Surrender to Me (The Derrings #4)(14)

The day passed slowly, the howling wind outside making her glad for the cozy warmth of their room.

Griffin Shaw might deem himself ready to travel, but his injury clearly still plagued him. Even without the laudanum she offered him—and which he declined—he slept off and on throughout the day, waking only when she roused him to change his bandage and at the arrival of their meals. The piping-hot smell of yeasty bread instantly worked to revive him.

He ate heartily, using his bread to sop up the remains of his thick stew. She couldn’t help but stare as he licked the juice off his thumb, reminded afresh of his primitive nature and oddly intrigued. Even when he licked his thumb, he managed to look…handsome. Unnervingly so.

“You’re finished?” he asked, looking up and eyeing her empty bowl.

She nodded, as always wishing there had been more. And yet accustomed to the lingering pangs of hunger.

She ate well when at Jane’s or Lucy’s. Or when she braved the sneers and speculation and attended a party or ball. Something she only did when the pantries at home were woefully bare and she did not want to take food from the mouths of Cook or the others. An occasional evening on the Town could be tolerated for them.

He craned his neck to peer inside her bowl. “I’ve never met a female who could eat faster than me.”

Standing, she gathered their trays, annoyed with herself. Hunger. A weakness she couldn’t banish. The gnawing ache never seemed satisfied.

They spoke little the rest of the day. When night fell and a new serving girl—it appeared the garrulous Molly had been called away on some family matter—cleared their dinner trays, Astrid bided her time, waiting for him to drop asleep again.

She had contemplated adding a dose of laudanum to his drink, but the prospect reminded her of another night long ago when she had doctored someone else’s drink…and lost herself in the process. A shiver trembled down her spine.

She couldn’t bring herself to do such a thing again. She regretted that she ever had.

She waited, sitting stiffly in the chair she had once again moved back to the window, needing the distance now more than ever considering that he was no longer mindless with fever but a vital, virile man.

When he at last surrendered to sleep, she rose from her chair and moved about the room silently, scarcely breathing, keeping one eye on him as she gathered her things to leave.

Slipping out the door, she resisted the overwhelming urge to look over her shoulder, to sneak a lingering glance.

Looking back never made sense. Only sentimental fools looked back, longing for what could never be and what never was.

Chapter 6
Her heart beat hard against her rib cage as she took step after slow step up the creaking stairs of the boardinghouse. She wore her hood low over her face even though she had left the worst of the chill outside. Several eyes watched her ascent, prompting her to shrink deeper into the confines of her cloak. Why she bothered to hide she could not be certain. No one in Dubhlagan knew her. No one would take special note of her arrival or departure.

At the top floor, she counted the doors on her right, stopping when she reached the third. John had spent half the day tracking down Bertram to this lodging house, to this very room. She had waited at an inn, her thoughts, strangely enough, on the stranger she had left behind rather than her long-awaited reunion with her husband.

Griffin Shaw. A strange breed of man, to be certain. A man with honor. A man that stirred emotions within her that she had no business feeling. For some reason, in his presence, she had felt like a woman again. She hadn’t felt that way in years.

An odd sense of guilt plagued her for leaving him the way she had. Almost as though she had abandoned him. Silly, she knew. He was plainly equipped to care for himself. And yet she felt like a thief stealing away in the night. It was almost as though they had been bound. As though he had cursed her with those absurd words. And she had failed him in leaving. Brilliant. Another soul she felt she had failed.

Still, relief coursed through her that she had not confessed her true purpose in Scotland to him. The shame of her husband’s abandonment did not rest solely with Bertram. True, he had fled prosecution for his crimes and left her to face penury and cruel gossip, but she was, quite simply, the wife he had seen fit to leave. The abandoned wife. That much she knew, felt. That much Society had made plain to her.

She would have loathed seeing pity fill Griffin Shaw’s eyes. Or worse, scorn.

Facing the door, a violent urge to run, to flee, seized her. Fortunately, her determination ran stronger…and curiosity. Curiosity to see the husband whose memory had grown dim over the years. There were days she forgot the exact color of his eyes. She knew they were blue, but knowing and remembering were separate beasts.

At that thought, another man’s eyes came to mind, a shade of blue so pale they glowed as though lit from within. She could not imagine ever forgetting them. Or him.

She knocked briskly, the sound tinny in the narrow corridor. She glanced left and right, almost expecting to see others emerge from their rooms at the sound.

A slight noise carried from the other side of the door—a tinkling of glass perhaps—before the door cracked open.

Dark blue eyes, flat as a still night sea, stared out at her.

“Yes?”

Astrid lifted her chin, letting the hood fall back. “Bertram,” she greeted, glad for the evenness of her voice.

His eyes widened at the pronouncement of his name, reminding her that he went by another name. Another identity. The memory burned through her, made her fists curl at her sides.