“Do you have time to talk before you go?”
Bronwyn blinked, wholly unused to this new, more open side of the girl. Attempting a smile, she motioned Regina in.
“Of course. Let’s move to the chairs by the hearth and we can talk as long as you like.”
The girl nodded and moved inside readily enough. But once they were settled she remained silent, staring at the empty hearth seemingly without seeing, her fingers nervously picking at the seam in her trousers, an article of clothing she had taken to wearing daily.
Bronwyn, not knowing quite what to do in this situation—the girl was obviously troubled about something—bit her lip. Finally, when it seemed Regina would not proceed without encouragement, she cleared her throat and said, “You wanted to talk about something?”
The girl started, looking at Bronwyn as if just realizing where she was. “Yes. That is—” She frowned, looking down once more, rubbing her palms up and down her thighs. “Ash is done with us, isn’t he?”
Bronwyn’s heart twisted in her chest. Ah, God, she should have realized the girl was affected by Ash’s sudden absence. “I would not say he is done with us,” she replied carefully. “He is readying himself for his return to London, is all.”
The look Regina shot her was frustrated and angry and pained all at once. “You needn’t pretend all is well,” she said, her voice thick. “I am not stupid, you know. And neither are my sisters. We can see that Ash has changed toward us, that he is done playing the doting guardian. But I would hear it from you, so I might be better prepared to help my sisters through it.”
Damn you, Ash. Her heart broke as she beheld the grief and fear in Regina’s eyes. But no, she had no one to blame but herself. She had been the one to force Ash and the girls together, hoping to heal things between them and give them a semblance of a relationship. This here was proof positive that she didn’t know a blasted thing about dealing with people. If she had just minded her own business, Regina, and no doubt the other girls as well, would not now be hurting.
Swallowing down hot tears, she replied, “We all knew he would be leaving at the end of the fortnight.”
The girl fairly exploded from her chair. “I know he said as much,” she cried. “But I did not think he would—”
She bit her lip, cutting off the words. Bronwyn, however, heard them all the same, for they echoed what was in her own heart.But I did not think he would truly leave us.
But she could not think of her own grief. She had the girls to consider.
She rose and made her way to where Regina stood near the window. The girl held herself ramrod straight, her gaze pointedly focused on something outside. Yet Bronwyn saw, by the way her arms hugged her middle and a muscle ticked in her jaw, that she was holding herself together by the thinnest thread.
Regina would not listen to platitudes. There was too much anger and pain in her, and pride as well. Bronwyn could tell her Ash loved them all until she was blue in the face, but that would mean less than nothing to this girl, who had been hurt far more than anyone her age should have been.
Instead she said, quietly, gently, “I have realized over the course of my life that we cannot control what other people do; rather, we can only control our own reactions to them. Easier said than done, I know,” she continued with a wry quirk of her lips when Regina looked bleakly her way. “I am still learning that lesson. It is not an easy one to learn. And it still hurts, dreadfully.” She reached out and placed a comforting hand on Regina’s arm. “But I think it’s made a bit easier to bear if you have friends by your side. And I shall always be by your side. I will be here for you whenever you need me.”
She did not know what to expect. Whatever it might have been, however, it certainly wasn’t Regina’s quivering lip, or the tears that pooled in her dark eyes, or the sob that ripped from her throat as she threw herself in Bronwyn’s arms. As the girl cried out her pain, Bronwyn found herself crying right along with her. Ah, God, but it was like looking back in time to the vulnerable girl she had been. She had been seventeen, not much older than Regina was now, when she’d had her heart broken so brutally by Lord Owens. A betrayal that had taught her nothing so much as that she could not be loved for herself. That who she truly was invited ridicule and disdain.
It had been years before she had found those friends who had saved her. Years of pain and fumbling and uncertainty and self-hatred.
She would be damned if she would allow Regina to suffer as she had.
As Regina’s sobs quieted, Bronwyn pulled back, taking a handkerchief out of her pocket and gently dabbing at the girl’s cheeks.
“Would you like to go with me to meet with my friends at the Quayside? And perhaps afterward, we might visit the Gadfelds, and you might see Coralie again.”
The hope that sputtered in Regina’s eyes was nearly enough to make Bronwyn go off crying again.
“Do you think they would mind?” she asked in a small voice.
Bronwyn smiled at her. “I’m certain they wouldn’t mind at all.”
Chapter 19
The days since Owens’s visit, reminding Ash who he was and why he had to remain distant from Bronwyn and the girls, had been misery. He had been desperate to rectify his mistake, keeping as busy as possible, filling the time with all manner of business. From scouring the local employment agency for governesses and music instructors and whoever else Bronwyn and the girls might need in the coming years, to making certain modistes and milliners—and even a tailor, so Regina might have all the trousers she required—were at the ready, to meetings with a local solicitor, there had not been a minute spent idle. He had even traveled to nearby Whitby on the mainland for anything Synne did not provide.
No matter how busy he had kept himself, however, he could not stop from thinking of Bronwyn or the girls. And no matter how many times he told himself that he would not visit Bronwyn’s bed, he found himself slipping through their adjoining door each night and taking her in his arms and losing himself in her sweet body—all the while burying her deeper into his heart.
Now, a day before he was to leave for London—a day that was coming both much too quickly and could not come quickly enough—it was taking everything in him to stay away from them all. The moment the sun had risen he had fled the house, filling each minute with business and work and errands until he was nigh exhausted. When the time came to return to Caulnedy, he had to do battle with himself to keep from hurrying home to them.
He started.Home? A strange word, indeed, to associate with Caulnedy. When he had first arrived after tracking down Eliza and Nelly, he had done everything he could to stay outside those walls. The place had given him too much pain, reminding him of his mother, and how he had failed her, and how in his selfishness he had remained blind to the suffering of so many others.
Now, however, it had become a place of happiness, where he had begun to develop something of a relationship with his wards, where he had learned to love. All the result of a slight, stern, pixie of a woman in spectacles.