Then, with equal force, he remembered the rare occasion of a family picnic with his parents. Escaping from the governess hehad later learned to be his father’s occasional bedmate, he had run to show his parents some interesting stone or shell.
Lying on top of his mother, his father had looked at Dorian as though he was the most tiresome sight in the world.
Damn the boy! Do run away to Miss Reese. Here’s a silver sixpence if you get lost and don’t bother us for the rest of the afternoon…
Why had such people ever even had a child? Dorian could only assume he had been an unwanted accident. Not even the most assiduous counting of the month’s days or most controlled withdrawal worked every time, he supposed, although Dorian himself had been lucky so far.
With Rose, of course, there had been no need to hold themselves back at all. That sense of warm dissolution in her arms at the end of each coupling, all cares and pains temporarily forgotten, was like nothing he had felt in his life.
The urge to return to the drawing room and lay his head in Rose’s lap was strong and Dorian had to wrestle himself away to the hall. He felt like an unconstrained pendulum swinging from high to low in every direction without ever reaching his normal equilibrium.
He could not live like his parents. He would not! Nor would he inflict such misery on his sweet Rose.
Pulling the bell in the hallway, he gave short instructions to the servants and then went out for a long walk of indefinite duration.
The house was silent as Dorian threw a few items into a bag late that night. His valet could bring anything else he needed to London later. In any case, there should still be clothing and other small necessities in his rooms at the Albany.
Once this small task was done, Dorian was left alone with his tangled thoughts and agonized conscience. Tomorrow he must leave Rose, for her own good, no matter how much it hurt him to do it. The longer he put off his departure, the harder it would be for her. His own pain was nothing alongside hers.
It would be easier to walk away if his wife did not look on him with so much love and give herself to him with such trust. Rose did not understand that she would eventually grow to hate him, either for his inability to return her love, or for the unprecedented possessiveness and over-attentiveness she seemed to bring out in him.
Laid against Rose’s wholehearted love, Dorian had only full-bodied lust to offer in return. This seemed a poor bargain, bound to eventually break her heart. Only a black-hearted rogue could lead on and use such an innocent nature to satisfy his own physical pleasure.
On and on, Dorian wrestled with himself in this vein, sometimes convinced by these arguments and sometimes suspecting thatthey sounded mad. Jane and Cassius would likely think so, but their lives were so different to his and they could not possibly understand. In any case, mad or not, nothing was going to change his resolution.
This would be the Duke of Ravenhill’s last night at Ravenhill House for a long, long time.
Chapter Twenty
“You’re going to London?” Rose repeated uneasily, putting down her coffee cup on the breakfast table the next day. “How long for?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dorian in that casual tone that she now automatically distrusted. “Some weeks perhaps. I shall come back to visit, of course, but I don’t want to crowd you or get in your way.”
Rose shook her head in confusion. Crowd her? Dorian was her husband, and even living together at Ravenhill House it felt as though she barely saw him in recent days. How could he possibly be in her way?
“I don’t understand,” she told him. “Have I done something wrong?”
He buttered a slice of toast with very concentrated motions of the knife, not looking up to meet her eye.
“Certainly not. If there is any fault, it is all on my side. You don’t need me here fussing over you all the time and I know you’d like to get to know the ladies of the district better and bring your family and friends over more often. You will find all that easier in my absence.”
“No, I won’t,” Rose told Dorian honestly, but he only buttered another slice of toast. “I don’t find anything easier here without you.”
He breathed in and gave a long, slow sigh.
“I am sure I am at fault, Rose. I have said before that I do not know how to be a husband. Right now, I am convinced of it. We have tried, but marriage is perhaps not my vocation.”
“How can you talk like that, Dorian?” Rose demanded, a little anger creeping into her voice at his lightness of tone, even if forced. “Don’t you dare smile at me! I know that you’re not telling me the whole truth!”
Thankfully, her husband did not further attempt any of the charming acts which Rose felt she could now identify in a single glance. Dorian must know that she could see through them all. Still, he was hiding something from her.
“We are…friends, aren’t we, Rose? I want us to keep that friendship. I fear that if we are together here too much, that will not be possible.”
Rose stood up from the table, not wanting to hear anything further. There was one straightforward explanation for all this, wasn’t there?
“If you wish to be free to see Lady Lepford and your other lovers as often as you wish, why not just say that?” she snapped at him and went to the door. “Do what you will. I cannot stop you.”
“But I don’t want that…” Rose thought she heard her husband say rather plaintively as she closed the door behind her, but that made even less sense.
