Isabel pressed her lips into a thin line. He’d begun the process before Georgiana was kidnapped. Before they’d been forced to marry. Before everything had changed.
They sat in silence for a long while, lost in their own thoughts. There were a dozen questions she wanted to ask Rock, her only link to the man she loved—to the man she had driven away—but she was embarrassed and uncertain, and the emotions overwhelmed her.
Ultimately, she asked what seemed like a safe question. “Why did you not leave with him?”
He paused, considering his words. “Because, unlike Nick, I know that leaving the thing I want most in the world is not the way to win it.”
“Lara.”
He did not respond for a long while, so long, in fact, that Isabel began to think that he would not acknowledge the name. When he finally turned to her, his dark eyes were black in the evening light. “Yes.”
She nodded. “I am happy for you both that you have found”—she paused, the lump in her throat making it difficult to finish the sentence—“each other.”
Rock breathed deep. When he spoke, his words were fast and clipped, as though he wished not to be saying them at all. “I know that she is a gentleman’s daughter. That she deserves someone infinitely better than me—a Turk—who will never be fully accepted in her world. I am not a gentleman. Not a Christian. But I care deeply for her. And I will do everything I can to make her happy.” He stopped. “I am very rich.”
Isabel smiled. “I do not know why you think that any of us would care about your being Turkish, Rock. Nor do I know why you would think we require you to be highborn. Have you learned nothing about this motley crew in the week you have been with us? ”
He matched her smile with a very dear one of his own. “I was simply pointing out my faults.”
“Goodness, let us not start doing that, else we shall be here all night as I list my own.”
“Never,” he said graciously, pausing for a long while to choose his next words. “I should like to marry her. And, since you are her closest family, I suppose I am asking you …”
She met his gaze, tears filling her eyes. “Of course you have my blessing. If she will have you, then you are happily welcome at Townsend Park.” Rock released a long sigh of relief, and Isabel laughed through her tears. “Did you really think that I would refuse you? ”
He shook his head. “I did not know. It is one thing to accept me as a guest in your home. It is another entirely to accept me as your …”
"Family,” Isabel said, placing one hand on his arm. “Cousin.”
He dipped his head. “Thank you.”
“Yes, well, it did not hurt that you are rich.”
He barked in laughter. “Nick was right. Yours is a sharp tongue.”
She grew serious at the mention of Nick. “Too sharp a tongue, I think.” She sighed, turning to this bear of a man. “I ruined it. When I saw him last … he was so different. Cold. Unfeeling.”
“He needs time, Isabel.”
“I love him,” she confessed, and there was something freeing about admitting her feelings to this man, her husband’s friend.
“Did you tell him that?”
She closed her eyes. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what? ”
She gave a little pathetic laugh. “Afraid of him leaving me here. Alone. In love.”
He did not laugh. He did not reference the obvious irony from which she was suffering. He simply said, “I think it is time that you hear about Turkey.”
Isabel looked to Rock. “What about Turkey?”
“I assume he told you that we were in Turkey together.”
“Yes. He said that you rescued him from a prison there.”
“Did he tell you how he landed in the prison to begin with?”
“No.”
“There was a woman. Nick thought he was in love with her.”
A painful image flashed, Nick in the arms of an exotic veiled female who knew all the ways to his heart.
He leaned back against the stone banister, eyes glazed over with the memory. “We had been camped just outside of Ankara for several weeks. The Crown was nervous about rumors of an army being raised in the Empire, and they asked Nick to track an informant who had disappeared without a trace.” Rock’s voice turned admiring. “Nick was a legend across the East. They called him the bulan—the hunter. It was said he could find anyone.”
Isabel nodded. Finding Minerva House must have been a parlor game for him.
“Alana appeared outside his tent one night, bruised and bloodied from a beating she received at the hands of her husband, weeping for help. He took her in, fed her, tended her wounds, but she left him before morning, terrified that her husband would find her and beat her more.”
Isabel winced at the words, immediately understanding that Nick would not have been able to resist such a wounded dove.
“She was back the next night, lip split. And the night after that with some other wound. And then she disappeared. And he grew frantic, worrying over her. He had tracked her to a house inside the city, and he became obsessed with finding her—with assuring himself of her safety. After days of waiting for her, he was finally rewarded with her appearance. She was headed for market with several other ladies from the house. He found a way to speak to her there and she begged him to leave her alone. Assured him that she was fine.”
She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself at the words. No wonder he hated it when she claimed that she was fine without him.