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For once, he prayed she wouldn’t speak just yet. He needed time to process what happened between them and determine what to do next. Oh, he knew what to do next, but exactly how to marry her with the least amount of talk was the issue.
“You are very quiet,” she whispered.
“I suppose I have no idea what to say or do just yet. I hadn’t counted on making love to my dearest friend.” He skimmed a finger down her arm.
“I had thought it might be uncomfortable for us,” she commented as if speaking of a dance and not what had just happened between them.
“Oh? Uncomfortable, how?”
She lifted her head and stared at him with a mischievous grin. “Why, Your Grace, I have seen you without your clothing. I should be most scandalized.”
He smiled. “You don’t seem appallingly shocked.”
“That’s the odd thing indeed. I rather like seeing you naked.” She pressed a kiss to his chest before moving to a nipple. She flicked the flat nipple with her tongue until he groaned.
“Stop,” he rasped. “I need a few minutes more. Besides, aren’t you sore?”
She shrugged. “Not much at all.”
Only Louisa could have her virginity taken and still be ready for more. “It was not as easy with Sabita.” He shook his head. “I must apologize. I should not be speaking of her while you are in my arms.”
“You never speak of her,” she replied. “I always assumed you must have loved her deeply to be so affected by her passing.”
How did he explain this to her without looking like the cad he’d been? “I came to care for her.”
“That’s a very staid answer.” She reached up and kissed the tip of his nose. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I cannot, Louisa.” Harry looked away from her. “You would think me a scoundrel.”
“I already know you were a scoundrel, Harry.”
The time had come to admit the truth to her. He prayed she’d understand what he’d done, even if he still couldn’t accept his actions. “I met her after I arrived at the estate. Her father was the steward on the plantation, and the family lived in a small house on the lands. She was barely eighteen and still unmarried, which is rather late in Indian culture. I knew she was an innocent, but she took to following me about the estate.”
“Oh,” Louisa said in a soft knowing voice.
“One night, I was dreadfully homesick after reading one of your letters. I missed you so much, Louisa. I couldn’t get you out of my mind.”
“What did you do?”
“Drank too much brandy and went for a walk where I found her bath
ing in the pond, naked.” He stared at the ceiling, unable to look at her and see the disgust in her eyes.
“And you made love to her.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “It was horrible. Sabita made such a fuss about the pain that her father caught us.”
“Is that it? Many men have done as you did, Harry.”
“I refused to marry her,” he admitted slowly. “I was callous about the issue, brutally so, and blamed her. She was so young, and I treated her like a harlot. It wasn’t until her father told me his daughter was with child that I finally agreed to marry her.”
“I guarantee your father would have told you not to marry her or accept that Charlotte was your child. You did the right thing.”
“She was a good mother.” Emotion stuck in his throat as he pictured her dying in their bed. “I thought it would be better for them both to get away from the poverty and illnesses of her homeland. I forced her to leave her family and move thousands of miles away. I didn’t even offer to have them come with us. Then she arrived here, in a foreign culture, with no friends, no family—save Charlotte and me—and in the span of a fortnight is killed. Murdered by my own father.”
She tightened her grip around him. “I’m so sorry, Harry.”
“I failed them both,” he mumbled. “I am as much to blame as my father for her death. By bringing her here, I inadvertently caused my darling Charlotte to lose her mother.”
