Page 84 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
Not the drawing room. “Wait,” she said, hearing the tinge of desperation in her voice. “I don’t want—”
He pushed her over the threshold anyway, and she braced herself for Celia’s smirking face staring down at her, only—the wall was blank.Blank?
Noting the direction of her stare, he said finally, “I took it down.” Directing her to the couch closest to the fire that was burning in the hearth, he urged her to sit, and her knees seemed to buckle as she did. She flailed beneath an excess of blankets, struggling to free her arms.
“Why?” she asked, and there was such an agitation in her voice—a terse demand for an explanation. Which was stupid, given that she had already decided that she did notwanthis explanations. That she did notneedthem.
He knelt before her, thrusting a cup of tea into her hands, and the heat warmed her frozen fingertips. “Because Celia doesn’t belong there, and you do. Because in the whole of my life, it just so happens that being abducted and held at gunpoint was the luckiest thing ever to happen to me.” His hands cupped hers around the teacup, held her captive. “Because I love you so damned much that I will spend the rest of my life here on my knees if only you will stay with me.”
Shocked into silence, Lizzie could only gape for a long moment, utterly dumbfounded. And again she asked, “Why?”
“Because you’reyou. You are everything I ever wanted, everything I could never admit that I needed. Youterrifyme,” he said, “because you could destroy me in ways that Celia never could—and still, I would love you.” A strangled little laugh eked from his throat. “I think I loved you nearly at once,” he said. “Your bravery, your loyalty. And then—then you werekindto me, even when I was appallingly rude to you in return. Generous, even when I was selfish. You were every virtue I had forgotten, everygoodnessI had abandoned.”
She had been a sharp-tongued harridan, and he was either misremembering or delirious with fever from the cold. “And you repaid me with trickery and deceit.”
“I needed you so much I was willing to cheat to win you,” he admitted. “And I couldn’t even acknowledge that truth to myself. I told myself that our marriage would be mutually beneficial. I told myself that if I kept you at arm’s length, then you would never have power over me. I toldyouthat we would have aconvenientmarriage—and worse still, I made you believe it.”
“I never wanted power over you.” She hadn’t managed to take so much as a sip of her tea, since his hands still commandeered hers.
“But youhaveit,” he insisted. “You have had it since—since you purchased that damned jar of marmalade for me. Since you pulled the stitches from my ungrateful hide. Since you soothed me when I was burning up with fever. Lizzie, I fell in love with you in Hatfield. You made me different than I had been.Betterthan I had been. You—allof you—gave me purpose again. I would have done anything to keep you.”
“None of it was real.Youweren’t real,” she said in a whisper. That had become appallingly clear the moment they had arrived in London. “I didn’t know anything about you at all. The man I—” Her voice squeaked away into silence. “The man I thought you were,” she amended carefully, “never existed at all.”
“He did, once,” he said, and there was a distinct tremble in his voice. “You helped me find him, Lizzie, when I had long despaired of ever being that man again. Youresurrectedme.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. Awife.” Really, he had been a stranger. She simply hadn’t known how muchof one. “I didn’t know I had married a man in my father’s image.”
His face bleached of color; his hands tightened on hers. “I’m not your father, Lizzie,” he said.
She lifted her eyes to his at last. “No,” she said. “You’re worse. At least he had the good grace to leave us in peace.”
∞∞∞
She wasn’t looking at him; not truly. Or if she was, she wasn’tseeinghim. She was seeing the shadows of her past, seeing the face of her father overlaying his own. Her fingers were still cold beneath his, despite the heat of the cup in her hands, her lips tinged with blue.
“Papa loved us, once,” she said. “Georgie and Joanna were so young that they don’t remember, but Imogen and I—we do. There was a time before Mama became ill when we were happy. We had agoodlife. And then, when Mama passed away, it crumbled piece by piece. The bulk of Papa’s love was reserved for Mama, and he buried her with it. He might as well have crawled into the grave beside her. Heburiedhimself while he was still alive, when weneededhim.” A terrible, hoarse sound rasped across her lips. “He could hardly bring himself to look at us. And then he left, because we reminded him of what he had lost. And do you know—it waseasierwhen he was gone. It was easier to know where we stood, that we weren’tenoughfor him, than to suffer his presence and hope that one day he might love us again. I used to think it was so cruel of him,” she whispered, “to have left us like that. But now—now I know that it was an act of kindness. I never built dreams on his empty promises. There were no illusions to be shattered. I never had anyhope.”
Idolove them, Papa Talbot had once told him.But...
“I never asked you to love me,” she said, in that soft, toneless voice. “I never thought you would. I knew I would never be enough. I neverhavebeen.” Her shoulders gave a small lift, a shrug of acceptance, of resignation. “And then—and then when we arrived in London, I knew that there would never be any sort of room for me. You were just like Papa; two sides of the same coin. Half buried already.”
He flinched as the words scraped his conscience raw. “Lizzie,” he said, “you were never in competition with Celia. I need you to know that.”
An awkward laugh trickled up her throat. “Of course I wasn’t,” she said. “She had won long before we had ever met. There was never any competition for your affections. You hadn’t any of them left for me to win.”
That wasn’t true—but he had made them an unattainable goal, buried them beneath the frost of his indifference. He had made her scrabble for only the scraps of whatever attention and time he could spare, because to offer her more would have made him vulnerable to her.
“Really,” she said on a soft laugh, “I was only your mistress. I suppose it’s fitting that I had only a ghost of a husband, since you had a ghost for a wife already. I was always alone again come the dawn. The lady of a house that could never belong to me, overrun as it is by too many spirits.”
Christ, no. “I’m so sorry. I’m so damned sorry, Lizzie.”
But the words merely washed over her, without effect. She had grown so accustomed to losing that there was noreliefin them, no vindication. They neither soothed nor comforted. They were only words, without meaning. He had made every tiny interaction between them a battle, and she stopped fighting. What was the purpose, when the outcome was predetermined?
A predetermined outcome. Two sides of the same coin.
The thought struck him suddenly, and he pulled his hands from hers. “I want to give you something,” he said as he rifled through his pockets. “And it isn’t meant to hurt you. It’s only that—Lizzie, you badly need towin.” And there, he’d found it—he withdrew the coin from his pocket, extended his hand, palm flat.
It looked so innocent resting there. George III’s face in profile, his head wreathed in laurels. Something flitted across her otherwise blank expression, there and gone in an instant. Hidden away from him, because he could not be trusted with it. Her hands remained curled around her cup, knuckles white.
