“And I can’t,” he stressed. “I can’t let myself be distracted by those feelings. I have to retreat to the place we were with one another when we first met. I have to get back to being able to be around you without getting carried away by sentiment.” He closed his eyes. “Prudence, heaven help me, there were a few times when I nearly kissed you.”
“I would have let you,” she told him softly, and the words gutted him. “I would have wanted you to.”
“But that’s unfair to you, because that’s not something I can offer you,” he said. “You and I are never going to have that kind of marriage. That kind of relationship. And I can’t treat you with such little respect as to act like it’s possible when I know that it isn’t.”
“I don’t feel disrespected by you,” she said. “Leonard, surely there is something we can do to work this out.”
“The truth is that I should never have married you at all,” he said. “I knew on the day of our wedding that I found you beautiful and fascinating. I knew what a danger that was to me. I should have said no right then and there. I shouldn’t have let it go any farther than that because I should have known that I would get in over my head and put us in a situation that wasn’t good for either one of us. This is my fault—entirely my fault—and I’m so deeply sorry that I allowed things to reach this point.”
She turned her back to him. He watched her shoulders rise and fall slowly and wondered desperately what she was thinking. Had his words hurt her?
Perhaps it’s for the best if they did. At least then I will be able to count on her pulling away from me—because I’m not sure I have the willpower to be the one to pull away from her. I think I’ve made a real mess of things between the two of us, and I’m so afraid that it’s too late for me to put it right. I don’t know what I’m going to do now; I really don’t.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked after a moment. Was she going to cry? If she was, maybe she would like to be alone, and it seemed like the least he could do for her after the mess he had made.
But when she turned back to him, she wasn’t tearful. Her eyes were blazing with anger so hot that he instinctively took a step backward. If she had been a man, he would have worried that she was about to strike him.
Of course, she does like to dress as a man. Maybe she has a bit of that instinct in her.
“No, I don’t want you to leave,” she said hotly. “I haveneverwanted you to leave, Leonard, in spite of the fact that you have always believed I did! I have always wanted you here, and getting you to stay has always been impossible. I didn’t even want you to go away to the country. Not really. You’ve always been the one putting up walls between the two of us. Now, you ask me if I want you to leave me alone—I’ll bet you wish I did, don’t you? I’ll bet that would make things easier. But I don’t wish it. I never have, and I don’t think I ever will.”
CHAPTER 30
“What are you saying?” Leonard asked slowly.
“I think you know what I’m saying,” Prudence said. “I’m saying that this marriage hasn’t been what you wanted it to be at all, Leonard. Right from the very start, it was something else. You wanted us to have a marriage based on practicality and efficiency, based on our need to rescue one another. But I never needed you to rescue me, and you knew that from the start. Don’t you remember how hard you had to push to get me even to accept you? You knew I didn’t need this marriage to protect me.”
“I knew you were being stubborn about it,” he argued. “And everything I came to know about you in the days that followed made that less and less surprising to me because you’re the most stubborn lady I’ve ever met in all my life.”
“It’s my fault you had to marry me,” she said quietly. “I never wanted to marry you, and you know that, but it’s my fault it had to happen, and I’m so sorry about that.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Apologize for things that weren’t your fault. Things that were beyond your control,” he told her. “You couldn’t have done anything about it. You couldn’t have helped it. I know what happened between you and my brother, you know.”
“You do?”
“Of course, I do. When the scandal broke, I made him tell me everything. I know that nothing untoward happened between the two of you and that you were only doing your best to help that lady he was with. It was kind of you, and you paid a price for it. You faced ridicule and shame because you tried to do something good. The whole thing was my brother’s fault, not yours. I did want him to marry you for your sake, that much is true, but I admit I also wanted him to do it for his own sake—and that would have been a punishment you didn’t deserve in any way.”
“We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” she said. “The point is that our lives have brought us to this point. Whatever we originally intended, wearemarried now, so the question is simply what are we going to do with our union?”
“I never intended for our marriage to be like this,” Leonard said.
“This is exactly what you intended,” she told him. “You told me over and over that this was how it was going to be. That there would never be any closeness between the two of us. That we would never be anything more to each other than what we are right now. In fact, you repeatedly said that we would be a lot less to one another than this.”
“That’s my point!” He raked a hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. Prudence thought he looked rather mad. “Don’t you hear what I’m saying? Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? I didn’t want the two of us to mean anything to each other because it puts us too much at risk. I don’t know if I can get past the feelings I have for you, now that I’ve admitted them to myself, and every time I’m near you at parties, every time you look at me with that expression on your face like I’m the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, it makes it impossible for me to pull away. I don’t know what’s real anymore, Prudence. I don’t know when you’re pretending and when you really mean it, and that’s agonizing for me. And that agony is making it impossible for me to focus on anything else I have going on in my life. It’s maddening.”
“What do you want me to do?” she asked him softly.
“You’re asking me what I want you to do when I’m the one causing all the trouble?”
“Just tell me how I can help,” she said. “I want to help, Leonard. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do. When you said you wanted us toshow the ton that we were in love, I did my best to do that. Now, you want something else to change. I can’t figure out what it is. But if you tell me, I will do it. I really will, Leonard.”
He looked at her. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“Of course, I do. I want things to be good between you and me.” She fisted her hands in her skirts. “All this about your parents, about the way they affected you… I had no idea about any of that. I wish you had told me sooner. I didn’t know that was the reason you were keeping me at arm’s length.”
