Could the tenuous bond she’d established with him outlast a return to daily life? Here she was the center of his existence. She wasn’t vain enough to expect that to continue forever. But she needed longer to make him completely hers.
Did he even intend to keep her with him?
Grim foreboding swamped her. Was this her ration of joy, these few glorious days on Jersey?
Reluctant amusement quirked his lips. “We have to go at some point, you know.”
Blindly, she lurched up and turned away, fisting her shaking hands in her skirts. His attempt at lightness grated, hurt. He treated her like an easily distracted child. “Not yet.”
She heard him approach, then his hand curved around her arm. She felt the roughness of his scars against her bare skin. His touch reminded her of his suffering and how far he’d come since they’d married.
Had he come far enough?
His voice was warm, encouraging. “There’s no need to be frightened. You’ve reached your majority. The Farrells can’t harm you. We’re free.”
He misunderstood her reaction. Of course the threat of Felix and Hubert had darkened her days. But more important by far was her endless battle for a future with Gideon.
“We’re not free. We’re married,” Charis said in a muffled voice, bending her head.
He released her with an abrupt gesture and stepped away. She felt the distance like the blow of an ax. “If I could have devised another way to save you, I wouldn’t have forced you into such drastic action,” he said curtly.
The sweet concord of minutes ago was only a bitter memory. The suddenness of the change left her staggering in its wake. She turned to face him, knowing her pain was naked in her face. “You know I’m always grateful for…”
“Enough!” One ruined hand sliced the tense air. “If I hear the word grateful once more, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”
“But, Gideon…”
“Devil take you, Charis, stop!” He paused, visibly fighting for composure. Bitterness frayed his voice, and his shoulders were ruler straight with tension. “Really, you shouldn’t thank me. As it’s turned out, our marriage was precipitate. Your stepbrothers haven’t traced us. We didn’t need to take such permanent measures. I can only offer my profoundest regrets.”
The sharp slap resounded like the report of a bullet.
Gideon’s head whipped back, and his expression registered shock rather than anger. The red imprint of her hand darkened his cheek.
The grim, echoing silence extended. And extended.
Shaking, Charis lowered her arm and backed away on unsteady legs. She wasn’t frightened. She was so furious, her vision turned black.
“How dare you?” Her voice lowered to trembling vehemence. “You’ve had me in your bed. You’ve been so deep inside me, you’ve touched my soul. Yet you have the gall to talk about regret?”
“What I’ve done to you is unforgivable,” he said harshly. As shock receded, rage lit his black eyes. “And yes, I do regret that I’ve hurt you.”
Her fragile happiness shattered around her with a sharp crack that sounded like a heart breaking. Her lips felt stiff as she voiced her worst fears. “You can’t mean to follow your original plan, that we should lead separate lives?”
His jaw set like stone. “The basic difficulties remain. It still seems the best solution.”
Agony stabbed her, stole her breath, made her stumble back a step. She felt betrayed, devastated, lost. Somewhere, she found strength to speak. “Is that what you want?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. I’m trying to do what’s best for you.”
She clenched her fists at her sides. Either that or batter at him like a madwoman. She loved him more than her life. And at this moment, if one of his pistols had been in reach, she’d happily have put a bullet through his thick skull. “So these last days mean nothing? You can’t expect me to believe that. You’ve found happiness in my arms, Gideon. Don’t ever lie about that.”
The skin on his face tightened. She braced to hear him say the words that turned her dream of love into a travesty.
His throat worked as he swallowed and he avoided her gaze. “I should never have touched you. It was wrong. It was cruel. The fact that I can’t stay away from you is no excuse. It’s only an indictment of my own damnable weakness. You should curse me with your every breath. One day you will. Even if we take the sensible course and part now.”
He blamed himself for what happened but couldn’t deny the bond between them. She should find that reassuring, but she knew how obstinate he was. Obstinacy had kept him alive in India. How tragic that obstinacy now made him surrender his chance of happiness. And hers. He tried to do the right thing, the noble thing, but all he did was condemn them both to a lifetime of loneliness.
