Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

Not even enough to get him in bed.

If she’d had any influence over her husband, he would never have left. And he’d come back more frightening, more mysterious than ever.

Louisa slumped into her chair again, and Jeremy, in her arms, gave a small, sleepy hiccough. “Even that’s no solution. Even assuming your husband was willing to defy mine, it would end with Harcroft having Jeremy. I won’t abandon him.” A fierce note entered her voice. “Not to him. Not to that. I would rather die.”

An extreme pronouncement, although by the fierce light shining in Louisa’s eyes, the sentiment was heartfelt. A thread of uneasiness curled around Kate’s spine. She’d given Louisa a gun.

But it was rather too late to rip the pistol from her hands, and it would have made no difference in any event.

“The weapon.” Kate licked her lips. “It is to be used only as a threat, understand?”

“Oh,” said Louisa bitterly. “I understand. This is as much my fault as anyone’s. I let this happen to me. I didn’t say anything for years. No complaints. No protests. I accepted it. I dare say I deserved it.”

“Nobody deserves to be hit in the stomach with a fire poker.”

“But I didn’t stop it.” Louisa’s gaze abstracted. “Until he threatened Jeremy, I didn’t stop it.”

Kate had discovered the truth of her friend’s mysterious illnesses a year before. In that time, she’d urged her to leave, to do something. It had taken Louisa thirteen months to act. It was impossible not to feel sorry for her, after what she had survived. She understood that her friend had been damaged in more ways than by just her husband’s physical betrayal. Still, it was impossible not to feel a hint of frustration.

“Don’t speak that way,” Kate said. “You did stop it, eventually. You’re here. You’re safe. Nobody will ever find you.”

Kate looked out the window. Before them, dying grass covered the hill, stretching down into the autumn-brown of the valley below. A spiral of smoke rose from a village miles distant. Kate counted to ten, pulling her own confused emotions in line, until that plume of smoke had disappeared and reformed again, before she answered.

“I think you underestimate your own strength.”

“And you always assumed too much of me,” Louisa said simply. “I’m not strong, not the way you are.”

Kate kept her gaze on the waving field of grass. Through the uneven glass, she could not make out individual blades. Instead, they passed back and forth, rippling like a sea. If Louisa could see into Kate’s heart right now, Louisa would not call her strong. She feared Harcroft. The terror of discovery filled her almost to panic. Her own husband might betray her at any moment, and still she wished he had taken her last night.

She wasn’t strong.

No; Kate was afraid. But she had become an expert at hiding her emotion behind a veneer of practicality. And now her husband was threatening even that.

She waited for practicality to win out before speaking. “There’s nothing to fear.” She raised her chin and caught a glimpse of motion cresting the hill. Her blood ran cold; practicality disappeared in a flap of brown fabric. In the space of time it took Kate to gulp breath into her seizing lungs, she saw men on horseback. She knew these horses. It was Harcroft and her husband. While they’d broken their fast this morning, they had talked of visiting a few nearby hamlets, of making a few inquiries. Kate just hadn’t expected them to take this tiny path to the west.

“Get down,” she hissed.

Louisa dropped to a crouch—quickly enough that Jeremy opened his eyes, blinking in confusion. They huddled on the floor.

So long as they were very still…

Jeremy began to cry. He didn’t start with little sobs, either; instead, he screwed up his nose and screamed. Kate hadn’t realized that a bundle of cloth scarcely larger than a large cabbage could generate so much noise. She stared at Louisa in appalled horror. There was nothing to do about it. Louisa patted him ineffectually on the back, and cast a worried glance at Kate.

There was still no reason the men would come up to this cabin. The track they were on passed a quarter mile from here, leading over the ridge to a village eight miles away. Even if they came near, unless they passed close enough to peer in the window, they would see nothing but a shepherd’s cottage, abandoned in the autumn. And loud as Jeremy was, they would still have to come very close to hear his wails.

Wouldn’t they?