Lifeless.
Her passionate heart stopped and his shattered into a million pieces.
One that instantly sucked him into a vortex of panic that was so strong it squeezed all the air from his lungs.
He didn’t remember going back to the drawing room and barely registered the stunned faces of his family inside when he pushed the door open with such force the walls shook.
“How dare you!” He thrust the newspaper at his wife. “I didn’t save you from a convict ship bound for Botany Bay so that you could continue to endanger your life writing bloody sedition!”
She swallowed as she glanced down at the offending article but didn’t deny being its author. “Sir William was shorthanded and asked me to do it.”
“And I expressly asked you if you were writing it again when I spotted those ink stains and you denied it! You lied to my face yet again. After all we’ve been through. After all I have done for you. And you have the nerve to pull me up for keeping a secret—but at least I didn’t lie as well!” That betrayal hurt almost as much as the prospect of her violent death did. “You claimed you were only writing letters to your friends.”
“I’m sorry.” She did a reasonable job of looking sorry too, but he didn’t believe it. “I shouldn’t have lied to you about it.”
“You shouldn’t have bloody done it!” He began to pace, aware that he had been sucked down too deep in the spiral to see reason, but too far gone to stop spewing venom. “You should have just stuck to writing essays about my blasted dimples or whether or not bloody Kitty was right and you’d foolishly fallen in love with me!”
“Leo…” She caught his hand. “I…” Then she dropped it like a hot coal. “How did you know that I wrote those exact words? Unless…” Her eyes widened. “You read my private papers, didn’t you?” She began to back away from him as horror replaced contrition. “You spied on my most personal and private thoughts and barefacedly lied to me about it?”
“So I lied!” He hated the petulant and overbearing way that he sounded but couldn’t seem to stop himself. The panic was too overwhelming. The fear it had created was too strong. “You do it enough!”
“How could you?” She was gazing at him with such wounded horror that he couldn’t stand it. “When you knew—you knew—that I would rather die than allow anyone to read them?” Then a wounded cry escaped and she covered it with her hand. “And then you used them to control me? Howdareyou?
He should have fallen to his knees then and begged for forgiveness. Explained to her that he wasn’t being rational. That he had lost himself, somehow, and loathed it. Confessed that he had only read the first paragraph of both of those essays and would never, ever, betray her in the way that she now seemed to think that he had.
Instead, it was the irrational monster who answered. “You are my wife, Portia, so of course I dared.” He walked toward her with his arms waving and hating himself every step of the way. “And I reserve the right, as your husband, to insist that you start behaving like one!”
“By doing what you say and not writing sedition?” Horror turned to outrage as she held up her ring finger. “Do you honestly think that this will stop me?” She ripped his ring off and jabbed it in the air between them. “I wave placards and write sedition, Leo!” Defiant, she met him head on. “That is what I do. That is who I am. If I cannot then—” She tossed the ring at him. “I refuse to remain your wife for another second! Whether we get an annulment or not!” If he was panicked before, those words sucked him into a new and wildly spiraling cyclone of hell.
“Over my dead body!”
“Don’t tempt me, Leo!” Before he could speak, before he could apologize, she hammered in the death knell. “Good luck controlling a wife who has already left you!”
And with that, she stormed out. Leaving him fighting to breathe as the panic actually threatened to suffocate him this time.
Leo had to bend double just to be able to suck in some air.
“Well,” said Abigail, “You made a monumental hash of that, big brother, didn’t you?”
The worst thing was that he knew he had.
“And he accuses me of having no common sense when my head is turned.” That came from Emilia who had bent to his level and was studying him as if he were something peculiar under a microscope. “When I have never, even in my silliest moments, done anything as monumentally stupid as that.” She stroked his hair. “Do you need me to fetch the smelling salts, Leo? Only you look as though you are having a touch of the vapors.”
He supposed he did, braced as he was with his hands against his knees, sucking in huge gulps of air while the room was spinning around him and his life spun out of control.
“Oh god. What have I done?”He had to fix this!He hoisted himself upright and lunged to follow Portia but his mother blocked the door. “Sit down and calm down, Leo, or I swear to god I’ll murder you myself!” She pointed at a chair. “Before I let you go anywhere and cause even more damage, you need to first work out what the hell is currently going on in that thick head of yours, because whatever it is”—she gestured to the state of him—“this isn’t right!”
As much as he hated to admit it, he knew his mother was correct.
Chapter
THIRTY-SIX
“And here we are yet again.” Miss Prentice poured Portia a fortifying cup of tea as the dawn filtered through the window. She had been back at the school all night after her awful fight with Leo and, to her utter disgust, spent most of it in tears. “Trying to pick up the pieces after another one of my protégées has had their heart broken by a stupid man.”
“It has been a bit of a year for it.” Kitty, who had had her arm around Portia for most of the night, sighed. “First Georgie came back in tears, then Lottie, and now you. But as things turned out all right for our friends, I am hopeful your duke will come up trumps too. You’ll see. He’ll come hammering on the door soon begging your forgiveness and you’ll both live happily ever after.”
“It’s over, Kitty.” How on earth could it not be after last night? “Leo isn’t the man I thought he was, and I certainly cannot be the woman he wants me to be. Our marriage was a huge mistake.” She had a feeling he realized that too because he hadn’t attempted to follow her upstairs last night to apologize after she had stormed off and he hadn’t come looking for her after she had fled Berkeley Square a scant half an hour after. It didn’t matter that she had sneaked out the back gate without anybody knowing, at some point,somebody must have noticed that she was missing and still he hadn’t come.
