Page 97 of The Captive
“Let me help you up, Countess, lest I get naughty ideas while you linger in a very fetching position.” He ambled over to her and couldn’t help peering at the strip of pale flesh revealed from her shoulder blade to the small of her back. In all their lovemaking and disporting, he’d yet to see her—
“Gillian?” He stared at her back, and she quickly sat up on her heels.
“Don’t look.” She tried to gather the nightgown closed around her throat, which only had the effect of parting it farther where it had torn at the back. He looked more closely even as she continued speaking. “You mustn’t…Christian, please. Don’t look.”
Scars writhed over her skin, thin white lines, some pink, a few of a brighter hue. They grew denser closer to her buttocks.
“Gilly,” he kept his voice steady with effort, “love, what happened to you?”
“Don’t look!” She scrambled to her feet, but he manacled her wrist in his hand when she would have bolted from the room. “You must not…please…you must not.”
He wrapped his arms around her, rather than distress her with further inspection. “Who did this to you?”
She shook her head, her face pressed to his bare chest, her mouth open as her body began to shake.
“You’ve been hiding this,” he said, cradling her against him. “You’ve been careful, haven’t you, to keep me from seeing you?”
A soft sob escaped.
He marveled that his voice even functioned, because he wanted to scream, to do violence in her name, to whip somebody as hard and as often as they’d gone after her, and then harder still.
“Was it your father? You said he was stern.”
She shook her head, crying audibly now, the sound terrible and raw.
“Tell me.” He gathered her close, his hands tracing the disfigured patterns on her flesh. “Please, love, you must say who did this.”
“My husband. My husband did this to me.”
***
Christian’s hands stilled on her back, and Gilly wished she could retrieve the words. For years, she’d held her head up on the strength of the knowledge that her situation had been between her and Greendale only. The servants had likely guessed—Gilly had needed some time to learn to fight Greendale in silence—but they hadn’tknown.
Her parents had known, but they’d chosen denial as the better course, leaving her at the age of seventeen in the hands of a monster.
Helene had suspected, and welcomed Gilly as a frequent visitor in recent years as a result, but Helene hadn’t known either, not for a certainty.
“Stay here.” Christian’s arms dropped away, and he grabbed up his dressing gown and left the room. In his absence, Gilly found her night rail and donned it over the ruined nightgown.
Would she ever see this bedroom again? Duchesses were not an old man’s widowed whipping post.
As minutes ticked by, it occurred to her she didn’t have to do as Christian said.
Not ever, because he wasn’t to become her husband, and yet, she sat exactly where he’d left her.
When Christian returned, he carried a large tray.
“Come,” he said, setting the tray down on a low table. He dragged two chairs close to the fire and stood behind one, his expression unreadable. “We shall talk, Gillian, Lady Greendale. You shall talk to me, and I shall listen.”
Lady Greendale. Even hearing her title hurt. “Why?”
“Because you didn’t even have bloody, bedamned, tame, fucking mice.”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t that. She crossed the room as much on her dignity as she could manage and took the indicated chair.
He took the other, poured for them both, and added cream and sugar to hers.
“Drink it. Don’t just hold it and expect you can wait me out.” His expression was so fierce, Gilly did as he said, and to her surprise, the tea was good.
