“So, I kept my distance and left the child-rearing to her and the servants. The first few years we seemed more like strangers living in the same castle than anything. So, no, we were not a love match, and we did not grow to love each other.”
She dug her teeth into the inside of her bottom lip. How terrible, empty, joyless. Stuck in a marriage, longing for love, and always denied. A future that wasn’t his choice. Pressure closed around her, thickening the air, each breath requiring more and more effort.
“Did you grow…to be friends?” There was a hopeful lilt to her voice even though she feared she already knew the answer.
“Not exactly,” he said slowly. “We learned to co-exist well enough. Especially as Colborn grew older and more children were added to our life. Her children were the one thing in life that made her happy. But we…we were civil. There was always something between us, I’m not quite sure how to explain it. A discomfort? I do not think she disliked me; she just didn’t feel anything for me at all. She wanted nothing to do with me.”
“That sounds like a very lonely marriage.” The suffocating pressure grew worse, a sharp ache piercing through her lungs like the burn of remaining underwater too long—lungs screaming for oxygen. Because of the man nodding and deflating on a weighty breath beneath her palm. Because this conversation of his past was starting to sound too close to her future.
She had a feeling, because she had learned quite a bit about this man in four short days, that he hadn’t sought love outside his marriage like her parents had.
“You were faithful to her.”
She hadn’t said it like a question, but he nodded, his blue eyes trained on hers. “Of course I was.”
Instantly a sting built deep behind her nose, an agonizing burning behind her eyes. She quickly covered her mouth as a dry sob burst from her.Of coursehe had been faithful. In a world where commitment meant nothing. In a loveless marriage, probably as desperate as she was right now to find love, feel love. The unfairness of it all…
He swiftly rearranged her, so she was straddling him, pulling her closer, their faces inches apart. “Easy, easy now. Breathe. What’s wrong, Felicity?” His eyes searched hers, his soft brown eyebrows furrowed tight.
Oh, God. Her hand caught another half-sob. She shook her head, refusing, unable to speak. She was a heartbeat from falling apart. The water was closing over her. She was underneath the ice of a frozen-over pond, and she couldn’t find the hole she’d fallen through. She gripped his waistcoat, fingers digging into his chest, as though she could hold off the impending breakdown.
But she couldn’t.
Everything came barreling forward at a speed too fast to stop.
The heartbreak of learning that her parents’ marriage was a lie. All her dreams crushed, based on a belief in something that didn’t exist.
A lonely existence looming, a life full of infidelity, her main purpose a showpiece and a body to house an heir.
The Planfailing; coming here and having her small chance of a different future being ripped from her with every passing day.
But it wasn’t just that.
Because all of that couldn’t compare to being tortured each day with a man who she was starting to see was everything she could ever ask for as a partner in life. But couldn’t ever be hers. Never hers.
It was all too much.
And after she broke from the weight of it all, she greatly feared who she would resurface as.
He gently pulled her hand away from her mouth and cradled her face in his palms, strong and reassuring. Ruinous.
“Talk to me, Felicity.” His voice was soft and soothing, and it shattered her.
“I… All I ever wanted was love. Love with the loyalty and faithfulness you gave your wife. But I am destined for so much less that it’s laughable.” A shuddering laugh escaped her, her voice taking on a high pitch, a panicked pitch.
“Sometimes I feel as though when people hear that I’ll gain the title of duchess, they forget that I’ll also become the man’s property. That I am completely and utterly at his mercy. I’ll have to entrust my welfare, my children’s welfare, to that man’s hands.”
She stared down at her own hands in her lap, spreading her fingers and studying her palms. “Somehow I am looked at as odd, as ungrateful, because I would rather find a man I can trust to hold my heart and not crush it, hold my body and not abuse it, hold my children and not neglect them.”
She leaned away from him and threw her arms out wide, a trembling breath rattling through her chest. “How could I ever complain about being a duchess and all the riches and power that will bring me?”
She dropped her arms and gripped his lapels, her knuckles white. She tugged sharply, as if that would somehow convince him, convince the world. Her words took on a pleading quality, “I do not seek nor need riches and power. All I want is happiness, a husband to laugh with, share worries and wishes with.”
Her voice trembled as something tight and uncontrollable spiraled inside of her. “That is not my future. I started to come to terms with it, thought maybe I could put fidelity aside if I could have something like what my parents had—friendship with love found elsewhere. But I cannot sit at home living a lonely existence, trapped as your son’s prisoner while he parades around with lover after lover and forgets I even exist except to bear his babes.”
Oh, God. She couldn’t let that be her future. It wasn’t a future. It was a sentence, imprisonment. Her breaths erupted rough and ragged, her chest vibrating with repressed sobs.
“I cannot live that life.”
