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He should be thanking his lucky stars for the narrow escape. There could never be a future with her. He shuddered with the memory of the taunts he’d suffered, and the way respectable women had turned away from him in his youth after they had found out The Scandal.
* * *
Hattie laid her fevered cheek against the cool plaster of the hall and attempted to regain some measure of control. Her hand trembled so much that the wax spilt, burning her wrist. She set the candle down on the floor and forced herself to breathe in deeply.
She had made a mistake, a colossal mistake. She’d vowed never to speak about her husband’s betrayal. Ever.
Now she’d confessed the bald truth to a man who was little more than a stranger, simply to keep from confessing how she felt about him!
What was worse—he’d said the things she had known in her heart. Every single word was true as much as she might wish it were a lie. She had allowed herself to be defined by Charles and what he’d done. She had hated what he’d done to her, but everyone considered her to be the grieving widow. How could she besmirch the memory of a hero? She’d used it as a way to lick her wounds for years but it was hypocrisy of the highest order. She had stopped living. Her dreams were just that—dreams.
Neither did she want everyone to know of her humiliation. Even now that burning sense of shame filled her. She hadn’t been able to keep her husband happy. He had secretly laughed at her feeble attempts. His mistress had taken great delight in showing her the letters. She knew nothing about making love. Sensible and unattractive, lacking any real fire or passion. She’d longed to scream that he was wrong. But how could she when she had lived her life without passion?
Hattie hugged her arms and sank down to the floor. She wanted to feel passion, the real sort, the feeling-utterly-alive sort that she had felt when Kit kissed her at the Roman ruins. She had never had that all-consuming feeling before. She wanted to be alive, instead of existing.
When she had discovered the mistress’s address, she had visited her. Hattie had not wanted Charles’s miniature, but throwing it on the fire had seemed less than charitable. She had packed it up along with a few personal items so that the children would have something to remember their father by. Afterwards,
Hattie had been sick in the street. The obvious love that woman had for Charles contrasted with her infatuation and fantasy of the perfect marriage.
All she’d wanted to do was to run away and hide. And she had—all the way to Northumberland. She’d been successful as well.
Undone by a man’s nightshirt. How pathetic was that?
Hattie pressed her hands against her eyes and tried to control the shaking in her limbs. She refused to cry after all this time. Not again and most definitely not over him.
It had been a mistake to insist that Kit return to the Dower House, rather than allowing the doctor to look after him. And then she had further compounded the mistake by sitting up and watching him sleep.
What he must think of her! She hardly knew what she thought of herself! All she knew was that she could not have gone on with the pretence that somehow she had loved Charles with a deep and unyielding love when he’d asked.
She wanted to cleanse the knowledge of him and their marriage from her soul. She wanted to live her life rather than being defined by the old one.
Hattie stood up straight, and brushed the tears from her eyes. ‘I’ll live. Whatever happens. No one is going to laugh at me again. At the same time as writing me letters of sweet promise, Charles mocked me in those to his mistress. She showed them to me. Sometimes even now, I wake up in a sweat remembering the phrases. That stops now. I start living the life I was meant to.’
She picked up the candle and started down the hallway to her room. Kit did not need her to play nurse. She was through with being pathetic. She would be strong and aloof. She’d do her duty. And then she’d start to follow her dreams.
‘Hattie? Harriet? Wait.’
She continued to walk towards the stairs, pretending she had not heard him call. The great Kit Foxton could survive the night without her panting over him, like some love-starved widow.
‘Wait.’ The note of despair tore at her heart.
She half-turned and saw him standing in the doorway of the sickroom with tousled hair and a shadow of beard on his chin. The voluminous white nightshirt revealed his muscular calves and bare feet. And where on any other man it would have looked ridiculous, somehow, on Kit, it highlighted his absolute masculinity.
‘You were supposed to stay in bed.’
‘You were supposed to stay by my side.’ He gave the semblance of a smile. ‘Looking after me. My nurse flees—what choice do I have but to go after her?’
