Henry forced himself to stop and wait for her to adjust while fighting the urge to take her fully. When she exhaled and her breathing returned to normal, he rasped, “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I am ready.”
He pushed. There was a resistance he had not expected, and then a give, and a cry came out of her, a short sharp sound she had clearly tried to hold behind her teeth and could not.
He stopped, lifted himself up onto his hands and looked at where they were joined. Blood on the draw-sheet. The sight of it held him still, and in the space of a single breath, he understood what it meant.
He began to pull back. Her hands caught his forearms.
“Please.” Her fingers tightened around him.
He did not move. She could have told him the truth without jeopardising their agreement but had chosen not to.
“Please,” she repeated and began shifting against him.
A jolt of pleasure went through him, wiping out any thoughts. He leaned over her and finished. It did not take long. He then sat back on his heels without looking at her.
She had not moved. Her hands were flat on the sheet. Her breathing had gone very quiet.
The cleaning and dressing took him less than a minute. He left the shirt unbuttoned and took up the candle from the table. “You lied to me.”
He did not wait for her answer. He went through the door and closed it behind him.
In his own dressing room, he set the candle on the washstand and did not move for several minutes.
She had lied to him, had sat across from him in a freezing drawing room and proposed a marriage built upon a deception.
He could have their marriage annulled.
The thought arrived and stayed. Fraud upon material misrepresentation was a doctrine in the ecclesiastical courts more often invoked than granted, but a duke who could afford the proceeding could afford the outcome. He could put her on a coach to Thornwick within ten days. Her family would keep what they had been given. She herself would return to her mother’s house with whatever social standing she still possessed.
The option sat with him for some time. But the fact remained: he wanted an heir, a child of his own, a family. The annulment could wait until she conceived, or it could wait until he decided, or it could wait until the anger subsided enough for him to think clearly. That was not going to be tonight.
The sound of her cry came back to him without permission. ThenPlease.And beneath it, the silence that followed. The silence of a woman who was determined not to show her pain.
He went to the washstand and splashed cold water on his face. With his hands flat on the marble, he let the water run down his chest.
The anger was considerable. At the lie. At himself for not seeing the truth. At the blood on the linen and the cry because he felt as though he had stolen her virtue.
Beneath the anger was also the memory of her warmth, her breath, and the way her body had tightened around him.
He waited for anger or desire to yield to the other. Neither did.
Chapter six
Turnips
Violet
You lied to me.
Four words. He could have made a speech of it. He had given her four, and the door, and the rest of the evening to live with it.
She had not lied to him. She held that distinction close, as if it might keep her upright. Trowbridge had written his name and hers in a book at White's and claimed what he had never taken. The ruin was his doing. The entry was his hand. She had been offered a thousand pounds to call it false, and she had refused, not because the claim was true but because denial would have cost her everything and bought her nothing. A baron's daughter's word against a duke's, inscribed in the betting book at the most famous club in London—no retraction of hers would have scratched the ink. She and her sisters would have been ruined and penniless and Trowbridge would have carried on. So she had kept her mouth shut and let his lie do its work.
She had thought of calling out as he was leaving. By the time she had decided it did not matter, the door had clicked shut.
The candles burned down. The linen cooled under her. She rose at last, washed at the basin Sarah had left, carried it through to the dressing room and tipped it into the slop pail. She stripped the under-cloth from the bed, folded it small and set it on the chair by the door, and lay back down on the clean linen beneath.
