“It’s Leo,” he said, tugging his fingers away sharply as he suddenly remembered that he was also furious at her. “For better or for worse, we are married now.”
“We shouldn’t be,” she shook her head, her lip quivering slightly. “I never should have allowed you to make that sacrifice. But I am supremely thankful for it, even if I never saw myself as a wife.” Her words were tumbling out as she hugged herself. He knew that she was overwhelmed, but that didn’t make them easier to hear. “I never wanted to be a man’s chattel, and I certainly never saw myself as a duchess. I have always been proudly one of the people and an outspoken critic of the privileged elite. And now…” Her pretty face contorted into a horrified scowl as she stared at the ring he had put on her outstretched finger, and it wounded. “This…” She gestured around the room still frowning. “Is the antithesis of the purposeful life I had planned for myself.”
“I never saw myself shackled for all eternity to a duplicitous liar in a loveless marriage, my reputation as an honest and principled man in absolute tatters, so I suppose both of us will have to lower our expectations of what we thought our futures might hold from hereon in!”
She absorbed that like a blow. “I suppose I deserved that.”
“You definitely did. You’ve done nothing but lie through your teeth to me since the first day we met! You never even told me thatyour father worked for Corston—even when the opportune moment presented itself! I had to find out that dangerousstate secretin a bloody courtroom!”
She nodded with quiet dignity at his bitter sarcasm. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I suppose I somehow thought the less you knew about me, the better it would be for both of us. I knew I had inadvertently placed you in an untenable position by coming to work here, but I swear to you that I never would have taken this job if I had known in advance that you were a magistrate. I did try to leave when things started to change between us—you know that.” He did. Just as he knew that he had done everything in his power to selfishly keep her with him, just as his mother had accused him of. “With hindsight, I should have left that day irrespective of what my contract said because if I had, none of this would have happened, and for that I am truly sorry.”
“Sorry that you got caught, you mean.” He desperately wanted to pace. “But not as sorry as I am for falling for all of your rot.”
“I never meant to hurt you, I swear.” She touched his arm, and he retracted as if he’d been bitten because he couldn’t bear how much he pathetically needed that paltry bit of disingenuous affection.
Trust him to fall head over heels for a liar!
“Yet you did. You have. So much that I wouldn’t dare trust you now as far as I can throw you! But lucky me, I am still stuck with you—even though I cannot stand to look at you!”
She didn’t balk despite his vitriol. “You don’t have to be. You could divorce me. You could probably even get this marriage annulled if you do it straightaway. I certainly would if I were you.” That sliced like a knife. “Claim you didn’t know the half of it until after we had said our vows.”
“I didn’t know the half of it!” Yet even though he knew she was right, and that he probably did have ample grounds for an immediate annulment, he still couldn’t bring himself to do it even if she would and, apparently, do it gladly. The very thought made his hairstand on end and his bludgeoned heart hammer in panic. Because he was clearly a blithering idiot. A hopeless glutton for punishment. A blasted fool in love with a woman who was more of a stranger to him now than she had ever been.God help him!“I suspect I still don’t—but now that we are married—” He paused to choke out the next bit. “While we are married, I insist that at the very least, there are no more secrets between us.”
“That strikes me as fair.” She stared levelly as she sat primly on the mattress, even though she looked as far from prim as it was possible to be wrapped in just a towel and with her wet hair tumbling seductively down her back. “What would you like to know?”
He wanted to ask if she had any feelings for him, but didn’t. If any of what he had thought was blossoming between them had ever been real? If she was prepared to muddle through and give them a go despite the inauspicious start to their union? “You can start by telling me how long you’ve been involved with that seditious rag.” But, of course, wounded petulance won.
“You don’t believe that it is seditious, Leo, even in temper.” She looked him dead in the eye. “You believe in freedom of speech and fairness, and you’ve done nothing but defend it up to now, despite all the trouble it’s caused you.”
