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“But they told me you’d died. Why?”
Why, indeed? Because she’d resisted the marriage? Because she’d refused to agree? Because they’d intercepted letter after letter begging him to come for her? Perhaps he had come for her, and her parents had been forced to fabricate her death. But she said none of this. Instead, she shrugged. “My father meant to make an advantageous match.”
“I remember,” he said dryly.
“My husband . . . he had money. Lots of it, and a desire to see the governor of Ceylon replaced. My father had influence over government appointments but never enough money. It was exactly the match he wanted.”
“Exactly what I could not offer,” Aidan grumbled.
“Yes.”
“And you simply agreed?”
“I had no choice.”
His head snapped up, and he looked at her. Really looked. Grief etched his handsome face, she realized suddenly. Lines of pain and weariness beyond his years. She’d been cruel not to see it before. She could not imagine what she’d have felt if she’d thought him dead. “I’m sorry they told you I was dead. I’m sorry.”
He seemed not to hear her. “They forced you to marry him? They forced you to go to India?”
Her spine stiffened. Her skin burned. That wasn’t grief on his face. It was pity. Pity. In his quiet words. In the softening of his eyes. Grief was there, yes, but pity rode close on its coattails, waiting to take over.
She set her shoulders back and decided to put an end to this. “Yes, well . . . I was privileged to travel to exotic lands and meet interesting people. Not many young girls are offered that opportunity.”
His face went rather blank at that, she saw with satisfaction. “Oh. Of course. It was not altogether horrible for you then?”
“Certainly not.” An impossible smile stretched her mouth. She’d be damned if she’d have him leave here feeling sorry for her. She was not the stupid, stupid girl she had been. She would not have anyone thinking of her that way.
Kate stood, forcing him to join her as she stepped onto the path. Aidan frowned at the grass as they walked, frowned at his feet, at everything but her. “Your time in India has been a benefit to you, it seems.”
She made a sound of agreement.
“What was it like there?”
“Hot. The plantation was isolated and somewhat primitive, I suppose. The animals were strange. . . .” Her voice faded away at the thought of the strange animal who’d been her husband. It had taken her so many years to understand him.
She felt Aidan’s arm tighten like a wary cat beneath her fingers as he prepared to ask something he didn’t wish to.
“Were you comfortable with your life there then?”
“Comfortable? Yes. It was a very comfortable life. We must have had twenty servants inside the house alone.” Not one of whom had ever spoken to her of anything but their duties. Kate had come to think there was nothing more disorienting than living for years in a house full of people who refused to see you. Only her stepson, a boy her same age, had watched her, and Kate had eventually wished him blind.
Setting the disturbing memory aside, she studied Aidan for a moment from the corner of her eye. He looked confused and a little angry, his jaw ridged with tension.
She fought the impulse to appease him. She was done being that woman. She’d eventually found a small purpose in Ceylon. If Aidan wanted to wish her miserable with her husband, then he deserved his own misery. Could he not wish her happiness? After all, he didn’t look as though he’d spent the last decade locked in an asylum, mad with grief.
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “We were young. And naïve.”
Aidan winced as if he remembered with perfect clarity the words he’d shouted at her that day.
Kate made her mouth smile. “You were right, you know. We couldn’t have married, so how else could it have turned out?”
He did not answer her, but seemed lost in thought as they circled the park before heading back toward her lane. The sun was setting, the air cooling around them. The coldness soothed her nerves. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with iciness. When she exhaled, she felt at peace, and she leapt into that peace with a final lie. “Perhaps it was better this way. If I’d married a man in England, it would’ve served neither of us well.”
He looked dumbstruck at the idea.
“I’m glad you came tonight,” she said. “But we should return now, I think. And say our farewells.”
“I thought I would return tomorrow evening. Perhaps dinner—”
