“What are you talking about?” he asked. Maybe she just wanted to go… clean herself. The bathing chamber was right there. He supposed he could let her go that far. As long as she promised to be right back.
But the look on her face told him otherwise. He felt different. He felt extraordinary.
She did not.
“I have to go,” she repeated, her voice gentle in a way that broke his heart. “You know this. I cannot be found here.”
He shook his head. The words made sense logically, but his mind refused to accept them as true.
“If anyone suspects what we just did...” she went on, still in that horribly gentle way. “I will be ruined. I will never find another job in London.”
He seized upon this, feeling a strange flutter in his chest. Was that desperation? Surely it could not be. He was not a desperate man.
“If it’s money you’re worried about, you needn’t,” he said. “You will always have a place in my home, Letty. Always. I would never let you find yourself out on the streets.”
She sighed as thoughhewere the one being difficult.
“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “Working here, living here, being with you… We could never have all those things. It would fall apart. Catastrophically. Youknowthis.”
Again, Ezra had the strange sensation that he was trying to stop water from filtering through his cupped hands.
“You don’t need to work for me,” he said. He knew he sounded ridiculous. He knew he sounded like a spoiled child who didn’t know how to accept the wordno. But he needed to try. He needed to make the offer.
He had always scorned men who kept mistresses, but God. For her, he would do it. What was pride compared to getting to keep Letty?
He swore that his heart paused in his chest when she hesitated.
“I… I can’t,” she said, sounding like she was genuinely sorry to say it. “I am sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he told her, hating that she looked distressed. She nibbled anxiously at her lip.
“It’s not that I think that what we did was wrong,” she hastened to add. “It was…”
She trailed off as though she could not find the words, and, on this at least, Ezra found they were in complete agreement.
“I know,” he said.
“But for us to keep going—having what should be a marriage, if it were right and if the world would let it… It just is not right. It would end so badly. We would both get so hurt.”
She was being generous, he knew. She would get hurt so much worse than he would, no matter what the pain in his chest was currently telling him. He crushed that pain down until it turned into irritation.
Why was she ignoring anything good that could come of this and only clinging to the bad? Maybe she just needed to be reminded that there was another way.
“What if it didn’t, though? What if it didn’t end badly?” He gave her a hopeful smile. “What if we didn’t get hurt?”
She frowned at him.
“Itwill,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Idoknow that!” She had still been in the bed beside him for all of this conversation, but now she pulled away, rising to her feet. He had a brief glimpse of her, gloriously naked, before she grabbed her shift and pulled it over her head, getting herself dressed much more quickly than he had managed to disrobe her.
“I am a servant, Ezra!” she snapped, huffing in irritation as she picked up her stays, looked at the laces that went up the back, and threw them back down on the ground. “I will always be a servant. Do you know what people would say about me?”
Her temper sparked his even higher. God, why did it always come back to this? Yes, he knew it would be harder for her to disregard talk, but why did it always return to what other people would think?
This was about that bastard viscount.
