If she did not do this, she risked having him hate her every day for the rest of their lives.
She was a woman used to pursuing and acquiring what she wanted, whether it be the latest fashion from Paris or a husband whose kiss made her heart fling itself against the walls of her chest. She had married Patrick because she had wanted to. She had wanted him. Her body was even now leaning toward him, wanting the reassurance of his touch.
But now that she knew she loved him, she faced a far more difficult choice.
She drew herself up, though she leaned against the bedpost for support. “You only married me to ensure I could not be compelled to testify against you.”
“Julianne, you cannot know—”
“Don’t.” She threw up her hand, shielding herself from the sting of his certain protest. “Do not try to spare my feelings on this matter. I will not have another falsehood between us, now that we are finally being truthful with each other. You have been freed of the murder charge. You are home, with your family, your title returned to you. You no longer need me. It would not be fair to hold you to the vows you made.”
He flinched backward. “What are you saying?”
A half hour of feigning death with Aunt Margaret watching over her had given her a long time to consider the future. She had reacted harshly to his confession, that day by the lake. She was shallow and selfish and spoiled, things she had never regretted in her life, and had always understood. She feared she was selfish enough to keep him.
But those were not things a man like Patrick would want in a wife. He deserved a wife he wanted, one he chose without the press of a noose about his neck.
He deserved a chance to find his happiness.
And so she faced her dripping, disheveled, muddied husband and lifted her chin with a courage she did not feel. “Given that you are safe now, I suppose we ought to discuss the possibility of an annulment.”
Surely she was pretending this bit of it too.
Any moment now, her mouth would curve upward into a real, heartfelt smile, and Patrick would be able to sort out what she was actually thinking.
Except, damn her flashing eyes, he had a sinking feeling she was all too serious.
He tried to school his lungs to breathe normally, tried to force his hands to unclench.
All his efforts failed.
“You would end it?” He was startled to hear the hoarse tenor of his voice, wrapping itself around those terrible words. “After all we have been through, you would simply walk away?”
Her lips stretched the merest fraction of an inch. “I don’t blame you for marrying me, Patrick, truly, I don’t. You were desperate, and I was willing, if a bit naïve. There was no coercion, no outright lie on that front. But the circumstances that drew us together no longer matter. We’ve spent scarcely a few weeks in each other’s company. There is no child to be affected by the decision, no reason to delay the inevitable. Everything has changed. And because of it, I would not force you to honor our original arrangement.”
By the devil’s balls. It sounded as though she didn’t want to honor their original arrangement.
Patrick drew a deep breath, feeling his way through this unexpected quagmire of emotion. “I don’t think an annulment is possible,” he told her. “At least, MacKenzie warned me it wasn’t.”
She inhaled sharply. “So you’ve discussed the option with your solicitor?”
He stood stock-still. Damn it, this was her idea. Why did she sound so irritated?
“You’ve been poisoned, Julianne. Perhaps the belladonna has confused your thoughts. Give it some time—”
“I do not need time to know what is right, Patrick,” she interrupted. “If we are truly tied to each other, I suppose we could deal with an unwanted marriage the same way everyone else in the ton does. ’Tis no small matter for me to live in London. I know your heart would keep you at Summersby. And your mother and sisters, certainly, need you here.”
Her words slid into him like a freshly sharpened knife. An unwanted marriage, she called it. He had thought it so himself, once upon a time. Had envisioned just this means of escape, handed to him on a silver platter. But for Patrick this had ceased to be an unwanted marriage almost from the start. All through his time in the gaol, through the endless press of day into night, he’d thought of her. Of the stunning gift of her love, and the promise that awaited him when finally he fought his way free of the charges.
Of how he had hurt her with his silence, and how he could make it right.
He’d come through hell, dreaming of this opportunity to prove himself to her, only to find that what waited him on the other side was infinitely worse.
“You may think that an admirable solution, but what of my need for an heir?” Patrick took a step toward her, reaching for her, sure that if he could only take her in his arms, he could prove why this was a poor idea.
But she flinched as his hand brushed her cheek. He could feel her muscles tense, ready for flight. Imagined he could see the revulsion floating beneath her skin.
“You’ve cousins who could fill that role,” she told him, her voice shattering the last of his hope. “And apparently, though it strains the imagination to consider it, they are both of the innocent variety.”
Patrick’s hand fell away. She didn’t want him. Her eyes had been opened, and her heart had been closed.
And it was no less than he deserved.
Chapter 31
Patrick slammed into his father’s study, still stunned by Julianne’s ruthless request and his own reaction to it. She had stood in front of him, still swaying unsteadily from the effects of her near-poisoning, and told him she wanted a goddamned annulment. There was naught for it but whisky and the solitude of his father’s chair.
Or, more correctly, his chair.
But neither solitude nor whisky were to be found in that chair, because James MacKenzie was sitting in it, his muddy boots propped up on the desk, the ever-present decanter of brandy uncorked in one hand.
“The whisky bottle was empty, so I sought my sins elsewhere.” His friend eyed him a long, studious moment, then held the decanter out. “You look as though you could use a drink. I presume this means your wife has awakened to torment you anew?”