Charis had prayed love would wash away the poison of Rangapindhi. She saw now her prayers hadn’t been answered.
Her voice rang with resentment. “You’re such a fool, Gideon.”
“One of us has to keep a clear head without getting lost in the romance of it all,” he said with wounding sarcasm.
He wanted her to let him go to perdition in peace. Well, he’d picked the wrong wife if he expected her consent to that. Still, only the knowledge that he loved her, however much he wished he didn’t, kept her fighting. This battle was dangerous—it could destroy both of them.
Her nails dug deep into her palms, the slight sting nothing compared to the way he lacerated her heart with his stubborn rejection. He was the cleverest man she knew. And when it came to her, the stupidest. “We desire each other.”
She saw him consider sidestepping the statement. After these days of passion, she knew him so well. Why didn’t he know her in return?
Something in her face must have convinced him evading the issue wasn’t an option. His lips lengthened in a grim smile. “Yes, there is desire. Enough to set the world on fire. But desire isn’t enough.”
As her false paradise disintegrated around her, she stopped lying to him and to herself. “And there’s love. I love you, and you love me. You told me once.”
A compressed line of guilt and sorrow replaced his smile. “I had no right to say that. I hoped you’d forgotten.”
In a different universe, she would have laughed. Forgotten? Those words were permanently carved on her heart, even if he never said them again. “No chance.”
He looked ill and tired and tense. He looked like a man contemplating the end of the world. “I’ve wronged you so deeply, I can never make recompense.”
Her temper spiked. “How have you wronged me? By showing me a man can be more than a selfish brute? By saving me from rape? By teaching me about ecstasy?”
He was so pale, the mark on his cheek where she’d hit him stood out like a beacon. “By making you believe we could have a life together. By coming to your bed night after night when every principle dictated that I stay away. By tying you with bonds of gratitude…” He spat out the word like a curse. “…you’ll never break, even when you realize what you feel now is illusion.”
She flinched. Surely he didn’t still think her love was sickly hero worship? Not after all they’d shared. The accusation hurt more than acid flung in her face.
She drew a shaky breath and reminded herself that he loved her, hard as it was to believe when she confronted his anger and derision. She fought for her life here. She couldn’t let him defeat her.
“I forget you’re so much older and wiser than I.” Gideon wasn’t the only one with sarcasm in his arsenal.
His expression closed. Once, she’d have retreated from his bristling hauteur. But she’d held him gasping with release too often for the mask of control to dupe her. He wasn’t controlled. He was anguished and angry and desperate.
“After Rangapindhi, I feel a thousand years old.” He spoke sadly, so sadly her heart clenched.
Pity almost made her step down. Almost.
“Gideon, I don’t discount what happened to you.” Her voice became less stride
nt. “I don’t blind myself to what your ordeal cost you. Still costs you. That doesn’t mean your decisions are always correct. Right now, you’re disastrously wrong.”
“You force me to be frank.” A muscle jerked spasmodically in his cheek. He turned and prowled toward the window, where he curled one hand in the curtains. “Let me lay out some facts. If you can bear to contemplate mundane reality.”
“I’m more aware of facts than you are,” she said through tight lips. His mockery stung. “But pray, dazzle me. I wait in humble anticipation.”
Even in profile, she didn’t miss the way his mouth flattened with annoyance. “Very well,” he bit out, every word as precisely cut as a diamond. And just as sharp. “I’m going back to Penrhyn to an arduous, frugal future. Isolated. Lonely. You are the kingdom’s greatest heiress. I’m physically and emotionally incapable of offering you the life you deserve.”
Disbelief rose to choke her. “You reject me because you’re worried I’ll pine for the occasional party?” Her voice began to shake. “You truly believe I’m irreparably shallow, don’t you?”
