Page 62 of The Pearl (The Godwicks 3)

“All right. I will.” She met his eyes. “I told you the first night we slept together I couldn’t have children. That was true. I don’t mean I’m on birth control, I mean…”

She steeled herself to say her secret out loud, the one she’d kept even from Sir Jack.

She continued, “Both my mother and grandmother died of a rare and incredibly lethal glioma before they were thirty-five. That’s a form of brain cancer, if you’ve never heard of it. I hope you haven’t,” she said. “The thing is, Arthur...it can be hereditary.”

His eyes widened. “Hereditary.”

“They can test for the genes now,” she went on. “They know.Iknow.” She shrugged. “When the geneticist gave me my results, I asked him what he would do if he were me. Do you know what he said?”

Arthur shook his head. His hands trembled.

“His exact words were, ‘I would make my will.’” She gave a cold little laugh. “I did make my will. And then I…I chose to be sterilized to avoid passing it on to, you know, any children I might have had with Sir Jack. Or anyone else.”

Arthur glanced away, looked anywhere but at her.

She could have told him more, that as soon as she was diagnosed—likely in the next five to ten years—a clock would start, the end-of-her-life clock, and she would have fifteen months, no more, left to live. And those last fifteen months of her life would be spent in agony.

“That’s the only reason I married Sir Jack,” she said. “So I’d never end up like my mother, begging strangers to pay for experimental medical treatments. And I don’t regret it, even now.”

“I know you don’t want me to say I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, don’t say you’re sorry. I know you are. I know I am.”

He exhaled heavily. “So that’s what…” He stopped, shot his whisky. “This explains a lot,” he said.

She knew what he meant. It explained why she drank too much and had unprotected sex with him from their first night together, why she worked twelve-hour days to avoid thinking. It explained why she’d pushed him away so viciously yesterday on the terrace. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him or anyone enough to let them fall in love with a woman condemned.

“I’m thirty,” she said. “It’s going to happen any day now. I won’t see forty, Arthur. That…that treatment my mother wanted to try in America? Ninety percent of the participants died after two years anyway.”

“Ninety,” he said. “Not one-hundred. And that was over two decades ago. Who knows what they can do now, what treatments—”

“I know,” she said. “I know it all.”

“Is this supposed to stop me from loving you? If so, it won’t work.” His voice broke and Regan had to look away from him. She couldn’t bear to see how much she was hurting him.

“Maybe this will work,” she said. “Sir Jack was mostly impotent in the last few years of our marriage. He would use powerful vibrators on me to force me to come even when I didn’t want to. It would just…happen. I couldn’t control my own responses. I had to learn how to separate my body from my heart and mind, from my…myself. I don’t think I can put them back together.

“They’ve been separated too long and both halves have healed, like when you set a bird’s broken wing badly… It will heal. It will live. But it won’t ever fly. What I mean is…I don’t think I can love you, Brat. And even if I could, I wouldn’t let myself.”

He looked away from her again, at the windows, rattling softly in their frames. She’d wounded him. He wanted the possibility of love, of a life together. She didn’t have it to give.

“But,” she said, “selfishly, I do want you to love me. Is that enough?”

He looked at her again, and he smiled the same way he had when the dove had taken flight. “Just hearing you call me Brat again is enough.”

“Enough for now,” she said. “I can’t love you, and I can’t have your children. And here you are, the heir to one of the last titles in the kingdom that means something. You know how it works—even if we adopted a son, he couldn’t inherit your titles.”

“I don’t give a damn about my titles, Regan. I never have.”

“I care about dying and leaving a child motherless,” she said. “God, Arthur, don’t you understand I am literally the last woman in London you should be falling in love with? I thought you were the smart one in the Godwick family?”

“Maybe.” At least he admitted it. “Maybe you are the last woman I should love, but you’re the only one I want.”

The lights flickered. And during that flash of darkness, she wiped the tears off her face. When the lights came on again, her cheeks were dry.

“You beautiful fool,” she said, then laughed coldly at herself. “Do you want to know something? After Sir Jack died, I told myself I wouldn’t date anyone at all ever again. No dating. No remarrying. No sex even. I couldn’t bear to think of someone caring about me and then finding out the truth…except you. I liked the thought of hurting you. That’s why I made that stupid bloody offer. You were the one man in the world I hated enough to sleep with, because I didn’t care at all how badly I hurt you.”

“I’ve never been so happy to be hated in my life.”

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