She flinched, the combination of his rejection of her touch and his dismissive response making her feel as if he had slapped her. “Agirllike me?”
“You are twenty years old to my thirty-three,” he said coolly. “Forgive me if that distance seems apparent when you pry where you are not wanted.”
A humiliating sting of tears burned in her eyes at his deliberate cruelty. “I’m beginning to think I have never been wanted, aside from my body. Tell me, is that all I am to you, Spencer? A naïve girl to warm your bed, one who is not worthy to access your mind and heart?”
“I do not have a heart,” he growled, stalking away from her and plowing a hand through his hair before pivoting to face her once more. “Do you not see? You are expecting things from me that I cannot give. Emotions that I do not have the capacity to feel. Everything I once had, the man I once was, part of it died with my son, and the rest of it died the day Millicent took her life before me. This is no bloody fairy tale, Boadicea. What do you want from me, damn you?”
“I want you to be honest with me.” Her hands trembled, and she thrust them into the folds of her traveling skirt to hide her distress. “Will this marriage ever be more than sharing a bed?”
He stared at her, his gaze as inscrutable as his expression, every bit as obdurate. “What am I meant to say, Boadicea?”
That you might love me back one day.
That you return even a fraction of the feelings I possess for you.
That you will not break me.
A sick sensation fluttered through her, and she said none of those things. None of what she longed to utter. “You are meant to say the truth. I thought the last week brought us closer together. And yet, before we even returned to Boswell Manor, you withdrew from me. Since yesterday, you have kept me at a distance. Now, we return here and you cannot wait to be free of me, to send me away. Why, Spencer? What changed?”
“Nothing changed, and that is the bloody problem.” He strode toward her, anger flashing through his eyes, tightening his jaw. “I cannot escape who and what I am. I have not made a secret of my expectations for this union. Ours is not a love match. We married to blunt the scandal we created.”
He stopped just short of touching her, so near that she could smell his woodsy scent. So familiar and yet so stark and strange. The need to step forward and throw her arms around his waist rose within her, but she remained still. His ice had returned. Indeed, perhaps it had never left, and she had been a fool to think she could ever melt it. His words of two days before returned to her then, taunting.
And then he knew he had somehow found the only duchess in the world who could ever suit him.
She swallowed hard against a sudden rise of misery. “Of course, I am aware of the actions that necessitated our marriage. How could I forget?”
His nostrils flared, as though he was having a difficult time marshaling his emotions into order. Or mayhap that was her wish. “We have mutual desire and respect, and that is more than many husbands and wives share.”
The desire was there, as ever. There was no denying that he had shown her a deeper part of herself, that he had introduced her to not only the pleasures she’d read about but to her body and its responses. With him, she could be fearless and bold.
But there remained another side to him, dark and foreign and hard, like uncharted land. A side he kept to himself. It was as if he were a garden she could only admire from the other side of a fence. And she wanted in. She wanted to pick the lock, break through to him. If she had thought that pleasure and the easiness they’d found during their honeymoon would be enough to see her through their life together, she could easily see now that it would not be so. If he remained unyielding, she did not think she could bear it.
She took a deep, steadying breath. “How dare you pretend to respect me when you just told me I’m naught but a girl who has led a sheltered life? When you won’t be honest with me, when you won’t share any part of yourself with me beyond your body?”
“I respect every bloody thing about you,” he growled, catching her arms and hauling her into his chest. “Never doubt that. But I cannot give you more than I have already done. I wish I could be the man who would love you and give you half a dozen pretty flame-haired girls, but I cannot.”
“You mean to say that youwillnot.” She pushed free of his grasp with little effort but a heavy heart. “The choice is yours, Spencer. You can let the past dictate your future, or you can free yourself.”
With that, she turned away and left him standing in the parlor, watching her go. She could not stay a moment more, or she would risk breaking down before him. Holding her head high, she fled to the inauspicious confines of the duchess’s chamber.
In the center of the gaudy room, her legs gave out and she sank to the rug, feeling like an interloper in this cavernous home, far away from everyone who loved her.
And then he broke her heart.
he soup course was laid before Bo’s nosethe next evening at dinner. She did not even need to make a discreet sniff of the air to know that what swam in her bowl was not anything she wished to eat. No amount of sherry could mask the distinct, unwanted scent of haddock and oysters.
Apparently, the headache that had kept Spencer’s mother abed for most of the previous and present days combined had not impeded her ability to oversee tonight’s dinner.
Bo clutched her spoon and met the triumphant gaze of her mother-in-law across the finely set table. How had she forgotten to consult with Chef Langtois regarding the menu? In the whirlwind idyll of her honeymoon followed by the manner in which her marriage had seemed to fall apart upon their return to Boswell Manor, she had overlooked the dowager’s evil plot to poison her bypoisson.
Between that, Lord Harry’s harsh mien, and Spencer’s frigid politeness followed by his glaring absence altogether, including a lack of appearance at first breakfast, then luncheon, and now dinner, her ignominious homecoming was complete. But then again, if she required any more proof that this sprawling edifice, adorned in garish color and reminders of the impeccable Marlow lineage, was not her home, she would be as mad as the duchess who had preceded her.
“What a splendid welcome home,” she drawled to the table at large—all two occupants besides herself—but to the dowager in particular. “I must confess, I had quite missed it here.”
“Indeed, you are fortunate to now find your shelter here at Boswell Manor,” the dowager duchess said with a false smile. “King George IV was a guest here, as you should know.”
Her mother-in-law spoke as if Bo was a stray hound who had been grudgingly allowed into the kitchens for some scraps. She feigned a smile in return. “Was the king an admirer of fish in all its forms as well?”
