How could he be so cool and detached, so polite and reserved, as though they were strangers? As though the last glorious week had never happened? The urge to lash out at him, to force him from whatever had descended upon him, was strong within her.
She could not resist tilting her head, considering him in a mocking fashion. “By refocus, do you mean forget we are husband and wife?”
He clenched his jaw, a scowl darkening his features. “Of course not. We are linked, inextricably.”
Why did he make it sound as if it were a sentence? Why did he insist upon undoing all the advancements they had made together? They had ridden, laughed, made love, bathed, had shared every intimacy, reached the heights of pleasure. And yet he dared to stand before her now, shrugging her off as though she were an irritating spinster aunt who had outstayed her welcome rather than the woman he had made blistering love to.
“Are we?” she asked, considering him. “If you have tired of me after a mere sennight, I do wonder at the longevity of our union.”
“The servants are about,” he clipped.
“Yes,” she agreed, unmoved. “But not your mother or your brother. Little wonder the dowager did now await me with a sharpened dagger. Perhaps she will wait until I am asleep and attempt to extinguish me with a pillow.”
“Jesus, Boadicea.” He caught her elbow, hauling her into a nearby parlor and slamming the door behind them.
Naturally, this parlor—a study in shades of vivid orange—was as ghastly as every other chamber his mother’s questionable taste in decorating had blighted. The dark oil landscapes on the wall contrasted in bilious fashion against the bright paisley wallpaper.
Lip curling, irritation surging, she spun on her heel to face him. “Perhaps you are right to object. Poison, I should think, would be more of a weapon of choice for Her Grace. Would she deliver a fatal dose all at once, do you suppose, or would she make me suffer slowly over the course of many days, going mad from it?”
Spencer’s eyes darkened, his fists clenching at his sides, sensual lips tautened into a long, mirthless line. He was livid. “Do you dare to suggest thatmy motherwas responsible for my former duchess’s madness and death?”
Ah, there it was. The ghost that would not leave.
Millicent, and how she resented that woman now, for all that she could help and even for all that she could not—madness, death, every bit of it. She resented her for having known Spencer before he had been touched by the ugliness of life. She resented her for having come first.
It was small, and it was futile, but there it was. She was a weak and imperfect creature, jealous of a dead woman. She loved her husband with a vehemence that almost obliterated her, and he had taken that love as his due and promptly returned to being the Duke of Disdain.
“I would never suggest such a thing,” she said honestly, “for I was not thinking of your dead wife, Spencer. Though apparently you were.”
Perhaps it was horrid of her to make such a cutting comment, but she had lost her ability to blunt her tongue with her emotions running rampant. His sudden reversal had shocked her. That, coupled with his refusal to fully confide in her about his past, suggested he had no wish to heal. Indeed, his every action and word in the last day bespoke a man who was firmly lodged in the grief and desolation of his past. A man caught up so deeply in what had come before that he had lost sight of what was to come.
It broke her heart.
“Of course I think of her. She was the mother of my child,” he bit out.
Boadicea absorbed those two sentences as if they were a blow. They may as well have been, for they possessed every bit as much force. They hurt even more. His former duchess had born his child, a right he now withheld from her each time he spent his seed into the bedclothes.
He had had a child. A child who was obviously no longer living. How had she not known? Why had he never told her? It made so much, horrible sense. All the pieces of him that she had come to know seemed to fit together at last, and the picture it presented was awful. He had suffered even more than she had realized.
She raised a hand to her mouth, stifling whatever would have burst forth. A sob? A gasp. She didn’t know. What she did know was that he did not wish to have another child, and that his dead wife and his dead child haunted his thoughts. How could there ever be room for her, for a life together, when he was so mired in old tragedies that they consumed him?
The vow she had made to herself not many days before to give him as much time as he needed to heal was moot. She realized the gravity of her situation now, and it was dreadful and bitter.
“Your child,” she managed to repeat.
“My son,” he elaborated. “Stillborn. He is buried alongside his mother.”
Tears stung her eyes. He had lost a son. The full, gut-wrenching impact of his revelation descended upon her. Dear God, he had lost a child and his wife, both in traumatic fashion. And she had not known. He had never said a word.Howhad she not known?
Her muddled mind sifted through the events of the last week, his refusal to get her with child. His adamant vow that he needed no heir. He was still mourning the babe he had never gotten the chance to know. She gazed at him, stricken.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” she said, meaning every word of it. “Why did you not tell me?”
“It doesn’t signify.” His tone was aloof.
But she could sense the emotion he hid so well. He was not a stranger to her any longer, though perhaps his need to gird his heart convinced him that he ought to be. “Of course it does.” She went to him, taking his hands in hers, squeezing them in reassurance. “I want you to share everything with me.”
He withdrew from her touch, his expression harder than ever, lips firmed into a grim frown. “Did it never occur to you that there are certain things I have no wish to share with you, Boadicea? But of course it would not to a girl like you, who is without boundaries and has never known a modicum of pain in her sheltered life.”