He ran his hand through his hair, mussing it to wildness, and whirled to confront her. “Damn it, Charis!”
He sucked in an audible breath as he struggled for control. “I’m a freak, a poltroon, one step off being a lunatic. I can’t bear people around me, touching me. You know my affliction. In spite of my insatiable hunger for you, you know essentially I haven’t changed. Why can’t you see what you want is impossible?”
Stepping closer, she replied with matching heat. “Because of that insatiable hunger. Because you can bear my touch. Because I don’t care about other people. I only care about you.”
“You say that now. How will you feel in twenty years when you’ve wasted your youth on a man who only exists in your imagination?”
She couldn’t doubt his sincerity. No matter how mistaken he was. She made an angry sound in her throat. “And if I’m pregnant?”
He’d been pale. Now he went stark white. His eyes sparked like burning coals. “Don’t you want to bear my child?”
“I want it more than I can say.” Almost as much as she wanted to stake her place in his closed heart. Strange to recognize that need so powerfully and so immediately. She placed a trembling hand on her belly. Could a new life already grow inside her? The idea was overwhelming. Frightening. Exciting.
Gideon’s blazing eyes fastened on her gesture, and a savage expression crossed his face. “Dear God, are you pregnant?”
Was she? With all that had happened, she’d lost count of the days. And she’d been so focused on Gideon, she’d hardly considered consequences. “It’s too early to say. Do you still mean to send me away if I carry your child?”
He looked like he reeled at the prospect of fatherhood. “I don’t know.”
An ounce of her earlier sarcasm crept into her voice. “Why are you so shocked? The natural result of what we’ve done for the last two weeks is a baby. Surely you gave some thought to the matter.”
He slumped against the wall, his face ravaged with despair. “Yes.” He hesitated and shook his head with bleak incomprehension. “No.”
There was a charged silence, then he continued in a dull voice. “Of course I knew I took risks. If I thought beyond how much I wanted you, it was to say we’d deal with any complications when the time came.”
She twined her arms around herself as ice congealed in her blood. Her momentary hope shrank to a cold kernel the size of a pebble. “Risks? Complications? Don’t you want a baby?”
He tensed. “If I’m not fit to be a husband, I’m certainly not fit to be a father. If we have a child, it…” He must have interpreted her expression correctly because he paused. “…he or she must go with you.”
She raised her chin although she was so deathly tired of battling him. He loved her, she reminded herself. But the words lost their power with every repetition. “Why does anyone have to go anywhere?”
“Aren’t you listening?”
“All I’ve heard is a lot of nonsense.” She turned away and stalked toward the bedroom. She was disheartened, angry, exhausted. Trying to get Gideon to see sense was like flinging herself over and over against a mountain.
For one electric moment, she’d wondered if she’d shaken his certainty. She hadn’t mistaken what she’d seen in his face when he asked if she was with child. He’d been furious with himself. And her.
But she’d seen more in his ferocious black gaze.
She’d seen longing.
He wasn’t nearly as implacably set upon his desolate future as he wanted her to think. If she had his baby, he wouldn’t desert her. She knew that in her bones.
Dear God, let me be pregnant.
As she reached the doorway, he spoke in a grave voice. When she turned to face him, he looked weary and curiously defeated, although he’d withstood her every attack. “I know you believe I’m cruel and capricious and pigheaded. But I swear I’m acting in your best interests.”
“I wish you’d think of yourself for once. Ask yourself what you want and seize it.” Blinking back acrid, painful tears, she left him alone.
Twenty-two
Gideon turned the hired gig onto the lonely road that snaked across the moor to Penrhyn. At his side, Charis remained bundled away from him in her new blue pelisse and matching bonnet.
She’d been broodingly quiet since before they’d left Jersey yesterday. On the storm-tossed boat that finally reached the mainland south of Penrhyn this morning. During this jolting carriage ride in a shabby, ill-sprung vehicle over potholed roads.
