“You shouldn’t hold yourself back if you do genuinely like her, you know,” Gabriel said. “Don’t let Peter’s opinion of things keep you from happiness if you see an opportunity for it. That would be letting him win.”
“You’re seeing things that aren’t there.” Leonard took another sip of his drink. “I’m not keeping her at arm’s length for thesake of making a point to Peter—although I do think that would be more than enough reason to hold back from her if I’m being honest! But that isn’t it. Neither one of us intended to marry the other. I promised her a marriage to mitigate the scandal, nothing more. She lives in my house and is Duchess of Desford, but in all other ways, we are more strangers than we are husband and wife.”
“I see,” Gabriel mused. “So, you’ve had nothing to do with her?”
“Nothing.”
“I did think it odd that you were willing to leave home so soon after your wedding and escape to the country. Now, I think I see the full picture. You don’t mean to bring her with you, do you?”
“She’ll be much happier in the city.”
“No, that isn’t it. You’re leaving her behind because you don’t want to be a husband to her. You may as well admit everything tome, Leonard.”
“All right, very well, that’s why I’m leaving,” Leonard conceded. “We’ll both be happier living separately. I’ve discussed that with her, and she agrees, so there’s no point in trying to convince me otherwise.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Gabriel said. “Lord knows I’ve never convinced you of anything as long as I’ve known you. You are the most stubborn man alive.”
“Then you should know better than to question me about all this? What do you hope to achieve?”
“Oh, I suppose I’m just a fool when you get right down to it,” Gabriel said. “We ought to get more drinks.”
Leonard waved to a server, who nodded and went to fetch the drinks.
“I suppose the thing I want to know is this,” Gabriel said. “What if Peter was never going to come back?”
“What do you mean? Do you know something? Something to do with his whereabouts? If you do, you ought to tell me at once.”
“You know I would have told you if I knew anything. You know I don’t. I’m just wondering if it would make a difference to you? What if you didn’t have to worry about how your brother might respond if he saw that his actions had had a positive consequence? What if you could develop feelings for your wife and no one would think anything of it?”
“I still don’t feel that way about her.”
“And you don’t think you ever could?”
“She drives me mad. I’ve told you that. Every moment with her is torture, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Gabriel burst into a loud laugh. “It’storture?” he guffawed. “She comes after you with thumbscrews, does she?”
Leonard groaned. “You know what I mean,” he said. “You know how ladies can be.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Gabriel countered. “I’m happy in my marriage. You could be too if you gave yourself the option—if you weren’t so insistent on seeing this as the worst thing that could have happened to you. Let yourself get to know her. Let yourself like her.”
“I thought you weren’t going to try to convince me of anything.” Leonard raised an eyebrow as the fresh drinks were placed on their table. “This sounds a lot like convincing to me.”
“All right, all right, point taken,” Gabriel said. He picked up his ale. “A toast, then.”
“A toast?”
“To you and your beautiful wife,” Gabriel said, lifting his glass. “To the adventure ahead for the both of you. You may not realize it yet, Leonard, but marriage is going to bring all kinds of unexpected things your way. This is only the beginning.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Leonard said firmly. “Once I’ve left town, it will be as if I had never married at all. I’ll get back to the life of peaceful solitude I was living before all this happened, andI won’t have to spend any more time worrying about Prudence. I’ll rely on my staff to handle her for me, and that will be that.”
He clinked his glass against his friend’s with a nod and took a long drink. When he had finished, he saw that Gabriel was still smiling.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“I just think you’re in for some surprises,” Gabriel said. “No one ever knows, on the day he gets married, what the future is going to hold. No one can ever predict what a marriage is going to look like. You think you do. You think you can see into the years to come, that you know what your life is going to look like, but you have no idea how you’re going to feel about your wife a year from now, let alone five or ten years. You two are at the very beginning of your story together, in the very first chapter. You’ll write it page by page, and you might find that the way it unwinds is different from what you’re expecting right now.”
“That’s pretty talk,” Leonard said. “But to tell you the truth, I think you’re wrong. That might be how your life works, but I have things under control. Nothing is going to happen between myself and Prudence unless I allow it to—unless I choose it.”
