The words hit Alaina like a swift slap to her cheek.
Her arms fell limply to her sides.
“How dare you?” she whispered, no longer recognizing the man before her as the one who’d held her so tenderly, who’d confessed to her his devotion unwavering. It was a lie. The man she’d believed him to be was a lie.
“I have a right to know,” Sterling insisted, thumping his chest. “You were making secret visits to a girls’ home, funneling money into it. It makes one wonder what else you’re hiding.”
All sense of decorum fled Alaina at that point. Her husband’s irrational rage doused any tenderness she’d begun to hold for him. How foolish she had been to ever consider forgiving this man. It was mortifying that she’d allowed her guard to fall, that she’d welcomed him into her bed, that she’d done those things to his body to return the pleasure he’d shown her, that she’d allowed him to seep through the cracks in her heart and fill the spaces with what she might have one day considered love. The illusion was so easily crumbled to dust that it was clear now to her how fragile the façade had been.
Furious, she sprung to her feet and stalked toward Sterling. “The donations helped fund a library at the orphanage and paid tutors for the girls. Do you know that many of them were leaving the home with little to no education to speak of and couldn’t even write their own names? What kind of preparation is that?” Her voice continued to rise, but she cared not who heard them. Let the servants gossip. Let them whisper about her volatile marriage. As far as Alaina was concerned, Sterling had just toppled every pillar upon which they’d begun to rebuild their life together. “To speak of the funds, you wereso generousas to provide me with more pin money than I could ever spend. I decided to put the money to good use and directed it where it was more needed. I might have been a good little wife and begged your permission to add Mrs. Worthy’s to the estate’s list of charitable funds, but you’d never responded to my letters before…how was I to hope for a different outcome if I made such a request? And I’m sure you can tell how receptive Mr. Bates is to my involvement with anything related to accounts. I practically had to wrestle the books from his hands months after you and I were wed, so I would have wasted my breath had I asked him for his approval in adjusting the budgets.
“The ladies of my Reading Society and I regularly take up donations for Mrs. Worthy’s. We pool what funds we can, and I made it my mission to fill in the gaps in their needs when and where I could. The home has no formal board, so I have done what I can to help them.
“As for the visits you have so kindly tracked and outlined, they were so I could personally inspect the facilities and make sure they were up to my standards. Sometimes, other members accompanied me; other times I went on my own. I wanted to be certain the funds were being used as allocated.” Alaina exhaled a shaky breath. “And I read to the smaller girls… I, of all people, know what it feels like to be abandoned without explanation. I thought only to make the children feel a little less lonely and unloved and unworthy…and here I am being crucified for it.”
As she spoke,Sterling felt a knife plunge into heart and twist. His rage cooled, his vision slowly cleared, and he began to see reason…and what an ass he’d been. All the progress they’d made came crashing down around his ears in a matter of seconds with his accusation. It would have been easy for him to blame Black for it, but the information had been flawless…it had been Sterling’s own rash reaction that had been faulty.
“Five years I’ve been championing Mrs. Worthy’s—among other charities and causes—and now you choose to take issue?” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “What changed?”
Sterling wanted to say that she’d done something wrong in sending funds to the home. He wanted to take issue with the charity she was performing. But how could he begrudge her reading to girls and ensuring their wellbeing and education?
In truth, it was the perceived lie that had added fuel to the fire. He’d hidden behind secrets and half-truths for so long that it had been a relief to feel as if he was moving past all of it—that he’d left behind that constant uncertainty for a life with a woman who was made of candor. And, when he’d felt that had been threatened, he lost his whole sense of self. He lost his head.
His only close example of a marriage had been his parents. They’d cared for one another and adored him, but they’d lived a life of companionability and not love. There had been no volatile fights, but there had also been no outward passion. Upon the announcement of his engagement to Alaina, he’d been warned by older members of his club that marriage could cause a man to lose himself. All the books and poems and plays he’d been exposed to had echoed shades of this. Love was a powerful, all-consuming emotion that often guided men astray; it could cause the sanity of even the most logical person to slip.
