Page 22 of Her Heart's Rightful Earl
Arabella focused on a point on the ground between them, processing this.
“Then it was not your decision to purposely leave me?” Her voice cracked a little as she asked.
“I never wanted to leave you, Arabella. I wanted tomarryyou.”
Arabella noted the past tense of this statement and steeled herself against it. There would be plenty of hours in her bedchamber to cry over that particular loss in solitude; now was not the appropriate setting. She needed to remain strong.
“Could Thomas not have revealed the truth to me? Perhaps I could have followed on after …?”
“Marcus decided it was too perilous. Suspicion would be raised if my fiancée disappeared quite suddenly after my own demise, being a wanted man.”
Arabella could see the sense in this, but it did nothing to quell her fury at the injustice of the situation.
“Well, thank you, Alexander, for sacrificing me!” Arabella wailed in a whisper-voice.
“Arabella, please!” Alexander reached out a hand in a gesture of petition.
“Tell me, pray do, of your thoughts upon the news I was to marry your cousin, Edmund?”
Alexander blinked at the question, struggling to articulate the complexities of that reaction.
“Were you relieved, Alexander? That you no longer had to shoulder the guilt and burden of my abandonment?” Arabella agitated his conscience.
“No,” Alexander breathed heavily through his nose, suggesting he had much to say on the matter.
“Oh.” Arabella raised her eyebrows, teasingly. “Were youhappyfor us?”
Alexander swallowed hard. “No.”
Arabella frowned.
“Eventually,” Alexander elaborated. “I tried to be. Edmund is a good man … hewasa good man, God rest his soul.”
Alexander noticed how tears sprang into Arabella’s eyes, and it hit him afresh that she had lost one fiancé and one husband, within a short period of just three years.
“I understood how he must love you. I fell in love with you—how dare I be so presumptuous as to assume I was the only one to be so captivated by you? So, I made my peace with it. He was a good man who loved you and could make you happy when I could not.”
“He didnotlove me, Alexander!” Arabella told him firmly.
Alexander looked stunned.
“He was a generous, altruistic soul who wished me not to live out my life as a scandalous woman. He saved my reputation out of his familial fondness foryou. He was a good man. But he did not love me.”
Alexander’s mouth had fallen open, hardly able to believe this revelation.
“I suspected it was a marriage of convenience, due to the speed at which it was carried out, following my disappearance. But I assumed he also loved you. Because—" Alexander pouted, considering his words carefully. “How could he not?”
Arabella felt a smile tease at her lips, but she reined it in. Alexander always knew how to say sweet words to her, and she determined not to be won over by his affectionate quips.
“Have you said all you wanted to?” Arabella straightened herself up.
Alexander seemed to falter, doubting his next lines, before drawing himself upward and taking a deep breath.
“Among all lovely things my Love had been; Had noted well the stars, all flowers that grew–”
A panicked rage welled up in Arabella’s chest. “No, Alexander! You have no right!”
He stopped talking immediately, and his slackened jaw suggested he recognized reciting their poem had been a mistake.
