Page 85 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
This innocuous-seeming coin had contained such treachery, its secrets hidden beneath its unassuming face. Well—oneof its unassuming faces. “I was never laughing at you,” he said. “I never thought you foolish, or stupid. The truth is thatno oneever thinks to check the other side of the coin.”
“A flip of the coin is always a fifty percent chance, you told me,” she said, her lashes shading her eyes.
It would have been true, had he not offered her a rigged game from the outset. “I lied to you then,” he said. “I lied because I didn’t think I could convince you to wed me otherwise. I baited you into a rigged game, because the outcome of it was too important to leave to chance.”
Still she did not take the coin. “How am I meant to trust you now, then?”
“Because…because as much asyouneed to win,Ineed you to win. The coin is yours to keep, Lizzie, to use as you please. Whenever you want something of me, whenever youneedsomething of me.” One day in the future, he hoped, she would no longer need it. But until that day, perhaps he could earn her trust back in bits and pieces, until the whole of it was his at last. “The outcome is yours to arrange, and I will abide by it. Ask whatever you like of me, and I will give it to you.”
At last—atlast—she lookedathim. He willed her to see his sincerity, to understand she had only to say one phrase to judge him beyond redemption, to humble him past any salvation.That’s not necessary. And for a heart-shredding moment, he thought those words hovered there just on the tip of her tongue.
“Please.” He had uttered that word more in the past week than he had in the whole of his life. “I am begging, Lizzie. Please let me do this for you. Please let me give you what you need from me. Please let me be the sort of husband to you that I should have been from the beginning.”
And she—didn’t believe him. The doubt was there on her face. Scrawled beneath her eyes, and pressed into the purse of her lips. It hovered on the tremble of her lashes, tucked itself into the hollows of her cheeks. It was in the line of her jaw, and in the tense swallow that rolled down her throat. He had given her no reason to trust him, and every reason to doubt.
Still he waited, breath bated, until at long last she gingerly extended her hand, set her teacup aside, and lifted the coin from his palm. Carefully she scrutinized both sides of it, inspecting both faces. Perhaps even now she feared a trick—a proper coin in place of this false one. And then she held it within the cup of her palm, as if it were a heavier thing than it ought to be. Bearing the burden of all of her hopes and the weight of his promise.
And then, abruptly, she tossed it. It sailed through the air in an arc, shining in the light of the fire. It bounced once on the table behind him, rolled, and dropped, clattering upon the polished surface.
“Tails,” he said, into that heavy silence that surrounded them that grew only deeper still. There was no need to glance behind him. It couldonlybe heads. “What do you want of me, Lizzie?”
Once more she hesitated, quailing from the possibilities set into her hands. Uncertain, he thought, whether she wanted anything of him at all. Whether she wished to bear the risk of disappointment once again.
He found the coin there upon the table and pressed it once more into her hand, wrapped her fingers around it, and covered them with his own. “Anything,” he said softly.
Her lashes flickered, shading her dark eyes. “Tell me about Celia,” she said, and he knew by the low tenor of her voice, the slight quaver in the words, that she thought he would refuse.
“Celia. Yes.” His fingers tightened around hers. “She was the daughter of a baronet, and the diamond of the Season. She had not much of dowry, but shewasvery beautiful and her aspirations were high. She was kind, pleasant, warm—I fell in love with her nearly at once. In the beginning of our marriage, it was so easy to love her. She wanted only pretty clothes, dinner parties, balls, a box at the opera. She had lived her whole life out in the countryside, and she was taken with the amusements available to her in London, and I—I was happy to provide them.”Something, some manner of emotion scratched at the inside of his throat, clawed out in his voice, and Lizzie—she folded her free hand around his and squeezed.
Generous, even now.Kind, even when he did not deserve it. Comforting him when he ought to have been comfortingher. His breath whistled through his teeth.
Lizzie prompted, “Susan said you never talk about her.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I hated her in the end. But I hadloved her, once, and she killed that in me. Those things that had drawn me to her were never onlymine. Shewas never only mine. Six months into our marriage, I caught her on the terrace at a ball with another man. I was…”
“Furious?” she suggested.
Luke shook his head. “Devastated. I loved her. I knew whatTonmarriages were often like, but I had never thought to have one in that vein. We argued, and I understood, finally, what I had not before. That she was never going to love me the way I had loved her. My marriage became a thing to endure. She took lovers, one after another, and she was not particularly discreet about it.
“I began to spend more and more time away from home. I gambled. I drank. My love turned to hate, a bit at a time, until there was nothing left of what it had once been. And then, one day, she announced that she was expecting a child.” He shook his head in self-condemnation. “I hadn’t shared her bed in years at that point, and still somehow my first thought was that I was going to be afather. For half a moment, I was elated. And then I recalled that there was no possibility that it could be mine. That not only had she cuckolded me for years, but that I would be obliged to raise someone else’s child as my own.”
“You could have divorced her,” Lizzie said, and still there was the comforting pressure of her fingers over his. Warm, now. So much warmer than they had been only minutes ago.
“No,” he said. “I had been shamed enough.” The public scandal of divorce would have been so much worse. “We lived separately thereafter. I couldn’t bear even to look at her. I leased her a house, I paid her bills, and I continued on as I had alone. And do you know, I don’t think she ever understood why I had stopped sharing her bed. Why I had stopped loving her.Herlove, if indeed it ever existed at all, was so shallow a thing, Lizzie.”
“Susan says she believes that Celia did love you, in her way. That perhaps she simply wasn’t the sort of person whocouldlove deeply. It wasn’t your fault that she couldn’t.” A soft pat to his hand, absently affectionate. Probably she hadn’t even realized she’d done it.
His legs were going numb beneath him, and still he proceeded. “It felt like it was. And it didn’t even matter, because by the end—I was not loveable. I had become someone unrecognizable even to myself. I kept her portrait, Lizzie, not because I remained in love with her ghost, but to remind myself of how deceptive, how cruel love could be, so that I would never be in danger of falling victim to it again.” He drew a deep breath. “But I did anyway. I was drowning in it, and so afraid of you. I’m still afraid, Lizzie.”
“I don’t think I was ever so terrifying,” she said. Her hands slowly withdrew from his and settled in her lap, her gaze dropping to them. “I would have loved you,” she said, her head bent, as if she were confessing to some terrible, shameful secret. “If you had offered me just a little of your time. Your attention. I could have been bought with so little.”
“I have no right to ask it of you,” he said, sinking back to his heels. “But could you love me still? I’m not asking fornow,” he hastened to clarify, when she hesitated. “But…eventually. Is there the slightest chance that I could earn it? Have I ruined everything so completely that you can never forgive me?” And he knew that had he come to his senses only a week ago, he might have received a more favorable response. Before he had crushed her, as Celia had crushed him. That familiar devastation scrawled all over her face, and all because he had made himself a coward andcalledit good sense.
Her lips parted on a short, unsteady breath. “I—don’t know,” she said, and she seemed to retreat into the nest of blankets that had long fallen from her shoulders. But her eyes rested upon that blank space upon the wall, where Celia’s portrait had once been. Studying it with something like—likehope. The tiniest spark of it, there in her dark eyes. A light that had been absent these past weeks, as he had fed her disappointment after disappointment.
Perhaps there was too much doubt in her still to render a determination. Butundecidedwas better by far than a resoundingno—and he had done little to earn even that small measure of mercy.
“I can accept that,” he said, and as he watched she uncurled her fingers and stared down at the coin in her hand once again. Deciding, he thought.
