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“No!” Her voice was shrill as she wrenched her arm free and stumbled a few steps away. “Don’t touch me.”
An icy flush crept over his skin, crawled beneath his flesh, tunneled into his bones. “You said you were happy. You loved him.”
“That’s what you think?” She spat the words out as if they burned her mouth. “You think I was just a stupid, fickle girl who was denied one man and decided the next was just as good? Well, you’re right on one count. I was stupid. I was stupid, do you hear me?” One trembling hand rose to press against her throat.
She began to cry then. Aidan wanted to cover her mouth to stop the welling sound, to halt the words, but he couldn’t move.
“You think I just decided to make the best of it?”
“Kate—”
“I was not a horse to be broken to another rider.”
The meaning of her words was a searing pain in his chest. He’d thought it torturous to imagine her enjoying another man’s touch, but it was unbearable to think the alternative. “Oh, Kate.”
Her fury spilled out of her, deaf to his words. “How could you think I loved him? I loved you. I was your wife, not his. Despite that we’d never made it to the church, I was yours. I kept telling myself that, even when it seemed hopeless. Even when he held me down on his bed and took me. Even when I waited and waited and you never came. Even when I thought myself too used for you to love. I knew I was yours. I was yours.”
Horror and grief stretched his soul thin until it was as tight as the skin of a drum. Every word set off a vibration of pain in his chest. “Oh, Katie. You didn’t tell me.” The disgust in her eyes when she looked at him made him cringe.
“I didn’t want that pity I see on your face. I still don’t. And how could you possibly understand? You gave yourself to every woman with a friendly glance and a warm bed! How could you understand what I felt?”
Thoughts and fears wrestled, fighting inside his head. He wanted to scream, to rage, to injure. But he tamped that need down and tried to reach for her. She slid from his grasp and stumbled back to her bag as tears streamed down her face.
“Kate, what happened?” he rasped.
She stuffed things into the bag, giving up any semblance of order. “I was sent to the other side of the world. I was given to a man I’d never met. I was as dead as my parents named me. And you did not mourn me at all.”
“That’s not true!”
Kate paused, both hands clutching the edge of the bag. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It wasn’t that I thought you hadn’t had lovers. I understood that I wasn’t the only woman you’d—”
“No,” he barked. “No. You are not just one of them. I love you. I love you, Kate. I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife.”
She shook her head. “We can’t marry, Aidan. We have very separate lives. You have an important business here in London, a life—” Waving a hand, she gestured to indicate his family, his friends, his tawdry affairs. “I have the shop in Hull. And a husband.”
“No. I’ve already planned. I will move to Hull, work from there until a divorce can be arranged. Most of my business is correspondence anyway. I could travel to London every few weeks. . . .”
His frantic words faded into silence as she paced away from him to stare out the window.
“I don’t want to marry you,” she said softly to the glass. “I do n
ot wish to become less than, again.”
“Less than what? I want to give you everything. Everything I have—”
“I can’t marry you.” The abrupt loudness of her words hung between them. She couldn’t hide her disgust, her utter hatred of him at that moment. It glowed from her skin.
“Kate, please,” he pleaded. “Please let me explain. Will you?”
She turned back to the window, but then she met his eyes in the reflection of the glass and nodded once, very slowly.
Aidan held her gaze for a long moment before he turned away to sit on the bed. He hung his head, staring at his shoes.
“You died. And I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself except drink, so that’s what I did. One night, a month or so later, an innkeeper’s daughter took pity on me and coaxed me upstairs. Afterward, I thought I would die of the guilt. . . .”
He glanced up, but her reflection only watched him in cool silence.
“The guilt was enough to keep me living like a priest for a few weeks—a drunken priest. But at some point . . . at some point, the liquor stopped doing its job. It ceased to banish your ghost, ceased to make life tolerable. I would dream of you, and that was the worst thing—waking up in the morning thinking you’d returned, then realizing it was a dream.
