Page 80 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“I didn’t evenlikehim!” she wailed, her voice muffled against his coat. “But I’m sad anyway. I don’t knowwhy. Why do I have to be sad for him? He never cared about us at all!” With a ragged sob, she clambered onto his lap, tucking herself into the circle of his arms. His collar was growing damp, but he let her settle into place and patted her back.
This was a sort of grief they had in common. For once, he knewexactlywhat to say. “Sometimes, when someone passes on, it’s notthemwe’re mourning—it’s the idea of them. Who they might have been to us, had things been different. Whatever your papa was, Jo, hewasyour father. It’s all right to grieve for the father youshouldhave had, if not the one youdid.”
“I don’t like it,” she said, sniffling again—a terrible, wet one that had him reaching for the handkerchief tucked away in his pocket, which he pressed into her hand.
“That’s all right, too. I don’t much like it, either.” And he’d had quite enough experience with it already. “Did you know I was married once before?”
He felt the small nod, her hair brushing his chin. “She was very pretty,” she said in a small voice, as if she wasn’t certain if she ought to have said anything at all.
“She was,” he said. “Her name was Celia.”
“Did you love her?”
“Very much.” He heard a small sound some distance away, and there, in his peripheral vision, he saw just a small swatch of rose skirts from behind the door. “But as it happens, I didn’t love who she was. I loved who I had imagined her to be. Who I hadwantedher to be. And that sort of disappointment is a pain all of its own.” He tipped his head back, felt the back of the chair pressing against the nape of his neck. “You can lose everything to that disappointment, Jo. A singlewhat-might-have-beencan ruin everywhat-could-bein your future. It’s a poison you give to yourself.”
“Lizzie isn’t as pretty as Celia,” Jo said, and he felt her small shoulders move in a shrug.
“Most people aren’t as pretty as Celia was,” Luke said carefully. “But beauty is an accident of birth—it isn’t worth a tenth as much as one’s character. Has Lizzie said anything to you of it?”
Jo shook her head. “But she looks at her portrait a lot. I think it makes her sad.”
That damned portrait.“It makes me sad as well,” he admitted. “That’s why I kept it. I wanted to remind myself of her. So that I would never fall prey to the same disappointment again.”
Jo drew back, squinting at him in the dim light of the lamp. “Did it work?”
“Yes,” he said, “for a time. But I forgot something important. Celia is gone—and whatever disappointments were left after she passed belong to me alone. The responsibility for them is only mine.” The architect of his own devastation. Drinking down the poison because he’d acquired the taste for it, because it had felt safe and comfortable. “I’ve spent so much of my time looking back that I’ve forgotten how to go forward,” he said, and dear God, but hehopedLizzie was still listening. “But Iwantto. I can’t replace your father, Jo. But I would like to be your brother.”
Children were ever so much more forgiving than adults. She tipped her head onto his shoulder with a shuddering sigh that forewarned a new burst of tears and whispered, “I would like that, too.”
∞∞∞
Luke had left without incident, and it had been up to Lizzie to put Jo to bed. She’d been nigh inconsolable, as if she had finally received permission to vent all of the frustrated feelings and conflicted emotions that had roiled inside of her, too big and too daunting for a child of her tender years to contain. It wasn’tfair, really, that she had been expected to carry the weight of other people’s decisions upon her small shoulders. It wasn’t fair that she had borne so much loss already.
It wasn’t fair that Luke had filled her head full of nonsense all over again. It would only make it harder on Jo in the end, to lose still more.
It had been a mistake to let Jo go down to him. And another to go down herself. It seemed to her that her life had just become one cascading series of missteps, one after another, until she had fallen so deeply into this pit that she had dug for herself that there was no saving herself from it. Worse still, she had dragged her family down into the darkness with her.
What was she meant to do?
I’ll thank you to leave me well enough alone.Get out of my sight.
Well, she haddonethat. It had been a hard lesson to take, but she had learned it at last.Finally. When she ought to have doneweeksago, before they had all been brought to this point.
Her thoughts skittered away from her even as she tried to snatch at them, to assemble them into some form of order. They could not stay at Ambrosia forever. Georgie and Imogen would have to be told about Papa. And Papa would have to be buried.
There was nothing for it but to continue as she meant to go on. She turned onto her side, staring through the panes of the window into the night sky peppered with stars. If only it had been just her own heart that she had broken—but her naïveté had cost Jo hers as well.
The trickle of tears that dampened her face surprised her. Why had he evencome? Why, when she had given him precisely what he wanted—a life unencumbered, undisturbed by a family not his own, a wife he had not truly wanted, children who would make demands upon his time.
His house would be his own again. Hislifewould be his own again. And hers would be just the same as it always had.
Until she had foolishly let herself want more.
Chapter Thirty
Dear Lady Ashworth,
Renovations are indeed thick underway at Talbot House. Naturally, given the urgency of your request, I shall direct the workmen to focus their efforts upon the bedchambers and other areas most in need. However, I would be remiss if I did not inform you that it is unlikely that the necessary repairs will be completed before Christmas. Presently the kitchen has no roof, and I must take my meals at the tavern in town. Regrettably, my lady, the house is simply unfit for habitation at present.