Patrick snatched the decanter from his friend’s hand. “I thought you were heading back to Shippington, with Blythe and the prisoners.”
“Your butler dispatched an entire army of footmen to see them on their way. And your cousin Blythe seemed more than willing to see his mother to gaol. Bloodthirsty fellow, that.”
“Righteous, I would say. He was always so. Only now it seems he had reason to be.” Patrick shook his head. “I have misjudged him somewhat, I’m afraid.”
“Well, it seems with your poor, wee, misjudged cousin so eager to guard his mother I was . . .” James paused and waved his hand about. “Superfluous.”
“I understand the feeling.” Patrick shoved his friend’s boots to the side and perched on the edge of the desk. “Only it turns out the person who considers me most unessential is my wife.” He obviated the search for a glass in favor of more immediate salvation, and tipped the decanter up to his lips. The long, sweet draught of brandy ought to have calmed him.
Instead, it sharpened his pain like a damned whetstone.
“She wants an annulment,” he said, as much to the wall as anything.
“Pregnant women can be a touch unpredictable.” James shrugged. “Georgette told me she wanted me to grow my beard back, just last month. And then turned around the day after and said I needed to shave.” His lips twitched. “There is naught for it but to let it blow over.”
“She is not pregnant,” Patrick said, realizing that the admission hurt. “She was ill because Aunt Margaret was trying to poison her, although she seems well on her way to recovery now. And I do not believe this is going to blow over.”
James leaned back, his dark brows bunching. “Well, she can’t bloody well have an annulment. Tight as a drum, that cont
ract is. I ought to know. I orchestrated the thing.”
Patrick glared at his friend. “You’ve made that perfectly clear. And I was willing to accept that ours might not be a happy union, at the start. Only . . . and here’s the rub . . . I didn’t expect to feel this way about her.”
“Driving you crazy, is she?”
“Crazy seems a euphemism, at best. My brain goes to rot around her. It’s like I cease to be the person I thought I was the moment I see her. Think on it. Have you ever seen me this way? More or less breaking out of gaol, wrestling pistols out of people’s hands? It is as though I cannot remember who I’m meant to be because of her.”
“Perhaps she has turned you into who you are supposed to be,” James unexpectedly countered. “She is a challenge, to be sure, but in my experience, one needs a little challenge to grow in life. Do you want an annulment?”
“For shite’s sake, no.” Patrick waved the decanter about, trying to express how she made him feel. “She’s maddening and unpredictable and a little bit vain, but the damnable thing is, every one of those . . . flaws, if you will . . . contribute to something more than just their sum. I enjoy her, MacKenzie. She makes me want to stick around to discover what unexpected, brilliant thing she might do next.”
“Ah.” A knowing grin claimed his friend’s face, even as his head shook in the universal gesture of sympathetic friendship. “Shouldn’t you be telling her these things, instead of me?”
Patrick glared down at him. “You aren’t helping matters. I am not someone who finds it easy to express my feelings.”
“If you want my advice—”
“Which I don’t.”
James’s brow winged up. “But if I were to give it anyway—”
“Which, of course, you will.”
“Then I would say you need to find a way to tell her everything you just told me.” James’s mouth pulled down into a frown. “Unless you want to give her an annulment.”
“I’ve already said I don’t want an annulment,” Patrick snarled into his decanter, before slugging down another throat full of regret. He wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve, the incongruity of the motion with the expectations of his new title be damned. “But I don’t want her to be unhappy either.”
“You would grant it to her? Even if it made you miserable?”
Patrick floated a moment on the terrible thought. When he thought he had lost her, his world had razored into focus. His future had ceased to exist for that frightening slice of time.
And he knew. Knew in his gut. Knew in his heart. He loved her.
He would do anything to make her happy, and the sacrifice of his own happiness in pursuit of hers barely scratched the surface of it. If Julianne told him the key to her happiness was in his recusal, he would give it to her. Because he didn’t just enjoy her. That implied pleasure over pain. This thing he felt for her . . . by God, it hurt.
But it was the kind of hurt that made him happy to suffer it.
“I would,” Patrick told his friend, cold with the truth of it. “If it was within my power, and I could not convince her otherwise.”
James lifted a dubious brow. “You would accept her right to leave you and seek another husband? You can be sure your cousin George Willoughby would be first in line, slavering for a chance at her.”
The very thought clawed at Patrick’s conscience. “If she wanted him, I could not deny it of her,” he said, more slowly this time. Truthfully, this was a bit of a stretch. He could accept that Julianne could not be happy with him. But he was not at all sure he could accept her being happy with George Willoughby.
James sat back in the chair, rubbing a hand across his chin. “Bugger it all, you’re well and truly smitten.” His friend eyed him with something approaching respect. “All right then. You should give her one.”
Damn it all to hell. What was MacKenzie about here?
“I don’t see how,” Patrick protested. “From the start, you told me the only way to do this was to be sure she could not press for an annulment. I followed your instructions to the letter, down to the requisite, awkward wedding night. The deed is sealed in blood.”
