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“I mean, I’d rather we talked about something more meaningful.”
“The fact that I have missed you is not meaningful enough?”
“That is not what I mean.” Annalise bit her lip and gently returned her fork to lie beside her plate.
“What do you mean, then?” he asked softly.
Annalise grimaced, her heart beating rapidly. He was playing an adoring husband. The man Annalise thought he would be when she agreed to marry him, and this memory, the bitter betrayal she’d endured after their wedding, clawed at her heart.
“I’d like to know where you’ve been,” she said softly. “These past months.”
“I told you last night, Annalise. I can’t tell you where I’ve been. I am sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too gruesome, too savage, too horrible to even contemplate, much less put into words. I don’t want to burden you with this.”
Annalise heaved a sigh. “What would you like to talk about then?”
“How about instead of talking about our past, we talk about our future?”
Annalise stifled a scoff. He didn’t want to talk about his own past. Apparently, he assumed Annalise’s past didn’t matter, either. And the future? What future did they have without circling back to their past? It would just be a repeat of more of the same, and Annalise didn’t want the same. She didn’t want to relive all that pain. She knew what she had to do if she wanted to avoid it. And since Blake wanted them to concentrate on the future, she would acquiesce to his wishes.
“I suppose since you do not seem to require my assistance anymore, since you are not ill… Perhaps I should move to Sussex, just as I—”
“What?” Blake’s question was more of a roar.
Annalise’s head shot up, and she blinked at him. “That’s what I was planning to do before… before your disappearance.”
“But that was in the past. Why would you still want to move out?”
“Blake,” Annalise said as softly as she could. “You seem to want to disregard the past altogether, but that’s not how it works. I was going to move away because our marriage was far from perfect, and without working through the issues of our past, I don’t know how we can move forward.”
“We can start from the beginning. A clean slate. Just give me a chance to prove that I’ve changed—”
“But you haven’t.” Annalise cried in frustration, then willed herself to calm down. “You haven’t. You still leave in the middle of the night to God knows where. You still deem it unimportant to tell me anything about your life. You don’t care what I’ve gone through these past few months, nor do you care about what I want. How do you expect me to believe you have changed?”
Blake scrubbed his face with his hand and leaned back in the chair, looking weary. “I do not mean to keep things from you, I promise. It’s just—it’s difficult with everything that has happened to me. I wish you could just… stay. We were happy once, weren’t we?”
Annalise swallowed, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. The laughter and happiness that had surrounded them during their courtship flashed before her eyes. “I don’t remember,” she whispered.
* * *
Blake stared at the downturned face of his wife as she struggled to keep her tears at bay. How had it come to this? This wasn’t supposed to be his life. Not with Annalise. They were supposed to be deliriously happy, frolicking in the gardens, swimming in lakes, making love on every piece of furniture they could find in the house. Instead, there were silent nights, tense meals, and harsh exchanges.
And he was the one to blame.
He knew that now more than ever. Perhaps he’d always known but suppressed the ugly truth from himself because—what? Because his father wouldn’t have considered him to be man enough if he didn’t.
He cleared his throat. “Annalise, please, can you look at me?”
She raised her head.My brave little wife.He smiled internally.
Blake turned to the footmen standing by the sides of the room. “Leave us.”
As the servants scrambled away, he stood and walked to his wife’s side of the table and sat in a chair beside her. Annalise blinked up at him with her innocent wide eyes, her lips parted. It took all his will not to bend his head and lick across those pretty lips. Oh, how he wanted to devour her mouth and damn the issues between them.
“I know that our marriage hasn’t been perfect,” he started, and his wife scoffed delicately. “I know that I’ve made a mess of things. But I want to make it right.”
