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And very distinctly. There was no way she’d misheard him.
Victoria’s head spun, out there in the hall. Because she had only ever met one person with that name. It was not a common one. Not like hers.
But she could not accept that Ago was actually speaking to her father.
In the next breath, she told herself she was being silly. Why shouldn’t they speak? It was more than likely some or other business thing. Since all these men seemed to do was business. She chastised herself for coming over all silly and emotional. Perhaps it was the pregnancy hormones. In a moment they would start talking figures or contracts or other such boring things, and she would feel foolish for that strange sensation—like betrayal—that had flooded her at the sound of that name.
“I told you those things as a courtesy only,” she heard her husband say in his cold, measured way. “Let me assure you, Victoria currently has no desire to roam anywhere. She’s happily pregnant, happily married, looking forward to Christmas, and will soon have enough to think about with an infant in the house. And I doubt very much she would have found it necessary to sow any wild oats in the first place if you hadn’t treated her like a medieval virgin princess stuck in a tower all these years.”
Out of the hall, Victoria’s heart beat at her, sickeningly. She had to reach back to steady herself against the wall and was suddenly all too grateful that this part of the villa was not packed with the sort of art and statuary that were featured everywhere else. Because she surely would have knocked any paintings straight off the walls upon hearing what sounded like such a casual betrayal from the husband she’d come to trust.
But then again, why did she trust him? Because he’d introduced her to the glory of a good orgasm?
You’re being paranoid, she told herself sternly. Maybe a little desperately. And her knuckles turned white as she gripped the wall on either side of her, somehow keeping herself upright.He’s never liked your father much, because who could? No one who’s ever met dear Everard has anything nice to say about him.
But inside his office, Ago was still speaking. He let out a bitter sort of laugh that made every hair on Victoria’s body seem to stand on end.
“Do not ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Everard,” he advised his father-in-law, his voice dark. “I think you know that I possess tools you did not. A husband is not the same thing as a father. And I suspect that is about all you wish to hear about your daughter’s marital bed.”
And Victoria tried her best, out there in the hall, to convince herself that didn’t mean...what it sounded like it meant. But her stomach turned, because she knew it did. She knew it must. And everything inside her seemed to be a part of that same bitter churn. It got more and more precarious, until she found herself hurrying away as quickly as she could with her ungainly waddle these days.
She was sick in the powder room near the dining room, but only briefly. So briefly she almost managed to convince herself that it was a pregnancy thing and unrelated to the fact she’d essentially heard her husband telling her father that he was controlling her with sex.
Either way, when the nausea passed, Victoria decided that she would go and walk in the rain anyway. Because she needed the walk more than she needed to remain dry.
Or in this house a moment more, just now.
Better yet, if her eyes should water as she trekked through the fields, it was as good as not crying at all. Because out in the cold December rain, no one could tell the difference.
Victoria did her best to pretend that she couldn’t tell the difference either.
That evening, she dressed for dinner in her overly ripe body. Not as she had before, of course, when it seemed her primary function was to swan about like a clothes hanger for her father’s ambitions. She was coming up on eight months pregnant and it was hard to believe that she could get any bigger, though she knew she would. She should have been reveling in the fact she could wear anything that wasn’t better suited to be a tent and yet tonight, with a chorus of words from her father hanging all over her like a shroud, she found that she felt more...precarious, somehow, than she ever had before.
She knew that when she made it down into the dining room, Ago would be as he always was. Because for him, nothing had changed.
He, obviously, knew that he’d been manipulating her from the start.
She was the only one who had shattered today, there in an anodyne hallway. She was the only one who felt as if her every breath was being pulled in through broken glass.
Victoria she knew she had to be careful. Because she could march downstairs and confront her husband with what she’d heard. She could take his betrayal and place it squarely on the table where they dined each night and then see what he thought he had to say for himself.
Or she could assume instead that she’d heard all she needed to hear. That despite imagining otherwise, she found herself under the thumb of a man who intended to control her ruthlessly, no matter how she might feel about it.
Maybe the real lesson here was that she should have known better than to hope for anything more.
And at least her father hadn’t made any secret of what he was about. He hadn’t pretended that he was doing anything at all but keeping her pristine and untouched and as sheltered as possible until it came time to use her for his own ends. That seemed almost refreshing in comparison to Ago, who had taken her innocence, then had taken all that passion he’d taught her and used it against her.
If she could have, she would have walked all the way to Florence today, letting all the sobs inside of her come out as they would. She would have removed herself from this marriage that was exactly like the ones she’d prepared her whole life to endure, when she’d been tricked into imagining it was different. Barring that, she wished she could take this dinner tonight and use it to demand that Ago be honest, for once, about what was happening between them.
But she knew she wouldn’t do that. That really, she couldn’t, because once again she had to think strategically. It was that or surrender completely. Just...accept that she had been tricked into submission and allow it. Sink into the kind of life she’d always assumed she would lead, and pretend she’d never imagined anything different.
Victoria thought that might actually kill her. Because what horrified her the most, she thought as she smoothed her stretchy dress into place over her belly and headed for the dining room, was that surrender seemed tempting.
It would be so easy, something in her whispered.You could stop fighting. Surely there are joys enough in this marriage of yours, no matter what his true aims might be. Does it really matter what his intentions are?
Maybe she was a fool to imagine there should be more. To daydream of a relationship based on honesty, where she didn’t have to wonder at every turn if there was a hidden agenda, or purpose that she was deliberately being misled about.
Surely that should be the bare minimum.
