“And what of your wife? Oh, poor wretched lady! She sits at home, always alone! Wondering, waiting, anxious—while you! A whore in every port!”
“Brianna!” His voice had taken on an edge of warning. She could not take heed; she could not care. Oh! It should have been so obvious! She should have realized. But she had not, and the fantasy had so recently soared. She did not know if she wanted to scream and shout, or dissolve onto the floor in tears.
“How could you?” she repeated. “How could you have done this to me? Surely you knew, you knew that I was falling in love with you, and you did not care! You knew that nothing could ever exist between us, and still you led me on—”
“Brianna!” He was aching so desperately for what was slipping between his fingers that he could barely think. He came to her again, catching her shoulders, holding her fiercely against all her struggles, even when she pounded his chest with futile vengeance. At last he shook her, firmly, and her head rolled back, her eyes met his—stark with hopelessness and bitter resentment. “Let me go, Sloan. Fool that I am, I really did not know.”
“I cannot let you go—now or ever!” he thundered to her, shaking her once again. “For the love of God, will you listen to me?”
“To what end?” she demanded heatedly.
“It is not what you believe.”
“What I believe? You have just told me that you are married.”
“I am married, Brianna. But—”
“Let me go, Sloan!”
“Nay, because I cannot!” Despite her protests he swept her into his arms and pinned her to the bed. He had to make her understand.
“No, Sloan!” she shrieked, her voice breaking.
“Brianna—there is a future. I love you. I—”
“What of your wife?”she demanded, ceasing her struggles to stare at him with blunt accusation.
“If you would but give me leave, I would explain.”
Bitterly, she answered him. “I’ve no choice, it seems.”
His hold on her eased. She plummeted to the depths of despair, and he knew well that her fury came from the misery he hadn’t the power to erase. He could only try desperately to make her see, to hold on to what they had.
“Her name is Alwyn,” Sloan said, and then he swallowed. To say her name, the woman he had only alluded to, was perhaps one of the most difficult things he’d ever done. “Alwyn does not care—”
“Does not care!”
“Cannot care,” Sloan said, ignoring her interruption. He did not know how to plead; he had never pleaded before. But God help him, he had to make her understand. “Brianna, we were wed fifteen years ago. Our estates adjoin. The match was arranged when we were both just infants and we were wed before my twentieth birthday. I was not against the marriage, because I had known Alwyn all my life. As a girl she was very lovely, and very gentle.” I am not saying the right words, Sloan thought in anguish. She was so stiff in his arms. Already, he thought, I have lost her. “Brianna! You have to understand!”
“Understand, My Lord Treveryan?” she asked coldly. “I understand quite well. You are married. You wish me to remain with you—as your mistress—while you leave a gentle wife behind.”
“Nay! Your tongue is ever sharp!”
“Show me where I am in error!”
“She is mad!”
Brianna held very still for a moment, aware that his voice and the tension in his body, in his very hold about her, betrayed a misery deeply akin to her own.
“Mad?” she whispered.
“Quite,” he said bitterly. “Alwyn was always frail. She trembled at the sight of me once we were wed. I was ever gentle with her. I let her be, and I wooed her as graciously as any man ever wooed his wife. There was a time, when we were very young, when I came to have great faith in a fruitful and happy life reaching out before us. But then—we had a child. A son. He did not survive three months in this world. And when he died, all that had been happiness for Alwyn died also. Slowly she began a retreat from this world. And now…”
“Now what?” Brianna asked him, aware that his eyes stared unseeingly across the cabin, that he was watching something a long way off. He shrugged.
“She barely knows me. She lives in my home, but all she knows is the forest and the pond of the estate where she finds peace. She is cared for by her old nurse, and she keeps cages of exotic birds. She loves to hear them sing, and to watch them fly. When I am at home, I allow her the fantasy that we are children again, and she believes that our fathers are visiting, and that we are together to play—as children.”
He stopped speaking, his eyes returned to Brianna’s. He wanted her to speak as she longed to do so. Yet it all swirled within her mind and wrought painful constriction in her heart and throat, and she could find no words.
