakes I’ve made. Stuff that happened to me when I was too young and small to defend myself. Sometimes even for the men I’ve killed, even though it was my only choice if I wanted to stay alive myself.”
It felt funny saying that. He’d sure never done it before, but it felt as if a huge weight had rolled off him along with the words. “Is there anybody on this earth who never weeps inside?” he asked.
She stared at him in what seemed like stony silence for several seconds. Her voice quavered as she replied in a thin voice, “My father. I don’t think he’s ever cried or even felt the urge. He definitely felt no regret when my mother died.”
Gabe had observed enough to hate the man. “Some people . . . I don’t know—it’s like they’re born with something missing inside them. I think your father is like that, a man who doesn’t have it in him to love anyone but himself.”
She unlocked her arms from around her waist just long enough to push a stray lock of golden hair from her eyes. “He definitely never loved my mother, or me—and when Laney was born, he despised her, too, because he’d wanted a son. Even when she was tiny, he’d tell her that she was the worst disappointment of his life. She wasn’t old enough to understand his words, but she got the message.”
Gabe could see her drooping with exhaustion and decided the rest of this conversation needed to wait for tomorrow. A man couldn’t kill every snake in a field with one swing of a hoe.
Right now, she needed rest more than any comfort he might give her. After she was tucked in, he’d listen if she still felt inclined to talk. But he doubted that would be the case. Once she regained her composure, he’d probably have to pry the words out of her with an iron lever.
He pushed up from the bed, which made her jerk. “I’m just going to light the lantern, Nan. Then, while you’re dressing for bed, I’ll see to turning off the others and banking both fires.”
“I don’t think I can sleep.”
Gabe almost offered to stretch out on the sitting room floor with his bedroll. After bringing in the wood earlier, he’d gone up the street to the hotel to collect his personal belongings, which were now stowed in one corner of the room. But before he could form the words, he decided against saying them. How they began this marriage would set the rhythm for the next thirty days, and he would never be able to breach Nan’s defenses in so short a time if he allowed her to sleep apart from him.
“You need to try,” he said instead. “You look dead on your feet.”
By the light of the moon, Gabe turned up the lantern wick, struck a match he found on the bedside table, which was covered with a dainty crocheted runner as creamy white as his wife’s skin, and then ignited the thick, kerosene-soaked cotton. A yellow glow burst brightly. With practiced ease, Gabe replaced the globe and turned back the key to adjust the flare.
He could feel the tension radiating from Nan. “I meant what I said earlier today,” he assured her. “I won’t be going back on my word. You needn’t feel uneasy.”
If nothing else, that got her mind off her father. “Uneasy? I’ve never slept in the same room with a man, let alone in the same bed, and you’re a stranger.”
“I’m sorry if this is unsettling for you.” It was all he could give her, and he knew it was precious little. She needed more from him. He searched for something, anything to ease her mind. “I’ll bring you one of the kitchen knives, if that’ll make you feel better. If I make a wrong move, you can stab me.”