Their eyes met. She bolted upright from the chair. The parasol fell from her hand, clanking against the deck. She stared at him, her face pale, her gaze haunted. He'd never seen her like this, not even on the day he left her. She was stunned, her composure flayed, her vulnerability visible for miles.
As her boat glided past him, she picked up her skirts and ran along the port rail, her eyes never leaving his. She stumbled over a line in her path and fell hard. His heart clenched in alarm, but she barely noticed, scrambling to her feet. She kept running until she was at the stern and could not move another inch closer to him.
Mrs. Allen chose that moment to link her arm through his and lay her head against his upper arm, rubbing her cheek against his sleeve like a well-scratched kitty.
“I'm famished,” said Mrs. Allen. “Won't you take me to a restaurant that serves cold buffet?”
“Of course,” he said dumbly.
Gigi didn't move from her rigid pose at the rail, but she suddenly looked worn down, as if she'd been standing there, in that same spot, for all the eighteen hundred and some days since she'd last seen him.
She still loved him. The thought echoed wildly in his head, making him hot and dizzy. She still loved him.
All at once, he could not even recall what had been her trespass against him. He knew only, with absolute certainty, that he had been the world's premier ass for the past half decade. And all he wanted was everything he'd sworn would never tempt him again.
He sleepwalked through lunch and rushed Mrs. Allen back to her hotel for her afternoon beauty nap, turning down her invitation to join her as if she exhibited symptoms of the bubonic plague. He raced about Copenhagen, to the barber's, the jeweler's, then back to Claudia's house for his best day coat.
He walked into his wife's hotel with a freshly shaven jaw and a wilting bunch of hydrangea bought from an elderly flower vendor about to go home for the day. He felt as nervous and stupid as a pig living next door to a butcher. Standing before the hotel clerk, he had to clear his throat twice before he could get his question out.
“Is . . . is Lady Tremaine here?”
“No, sir, I'm sorry,” said the clerk. “Lady Tremaine just left.”
“I see. When is she expected to return?” He would wait right here. He would never go anywhere again without her.
“I'm sorry, sir,” said the clerk. “Lady Tremaine is no longer with us. She vacated her suite and departed for the harbor. I believe she was trying to board the Margrethe, leaving at two o'clock.”
It was five minutes past two o'clock.
He raced out of the hotel, flagged down the first carriage for hire, and promised the cabbie the entire contents of his wallet if the cab but reached the harbor before the Margrethe left. But when he arrived, all he could see of the Margrethe was three columns of smoke in the distance.
He gave the cabbie double the usual fare anyway and stared at the horizon. He could not believe it. Could not believe that all his hopes of a future together would come to aught, so swiftly and pitilessly.
For the first time in his life, he felt lost, hopelessly rudderless. He could follow her to England, he supposed. But being in England would crush them with all the weight of their infelicitous history. Would remind him incessantly of why he'd left her in the first place. In England neither of them could be spontaneous. Or forgiving.
Perhaps it just wasn't meant to be.
It took hours, but in the end he convinced himself that his guardian angel must have toiled on his behalf. Imagine if she had actually been there. Imagine if he had actually thrown all caution to the wind. Imagine if he had actually gone back to her, a woman he could never again trust.
He told himself he could not imagine any such thing. He really couldn't. Not a sensible man like him. His fingers closed over the velvet box that contained the diamond-and-ruby necklace he'd bought, all fire and sparkling beguilement, like her. Mrs. Allen would have one hell of a parting gift from him.
The blue hydrangea he threw into a canal, watching the bouquet drift in the water until it disintegrated. Who'd have believed that after all these years, she still possessed the power to shatter him without even once touching him?
Chapter Twenty-one
31 May 1893
Gigi wished she could better predict this man who was her husband.
She'd been infinitely certain that he'd demand lovemaking in the confines of her private coach on the way to Devon—so certain, in fact, that she'd taken precautions. And suffered erratic heartbeats from the moment they left the house together.
He, on the other hand, began working on the designs of some mechanical contraption before the train even departed Paddington Station, leaving her with little to do other than watch the world hurtle by at sixty miles an hour, feeling entirely daft.