Page 64 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

Some of the certainty had gone out of his expression even as she carefully made sure her voice did not crack on her last word.

This time, he raised a hand helpless toward her. “Tamsin, I was trying to keep them from pulling you back into the same position you occupied before we married. You were expected to take care of everyone’s problems, always at hand to take upon yourself what others were capable of doing themselves. No one was looking after you.”

“I know.” She squeezed her eyes shut and sighed. “I know what you were trying to do.”

He stepped closer and lowered his hand, no longer reaching for her. “You are still angry. I can feel it.” The man sounded surprised rather than disturbed by that fact.

She folded Anne’s letter once more along a crease that didn’t need folding. Her fingers were not shaking. “I am. I am angry. But not because you helped.”

“Then why are you angry?”

Because he decided what she needed before asking her.

The words came readily into her mind. They did not come readily to her tongue; perhaps because no one had ever asked Tamsin what she needed, or truly listened when she tried to speak on her own behalf. Perhaps because, until this moment, she had hoped Roman would be different. That being a wife would mean something different.

But it never was.

Her whisper escaped her before she could call it back. “No one ever seems to listen to what I have to say.”

Roman frowned down at her. “I beg your pardon?”

She swallowed. She had spoken as clearly and evenly as she could. He was an intelligent man. He had to understand. “You did not ask what I wanted you to do.”

“You were already preparing to go.”

“Yes.” Her eyes burned. She was not going to cry. She was not.

“And I knew why.”

“No.” She looked squarely at him, unflinching. “You thought you knew why.”

He stared.

Tamsin’s throat tightened. “I love Henry.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Do you really know anything about me?”

The question hurt. She saw the pain flicker across his expression.

The sight made her want to soothe it, but instead she forced herself to keep talking. “I know my stepmother depends upon me too much. I know Father has always allowed things to become my concern because it was easier than making them his. I know Leopold and Charles leave, and the girls⁠—”

No. That grievance was too large to open now.

Roman waited this time instead of trying to explain himself.

Tamsin could only shake her head and bring everything back to the one thing which mattered today. “Henry is not an obligation someone has placed upon me. He is my littlest brother—Roman, I raised him, it is almost as though he is my own— Sometimes he needs me because I have been the one person who listened to him. Everyone else dismisses him because he is the smallest in a large house. And what happened today? No one even asked him.”

Roman’s jaw shifted. She did not recognize this expression, or was too tired to interpret it.

“Sometimes,” she continued, quieter now, “I want to be needed by him.”

That was the thing her husband hadn’t understood. Perhaps she hadn’t understood it herself until she said it.

His gaze moved away from her. “I see.”

She wasn’t certain he did. The silence between them stretched.