“She cannot press for an annulment. But you can. On the grounds of fraud.”
Patrick grappled with a growing unease. Damn MacKenzie’s black soul, he looked deadly serious, no matter that his words completely contradicted his earlier position on the matter. “How can I accuse her of fraud, when I am the one who lied to her about my motives in marrying her?”
“I was your witness, and managed the settlement papers, if you recall. I was not sure, when all was said and done, you would want to stay married to her. She’d ruined your life once, already.” He smiled in a self-deprecating manner. “But she was also far too trusting, signing whatever I slid in front of her. She misrepresented her age.”
“Her . . . age?”
James cleared his throat. “The papers she signed may have indicated she was born in the year 1802.”
Patrick’s imagination kicked at the absurdity of it. “No one will believe she is forty years old. She’s just come off her third Season. The whole of London knows she’s just shy of her majority.”
“No one needs to believe she is forty, Patrick. They just need to believe you believed it. The chit signed the papers without looking at them. She’s as culpable as anyone. It is a petty thing, I know, but enough to take before the Commissary Courts to request an annulment.”
“I thought you prided yourself on your honesty,” Patrick protested, still trying to wrap his head around it.
“Do not mistake me—I do not recommend this course. It rubbed me wrong to do it then, and it rubs me wrong to tell you of it now. But if you are serious—and by God, you’d better be if you decide to pursue it—you can claim you did not realize she was under age. If Julianne is the one who so desperately wants this annulment, she could claim she willingly lied. Or, if you would rather offer some version closer to the truth, you could claim that I was the fraudulent party.”
Patrick fixated on the last of his friend’s offer. As a solicitor in Moraig, James MacKenzie was well known for his fair dealings, and his sense of social justice. But now he was offering to destroy that reputation, all to help a friend. “That’s a big risk to take, MacKenzie. What about your reputation you are always harping about?”
James shrugged, damnably unrepentant for his sleight of hand. “My reputation seems a small sacrifice if it saves your miserable arse. It was my decision to orchestrate it, and is my consequence to face, if it comes to it. I only envisioned this means of escape employed as a matter of last resort, and had hoped to never need to tell you. Truly, I see much potential between you and Julianne.”
Patrick swiveled a disbelieving eye on his friend. “I thought you said you engineered this entire bit of lunacy on the basis that we might not suit.”
“I didn’t know her when I penned that settlement. But traveling with you both down from Moraig, I saw a different side of her. She is funny and smart, and yes, maddening if you don’t take the time to sort out that beneath that fashionable exterior lies a sharp, loyal mind.”
“You told me this morning I ought not to trust her.”
“I was testing you. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see you each care for the other. She is fierce in her desire to help you, and puts your needs above her own comfort. That is an admirable prelude to love.”
“So you don’t think I should grant her an annulment?”
“I think you need to think, Haversham.”
Patrick studied his friend a long, tense moment. “I suppose you think I should thank you for this. You’ll forgive me if I am not feeling all that gracious.”
James slipped the decanter bottle from Patrick’s hand. “It remains to be seen whether you will thank me or hate me later. But regardless of how you feel toward me, you have the means to grant your wife the annulment she wants.” He shook his head and refilled his glass. “But I’ll be damned if I can see why you’d want to.”
> Chapter 32
Patrick pushed his way up the long, winding staircase and pointed his boots toward his bedroom door. Far from steadying his nerves, the brandy had obliterated his resolve to approach this conundrum in a civilized, cerebral fashion.
The denial that had sent him searching for a bottle had been displaced by a howling sort of anger since his conversation with MacKenzie. He was livid with his friend, for machinating such a damnably brilliant fix. He was angry with his wife, for wanting it.
But most of all, he was furious with himself, for lying to Julianne in the first place.
The weather, it seemed, had spent itself out, and through the windows at the far end of the hallway he could see the beginning of what promised to be a significant sunset. But the lingering storm still seemed to hang in a bit of indecision, with gray-tinged clouds boiling low on the horizon. Long fingers of amber light splashed across the hall’s carpet runner and played about his feet, and he knew, like those shadows, he needed to make a decision which way things would go. He wanted Julianne to be happy. He had not lied to MacKenzie about that.
But he was beginning to think that he had lied to himself. Because while it might be selfish, he wanted Julianne to be happy with him.
He opened the door to his room, and the belligerent bump of his pulse shifted toward confusion. Because instead of packing her things in a mad dash for London, as he had half feared she would be doing, Julianne was standing over a steaming bath.
She looked up as he stepped inside, and the light from the fireplace danced across her face. She had changed into a nearly translucent wrapper, and it swung like a gossamer pendulum about her body. The room was bathed in heat, thanks to the fire that had been laid. She’d let her hair down, and it streamed down her back like the flames in the grate, halos of red and amber and always, always, those endless curls he wanted to wrap up in his fist.
“You have returned.” Her voice was steady, giving no hint as to her state of mind.
Moonlight on My Mind Page 30
