“Did you tell him?”
“Tell him . . . of what?”
He blinked. She didn't sound coy. She sounded baffled.
She was not pregnant.
Suddenly he felt unsteady again, this time as if someone had swung a very large object at the back of his head.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
He walked to the grandfather clock and pretended to check the time on his watch, when he wanted to grab the poker next to the grate and smash everything in the room. The children they were going to have. The life they were going to share. Everything slashed and burned in a vicious assault by reality. And her, oblivious to his pain, throwing away their happiness as if it were last week's bread.
For a while, as he wound a watch that needed no winding, nobody said a thing. Then he heard her deep breath and knew, from the way his heart suddenly splintered, what she was going to say.
“There are no consequences,” she said. “Will you let me go?”
Every single cell inside him screamed no. He would most certainly not let her go. In fact, he was feeling downright nostalgic for those terrible old days when a woman had no choice whatsoever in those matters, when he could laugh cruelly, hang Lord Frederick by his ankles in the dungeon, rip her chemise to ribbons, and have her right on the dais of the great hall, under the scandalized eyes of the local bishop.
The period they'd agreed to was far from over. That she refused his entreaty did not release her from the conditions he'd set. That every touch would be fraught with peril did not diminish the allure of holding her fast to the pact.
His heart pounded. He had to close his eyes to control his ragged breath. True, there were all sorts of ways he could bludgeon her, with the diminished but still powerful husbandly prerogatives granted him under English law. But in the end, what would it accomplish?
He recognized much of his younger self in her stubborn clinging to the idea of a “good” love, in her deep, sincere, if vastly misplaced sense of personal responsibility toward Lord Frederick.
Ten years ago she'd clearly perceived the ill suit between Theodora and himself. But she hadn't enough faith to let him discover it for himself. If he were to impregnate her with the express goal of keeping her bound in matrimony, he'd have made exactly the same mistake she had.
But what if she doesn't come to her senses, or doesn't come to her senses in time? howled some primal part of him, all but trembling in angst. His entire person seized, recoiling in dread. That was a distinct possibility. He could not allow that to happen. He could not. His world would fall apart.
Was this how she'd felt all those years ago? The anxiety. The simmering frustration. The corrosive fear that if he didn't do something, she would be lost to him forever.
Had he been nineteen, he'd have embarked on the same wrong path. At thirty-one, even having lived through the aftermath of that debacle, he was still tempted almost beyond endurance.
Only pride and his last shred of good sense saved him in the end. He wanted her to remain his wife not because he'd put an erotic spell over her or because she loved her infant too much to give it up but because she couldn't imagine her life otherwise, because she saw every breath she took intertwined with his, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for as long as they both should live.
“As you wish,” he said.
“What?!”
She couldn't have heard it right. She couldn't.
“Break open that bottle of champagne. This time next year you could be Lady Philippa Stuart.”
She didn't know why she should be so stunned. Yet she was dazed with distress, barely keeping herself together, as if all these weeks she'd been holding her breath, waiting for him to return and reclaim her, vowing never to let go of her again.
He came close, too close for comfort, and sat down next to her, the light worsted wool of his summer trousers socializing insouciantly with the layers of her skirts. She became aware of the subtle scent of starch from his shirt, the spice and citron of his soap. A small part of her wanted to move away. The rest of her wanted him to trespass further, to push her down, hold her immobile, and do whatever he willed with her.
He did something even more shocking. He took her hand in his and said, “I've been a cur, haven't I? Coming here and subjecting you to this impossible situation.”
He played with her fingers absently, running the pad of an index finger across the inside of her knuckles. His hands were cool and faintly moist, as if he'd just washed and toweled them dry. The skin of his fingertips scraped her palm ever so slightly, reminding her that he did more than playing piano and rendering scaled drawings with those hands.
She wanted to kiss his hand, every roughened finger pad, every knuckle. She wanted to suck on the ball of his thumb and lick the lines and wrinkles of his palm.