***
He felt sick, as though he’d gone to bed drunk, yet he hadn’t touched a drop of spirits. A little ‘Dutch courage’ might’ve helped matters for once, Giles realized bitterly, as he sought the stranger in his bed.
Louisa faced the wall, curled up so small. After he’d spent himself, she had crawled to the farthest edge of the mattress to escape him, and had gone so far as to wedge a pillow between their bodies.
He, of course, was naked, cold and clammy, beneath the bedsheets. She’d been allowed the dignity of her nightclothes. Truthfully, Giles had not wished to witness exactly what it was he’d done to her.
He had offered her no kindness as he’d taken her. He’d labored hard for the pleasure that should’ve come easily with someone so lovely as Louisa.
Giles felt wretched. She was his wife, and someday the mother of his children, yet he’d used her. He would keep using her because she was nothing more than a bank balance to him.
She was a means to an end—that was what he’d told himself as he’d struggled through their consummation.
He reached for her to make some pathetic apology. How could a gentleman make amends for the awful thing he’d done? “Louisa…”
She flinched from his touch. “Don’t.”
His sweetly trusting,wantingwife had reached for him last night, yet Giles had rejected her. He hadn’t wanted her comfort or her kisses. He had no use for her beyond the physical, and now she paid him back in kind.
She all but slapped his hand like an errant child.
“Oh, go away,” she whispered.
Giles pulled the sheets and counterpane up over her shoulders and did as she asked. He slid from the mattress, hunting for his discarded clothes. By the bedstead, he found the shirt he’d hauled over his head, pulse pounding as Louisa had waited for him to join her. Next, the trousers and drawers he’d dropped, terrified to face her wondrous gaze. He had been the timid one last night, too tangled up in the letter, the debts, and the tussle he’d got into to make proper love with an enthusiastic virgin.
He finished dressing and rang for breakfast, hoping Louisa would be hungry when she finally dragged herself from the wallowing pit into which he’d pushed her. Giles left her in their stateroom, knowing he must set the tone of their marriage—there would be coupling, if only for begetting heirs, and civil behavior toward one another whenever they were together, but Lord and Lady Granborough’s lives would be largely lived apart.
Once his debts to the Herberts were satisfied, this marriage would be a regrettable chapter in the sad story of his life. At the very least, he could save Louisa from the heartbreak of being dragged down with him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She was glad he was gone, though Louisa was grateful for the breakfast he’d sent her. She dared not show her face in the dining saloon, surrounded by curious onlookers, nor could she have sat across from him and kept her appetite.
Yesterday, she’d gone to the altar hoping to be worth more to him than her money. Fate must hold something greater in store for them than chilly courtesy and empty frivolity. That was not the life she wanted, and it was not the life Lord Granborough wanted either. It couldn’t be!
The prospect of sharing the next fifty years with a barely civil stranger, making and raising children together, was too awful to contemplate. Louisa would never have agreed to marriage had she known the full truth of what she’d signed up for.
Of course, she hadn’t known—none of the belles did. They were kept purposely ignorant of their fate, for no title or social position was worththissacrifice.
She contemplated the foreverness of her situation as she bathed, cried, and bled. His Lordship hadn’t harmed her. Physically, he had not been rough with her, but there were so many different kinds of hurt. Her husband had wounded her more by his neglect than anything else he might’ve done.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Please,” she whispered to herself, “no more congratulatory letters.”
She’d nearly dumped last night’s post into the bathtub. She couldn’t bear to read another line.
Louisa donned her dressing gown and answered, surprised to find a delivery boy in the passage. “Yes?”
The young man offered a bouquet of vibrant pink-red roses. “Flowers, madam.”
She checked the card. Lord Granborough had sent her a dozen long-stemmed American Beauties. They were horrendously costly—two dollars a piece! No doubt she’d find the expense charged to parlour suite twenty-five’s shipboard account, whichshemust settle at the end of the week.
She’d signed away her fortune and now her body to the mysterious Marquess of Granborough. It all too was easy to gnash her teeth and wail over what she’d got herself into.
Louisa tipped the delivery boy and carried the extravagant bouquet into her stateroom. She placed it on the bedside table. They were beautiful flowers, plucked at the height of their first bloom, yet they’d be withered and dull by the time she reached Liverpool.
She hated them. So much waste, so much loss—for what? It was a fleeting gesture from a careless man when a tender word and a patient hand might’ve meant the world to her.
