Page 51 of Her Daring Earl
“Eliza,” he said, bringing his hand to his chest. “What are you doing here?”
His eyes instantly lit up as they ran over her body in interest, but that wasn’t her intention.
“I am here to talk to you.” She paused, looking at him meaningfully. “And only to talk.”
“Very well,” he said cautiously. “What would you like to talk about?”
“About why you reacted to me the way you did,” she said, blinking away the tears beginning to form in her eyes as she recalled how his words had hurt her. “What did you want me to do, Fitz? Not tell you? And the fact that you assumed such awful things about me?—”
Her voice broke, and she dipped her head downward, not wanting him to see how he had affected her.
“Eliza,” he said gruffly, and when she looked up, his hands were in his pockets as he scuffed his toe against the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” she scoffed, annoyed that he thought two simple words could fix the hateful ones he had spewed earlier.“Very well, but I’m going to need a little more of an explanation than that. You may think that we do not know one another well, but I thought you had become well enough acquainted with me to know that I would never try to trap you into anything. We had agreed on an experiment, but we did spend a good amount of time together and I thought we were… friends, if nothing else. Until your reaction to my news.”
He rubbed his temples as he took the matching chair across from her, slouching down within it, his elbows coming to his knees.
“You’re right,” he practically mumbled, and she had to lean in to properly hear him. “It wasn’t just about you.”
“Then what was it?”
“I’d rather not speak of it.”
“Just as I would rather not be in this predicament with you, but here we are.”
He sighed as he tilted his head back, looking up at the ceiling before finally dropping his chin.
“Very well,” he said, waiting a beat before continuing. “I was in another… situation before.”
She lifted her brows. “Are you referring to the woman you said you thought you would build a life with?”
“That’s the one,” he said. “She also told me that she was with child and that the child was mine. She was the widow of a minor lord, so someone who I thought I could just… have some fun with.” He cringed. “I realize how that sounds.”
“Oh, do go on,” she said, annoyed, but mostly with herself for how she was reacting to his story of another woman.
“I agreed to marry her, even though she was not the woman I would have wanted to marry nor was I ready to marry at the time. However, I knew if I didn’t do the right thing, there would be scandal.”
Eliza could see where this story was going. “Was she lying about being with child?”
“No, on that she was telling the truth. Only, it wasn’t my child.”
Well, that was interesting.
“Did she lie on purpose?”
“She did,” he said, nodding grimly. “Along with her lover who was the father of the baby. They concocted some scheme to have me believe the baby was mine. The plan was that by the time we were married and I realized the timing of the pregnancy, it would be too late for me to deny anything.”
“How did you learn the truth?” Eliza asked, more invested in this story than she liked.
“The father came to me and told me what they had done. He said that his conscience made him confess, but I am fairly certain that the impetus was his jealousy that she was with another man and that I would be raising his child as my own."
Eliza absorbed his story, trying to make sense of it and everything that had followed between her and Fitz.
“I can see the similarities, of course, and can better understand your reaction,” she said. “I still wish you hadn’t assumed I was just like this woman.”
“I know,” he said, his head still facing the carpet. “I can see that now. I do trust that you are telling me the truth. It just… shocked me for a moment. Took me back to another time.”
As much as she would like to hold onto her annoyance at how he had treated her, she couldn’t change the past – she could only make certain that it wouldn’t happen again.