It was well into the afternoon, and still she remained locked away as securely as if a wall of bricks and mortar separated them. She’d rebuffed his stilted attempts at conversation, seemingly content to stare at the rough countryside.
She’d never been a chatterer. Her ability to maintain a restful silence was one of the many things he admired.
This silence wasn’t restful. It seethed. With every mile, the tension twisted tighter.
They hadn’t resolved their acrimonious argument. How could they? She wanted what he couldn’t in conscience give her. Tying a beautiful, vital girl like Charis to a physical and mental wreck like him was a sin against nature. He’d always recognized that. His pride wouldn’t countenance it. His heart couldn’t endure it. All the passion in the world didn’t change that one bleak reality.
How the devil was he going to live without her?
The memory of the last, radiant days should fill him with regret. His passion had misled Charis into believing they had a chance together. He’d glimpsed a bright heaven that only mocked him now.
But selfish bastard he was, he couldn’t repent what he’d done in Jersey. Not when desolate solitude beckoned ahead.
After their quarrel, they’d slept apart for the first time in over a week. Not that he’d slept. Instead, he’d sat in the parlor, watching night change to grim day. He’d felt like a mongrel cur tossed into the gutter to starve. He still did. Dear God, was this how the rest of his life was going to be?
He beat back the questions, the guilt, the anguish that plagued him. His gloved hands hardened on the reins, and he urged the ungainly pony to a faster pace. The gig bounced along the rocky track. He couldn’t risk slowing down. The clouds closed in, and they’d be soaked if rain caught them on this heath.
Charis’s gloved hand clenched on the edge of the lurching carriage. It had been the only vehicle available in the small fishing village where they’d found safe harbor this morning. They’d tried to land at Penrhyn Cove, but the seas made it too dangerous.
With every second, the weather worsened. A biting wind howled. The sky loured, black and menacing, and thunder rumbled in the distance. He needed to get his wife to warmth and safety. Where she could ignore him in comfort.
He slapped the reins against the pony’s fat rump. They were still several miles from the house. He made a frustrated sound and looked at Charis.
She studied hi
m, her eyes more brown than green, underlined with dark circles. She looked proud, distant, unhappy…beautiful.
In the strange gray light, her fine brows arched with what he read as disdainful curiosity. “Are you quite well, Gideon?”
“Yes, of course,” he said curtly.
Her lips lengthened with irritation. “You’re very restless, and you’re making bizarre noises.”
“I’m worried about the weather.”
She looked around the open plateau. High in the sky, birds streaked to escape the coming tempest. The wind competed with the gig’s rattle and the clop of the pony’s hooves.
Her hand shifted to touch the necklace he’d given her the morning they left Jersey. England’s greatest heiress must own bank vaults full of spectacular parures. But when he’d seen the amber-and-gold circlet in the jeweler’s window in St. Helier a week ago, he’d immediately thought of Charis. The unusual intensity of the yellow stones reminded him of the light in her eyes when she was happy.
A light noticeably absent today, damn it.
Although her thanks were subdued, she’d seemed to like the trifle. At least she wore it.
Not for the first time, Gideon felt all at sea with his wife. Marriage was a difficult and complicated endeavor. Perhaps it was a good thing that his would be so short-lived, at least in any meaningful sense.
And didn’t that cheer him up no end?
Dourly, he stared past the pony’s ears at the rutted path. It was difficult not to view the surrounding wasteland and threatening sky as omens of his future.
“We’re not far from home, are we?” she asked, without looking at him.
Home. Gideon supposed she must consider Penrhyn her home. Lord knows she’d been exiled from anywhere else she rightfully belonged. Now he prepared to exile her again. He knew he did the right thing in setting her free. But at this moment, it didn’t feel like it.
“Not far. Pray God we beat the rain.”
The road dipped into a tree-filled dell. Interlacing branches turned the gloomy afternoon into night. Away from the wind, the gig’s creak seemed unnaturally loud.
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