Her wistful smile as she read him like a book wasn’t the least bit patronizing. “But to answer your question, I joinedEquitasa week before I joined you. Before that, I am not ashamed to admit that I have been an active member of the United League for Reform since I turned sixteen. I blame Mary Wollstonecraft because it was her essays that lit a fire in me and started me writing, but Lord Corston’s abominable treatment of my mother after my father’s death also played its part, as he had been the first one to highlight to me how grossly unfair our society is.” Thanks to Portia’s mother, Leo now knew that her father had been killed when one of Corston’s guns backfired while he had been preparing it for a grouse shoot. Instead of helping the family the way basic humanity, let alone duty, dictatedhe should have, Corston evicted them and swindled them out of most of the pension that should have been owed. Something that beggared belief but that sadly did not surprise him because it was so typically and selfishly Corston.
“I have always had a talent for writing, and well-argued essays, as you saw in my letter of application, are my speciality. For the last few years, I put together most of the League’s pamphlets. More recently, I wrote several of the major speeches—which were all gallingly delivered by men who had no hand in them, for heaven forbid a woman actually speak out.” She rolled her eyes at the injustice, reminding him so much of her off-the-cuff lecture to him about his privilege that he realized her strong sense of inequality was so intrinsically a part of her that she couldn’t hide it, even when she tried to. That gave him some consolation; she wasn’t a complete stranger to him now. He knew parts of her—her essence—and that was something to cling to.
“Equitaswas my first opportunity to do something truly meaningful for the cause. I was Matthew Reynolds’s replacement, not that that egotistical agitator ever really worked for the newspaper. However, before I took over editing it, I had contributed many articles over the years. All in my real name because I was proud of them and still am.” There was that bold stare again that had originally intrigued him so. It irritated that he could not help admiring her unapologetic pride in what she was and what she stood for. “K Pendle only came about, reluctantly, when I discovered that I was working for a magistrate and because we all knew that the constable had it in for the paper.”
It also annoyed Leo that he found all that plausible, so he turned to something that was already making the roots of his hair twitch. “There was no neighbor who brought you home every night, was there?” She shook her head. “Dare I ask how you did get home?”
“I walked.”
Panic wrapped its tentacles around his innards. “From the bloody quay! In the dark! On your own!” He knew that awful truthwould keep him up at night as his brain worked through every possible dangerous scenario that she could have encountered.
She winced. “I always carry a pebble in my reticule.”
Was she serious?“You think a pebble would stop a gun or a blade or the sort of predator who hides in the shadows on the hunt for a woman?” His heart was racing so fast it was a wonder it didn’t bounce up his throat. “You actually thought a pebble would keep you safe?”
She stared down at her clasped hands rather than his wildly waving ones. “I’ve never had cause to test it.”
“More by luck than judgment!” The potential consequences of that reckless choice made him lightheaded. “And what of Mr. Percival Digby and the protest?” Rather than sit beside her on the mattress as he wanted, he folded his waving arms and loomed instead, hoping he at least looked in some sort of control even though his emotions were currently running riot and any grasp he had left on his control was tenuous. “Are you seriously going to deny influencing and aiding Abigail on that score now that we both know that you are a passionate reformer as well as a compulsive liar?”
She sighed. “When Percy arrived atEquitasa couple of weeks ago, I had no clue that his fiancée was Abigail.”
“What?” How the top of his head didn’t explode was a bloody miracle, the anger was so swift and so ferocious. “They are engaged!” His arms unfolded and waved in the air of their own accord again. “Over my dead body will she marry that dangerous libertine!” He was going to wring his sister’s bloody neck!
She grimaced. “Sorry.… That was clumsy of me. I thought you knew.”
“I knew about them! Which is obviously why I tried to put a stop to it—but I did not know that things had escalated so far in their relationship that he had bloody well proposed, and she had accepted!” His hair did stand on end then and, typically, the red mist descended ensuring all he saw was danger. “Not that she can accept without my permission and not that it will bloody well happen—but still!”He began to pace to reassure himself that the ground was still solid under his feet, because for so many hours now it hadn’t been. “How dare he! Howdarehe!”
“He loves her,” said their treacherous, backstabbing enabler with a shrug, “and, for what it is worth, I know that he is a good man.”
