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‘To do more than try. I hit him with a water carafe and screamed, and Jane—who was my maid then—came in. He dismissed her the next day, but I never let him be alone with me after that. I locked my door at night and put the dresser in front of it. I carried a knife.’
He stayed quiet, forced himself to stillness, knowing from her tension that there was more. He had not listened to Felicity—had blundered in, talked over her, convinced that he had the answers, that he knew best. He was not going to make that mistake again.
‘It is not that I am afraid of you, I swear,’ she said, her voice low and vehement. She looked up—just a fleeting glance—then looked back down at her hands again. ‘I want… I wanted you to make love to me. I enjoy it when you kiss me, when you hold me. I thought it would be all right…’ Her voice died away, then lifted again. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing. It is a pity he is dead,’ Blake said. ‘There are some people for whom you feel dying once just is not enough.’
She moved abruptly.
‘Eleanor—it wasn’t…? He didn’t try again and you…?’
‘No, thank goodness, it was not me. At least I have no blood on my hands.’
She sounded a little stronger now, but Blake did not risk pulling her back against his chest.
‘He cornered me in the drawing room one evening. I thought he had gone out, so I was careless. I ran from him and tripped—landed on the hearth and broke my leg…high up, near the joint. I was screaming with pain and the fear of him, and I was lying on my knife so I couldn’t get to it. Then the servants rushed in. I don’t know what it was that killed him—perhaps the thought that I was going to tell everyone, the thought that they would assume he had pushed me? But he had a stroke, there and then, and died two days later.’
The words were pouring out now, and he realised that she had never told anyone the truth about this before.
‘Everyone supposed that I had tripped and he had been rushing to help me. I didn’t tell them otherwise—there was no point. Then Francis found out that there wasn’t much money to inherit and had to sell the house we were living in—it was not entailed, fortunately. We ended up in a rented house, and once my leg had more or less healed it saved money for me to become the housekeeper. With the limp, what else was there for me to do?’
‘Did Francis ever—?’ He had to hear it all now—get the whole festering mess out into the open so she could start to heal again.
‘No. He never gave me the slightest cause to be uneasy. Although he did so all the time simply by looking like a younger version of his father,’ she admitted. ‘He liked pretty things—good clothes, beautiful women, handsome men.’
Blake felt as though she had hit him again. He had dismissed her with as much arrogance as had her stepbrother, simply because she was plain and drab. And he suspected that the handsome men she’d spoken of included him—that she had been forced to watch while Francis frittered away their money, aping what he had seen as the glamour of Blake’s life.
‘I should have told you.’
She had been watching him while he had been lost in those painful thoughts, wallowing in his own guilt, while she needed comfort and reassurance—not his confessions.
‘You would not have wanted to marry me, I know. But that wasn’t why—I honestly thought I would be able to…to overcome my apprehension or at least hide it.’
The idea that he might have taken her virginity while she struggled to hide her fear made him nauseous. And the realisation that he should have guessed—that her reaction after the carriage accident had been due to something far more serious, far deeper than simply a wariness about men—was no help either. Was he really the arrogant, selfish creature she had accused him of being all those weeks ago? Someone incapable of empathy and understanding other people while he strode through his privileged life, secure and superior?
*
Blake looked as he had done that morning he had arrived on her doorstep—bleeding, hiding pain and shock and what must have been churning emotions behind a façade of unsmiling control.
What was he thinking? Not that she had been asking for it, flaunting herself, teasing—all those ugly words her stepfather had thrown at her. His anger with the other man had been unfeigned, and he had been concerned about Francis and whether she had been forced to kill her stepfather in self-defence.
But he must be wondering whether he had married a woman crippled in mind as well as in body—one who would never be a proper wife to him, or a mother to his children. And he must have realised that she had kept this from him when she should have told him well before their wedding day.
What had Verity said about men when they were in a state of interrupted arousal? That it was actually painful for them? So he had to cope with that as well as whatever bruises she had inflicted with the candlestick—because she did not believe for a moment that she had not hurt him.
‘I am sorry,’ she said.
‘You are sorry? What for?’ Blake demanded. ‘You are not to blame.’
‘I should have told you.’
‘Not the easiest thing to talk about, is it? And you thought you could conceal how you felt. I understand.’
His smile, which was probably meant to be reassuring, was a trifle skewed, a bit quizzical.
‘And I hurt you. No!’ she said when he shook his head and rolled his shoulder to demonstrate that it was all right. ‘Verity said that when a man wants…um…and doesn’t…it hurts.’
She was probably crimson now, on top of tear-stained.