And it was precisely why members at every level of the spy society were strongly discouraged from forming strong attachments that might lead to love—why Ramsay had displayed so much displeasure when Sterling had announced his intention to marry Alaina before he left for the Continent. A man in love was a man who made mistakes. He understood that first-hand now.
All of this spun over and over again in his frantic brain, but no words came as the noose tightened around his throat. His outburst had been disgusting and pathetic, but it was clear remaining levelheaded was hardly ever an option when it came to the woman he loved…that he’d never stopped loving.
“Is this the first time you’ve had me investigated? Followed?” Alaina demanded. She whipped the papers at him, though they fluttered uselessly to the ground before reaching him.
Though he knew the truth would damn him further, he couldn’t help but admit to everything. He owed her that much at that point. Atonement was often a painful, rocky path, but one worth traversing.
Sterling shook his head.
There were several seconds of stunned hesitation. “Who?” she scoffed in disbelief. “When?”
“I needed a source of consistent, personal updates on you—information about how you were faring behind closed doors while I was abroad,” he admitted evenly, keenly aware of the growing danger. She crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself as she waited, and Sterling took a bracing breath before he continued. “I had contacts here in London. When they could, they provided me with information as to the events you attended and your public activities—it is how I learned about the notoriety of your Reading Society while I was away—and they also directed some discreet inquiries to the household staff. This was more difficult because you’ve managed to garner quite the loyal staff; still, I was able to glean enough information that you were safe in my absence, eventhriving.” That had been a dagger to his gut if ever there was one. It had been part of the reason why he’d come back so determined to prove that he could be necessary to Alaina’s future—that she needed him.
“You—you had strangers prying into my life to help assuage your guilt about abandoning me?”
“Not strangers,” he sighed with resignation. “These were people I trusted.”
“Apparently, they weren’t reliable enough to provide you with the reason for my visits to Mrs. Worthy’s!” Alaina snapped. The fire in her eyes would have been beautiful if he hadn’t sensed the potential for it to burn his world down. And he was the one who sparked the tinder.
“You are a woman who garners loyalty wherever you go, Alaina. Your staff was incredibly reluctant to divulge any information.” Alaina scoffed, but he forged on. “I couldn’t have you watched the entire time, not without raising suspicion or planting someone with questionable morals in your household, which was never an option.” This, of course, didn’t mean staff didn’t chatter amongst themselves and let slip a few tidbits here and there to delivery men or others they believed to be their partners in service. They could be a wealth of information if one knew how to place the proper inquiries, but even they had their limitations. “You managed to acquire one of the most loyal staffs in all of London.” The termination of her letters to him, the secret donations and frequent visits to the girls’ home, and his own wavering confidence that leaving Alaina had been the right thing to do meant Sterling was primed for a wildly outrageous and unfair judgment of his wife. An overreaction.
Disbelief, anger, and sadness flashed across Alaina’s face in a carousel of emotions, finally landing on incredulity. “So…you cared enough to hire people to ferret out information and feed you snippets of my life for eight years, but not enough to enquire after me yourself? You knew I wrote you all those letters and you never responded to a single one. I overlooked this fact because you were making such an effort now, but…Sterling…surely you must see how upsetting and backward this is.”
He barely suppressed a flinch. Hearing his name on her lips was something he’d never grow tired of, but the circumstances transformed the word into a blade. “I couldn’t, Alaina,” he insisted. “It was unsafe.”
“Why?” she demanded and advanced on him, prodding his chest above where his heart had once resided. The organ was now singed to ash fine enough to blow away on the breeze. “No more secrets; we’ve had enough of those for a lifetime, and I will scream in earnest if I am forced to endure any further hypocrisy from you.”
Sterling’s eyes looked heavenward and slid closed.
It was now or never; he would divulge his secrets, or he would die alone with them.
“I was sent to the Continent by the Crown as a spy,” he began evenly. “I could not let on that I had a wife at home whom I cared about in case my true aim was discovered. Your existence could have been used against me. You could have become a target and I refused to put you at risk.”
