The Runaway Countess by Amanda Mccabe

roughly.
    ‘Not at all like that one.’ Jane brushed past him and hurried back down the steps. Emma was chasing Murray around the clearing, laughing, and Jane watched them as she tried to breathe deeply and remind herself that the Hayden she knew that day of the swing wasn’t the real Hayden.
    Just as that girl hadn’t been the real Jane. That was all just a silly dream. Then she had lost the babies and she woke up.
    She had to stay awake now, and guard her heart very, very carefully.
    Had Jane always been so beautiful?
    Hayden watched his wife as she ran along the garden pathway towards the terrace, laughing with her sister. Of course Jane had always been beautiful. She had drawn him in from the first moment he saw her, with the way all her emotions flashed through her large hazel eyes, with the shining loops of her dark hair he wanted to get lost in. Yes—Jane had always been so very beautiful.
    But she had also been pale and somehow fragile, moving through the world so carefully. Everyone in London had wanted toemulate her, her elegant clothes and hats, everyone had wanted invitations to her small soirées. Yet still that air of uncertainty clung about her. He had been so sure he could banish it, that he could make her happy while still not making himself vulnerable. When he couldn’t, the frustration and anger consumed him.
    Here at Barton, Jane wasn’t uncertain at all. Her pale skin had turned an unfashionable, but attractive, burnished gold. She was still slender, but she didn’t look as if she would break. As she twirled around in a circle with her sister, laughing with glorious abandon, she looked carefree.
    Happy.
    That
was what he wanted so much to give her, where he had failed. When they were together, he had watched that fragile hope in her eyes fade to silent sadness, but he couldn’t seem to stop it, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t really know what she wanted and he didn’t have it in him to discover it. He didn’t know how to even begin.
    How could he? He had learned nothing of emotions and connections from his own parents,nothing but how to be what they and society expected him to be—a rake and a scoundrel. A failure. He didn’t know how to be anything else, even for Jane.
    For an instant, Jane and Emma’s laughter faded and the overgrown gardens melted, and he stood before his father’s massive library desk.
    ‘Never was a man cursed with such a worthless heir!’
the earl had roared, while Hayden’s mother lounged on the sofa, drinking her ever-present claret and smirking at her son’s latest peccadillo. It was all she ever did.
‘If only your older brother had lived. You have disgraced us for the last time, Hayden
.
Obviously there is something in you, some curse from your mother’s family, that won’t allow you to be a true Fitzwalter. You are a wastrel and a fool, and I wash my hands of you! You are no son of mine.’
    It was during a diatribe very like that one that his father had an apoplexy and keeled over dead on the library carpet, not long after his mother died trying to give her husband one more son. So his ‘wastrel’ son killed him in the end. And Hayden never saw any reasonto rise above the low expectations set for him so long ago.
    Until Jane. By then it was too late. And he hadn’t protected her from the very things that brought down his own parents. He couldn’t fail her like that again.
    ‘Hayden, come dance with us!’ Emma called, twirling in a circle.
    Hayden was jerked out of the sticky tentacles of the past and dropped back into the present moment in the garden at Barton. Emma ran over to grab his hand, and Jane watched him with a bemused half-smile on her face.
    At least she wasn’t frowning at him for the moment. He wished she would
really
smile at him again, as she had that day on the swing at Ramsay House. She had laughed then, too, letting her wariness drop away and letting herself be free with him. The memory of that smile was like a secret