The furrow between her brows had returned, but this time it was deeper. “Your mother hurt you?”
He had not intended to mention his mother’s sins. Indeed, it had happened so long ago, and unlike the dark moods that continued to plague him, he had become adept at keeping that awful part of his past from his mind. “Yes.”
This time, her touch was on him, gentle and comforting. Her fingers on his jaw. “Tell me, Leo.”
He closed his eyes, a wave of nausea returning to him along with remembrance. Purging it from his mind, forgetting it had ever happened, had been the means by which he had carried on with his life ever since his father had banished her to the Continent after the last time. He did not realize he was trembling until he felt Bridget’s arms close around him. Until she urged his head to rest above her solidly thumping heart. Until her hand stroked lovingly over his hair, again and again.
He would not embarrass himself by weeping.
He would not.
“Leo,” she whispered. “Tell me, please.”
“When I was a lad, I suffered from violent illnesses,” he began, hating to revisit the hideousness of his past and yet feeling somehow soothed by unburdening himself to her. “I would be healthy one day, and the next, I was violently ill, vomiting, unable to hold down any food, covered in a rash. It went on for years. Sometimes, I was healthy for a year at a time. When I was away at Eton, I was hale as a horse. And then I would return home, only to grow ill again. My—Mrs. Ludlow, my brother Clay’s mother, she suspected my mother after a time and had her watched.
“My mother was soaking fly papers to obtain the arsenic in them and poisoning my food. The doses were always small enough to make me ill and never kill me, but…she was not kind to me, and I always knew she had no love for me. The day her treachery was revealed was the day I realized my own mother loathed me.”
“Oh,leannán.” Her arms tightened around him. “I am so very sorry. I have heard of such a thing, mothers poisoning their own babes, but I never could have imagined…”
He pulled back, made uncomfortable by his revelations. Aside from Clay, their father, Lily, and the dowager Duchess of Carlisle, no one else had ever known the truth. His father had forced his mother to leave for the Continent in exchange for not sending her to jail for her crimes, fearing the scandal and the harm it would cause his family.
“I do not want you to pity me,” he said hoarsely. “It was a long time ago. I only told you so you would see that I may have been born to become the Duke of Carlisle, but I too have my demons. I am no better than you. No different.”
“I do not pity you.” Her gaze searched his, her hand cupping his jaw once more to stroke it gently. “I ache for you. I ache knowing the one woman who should have loved you and protected you most was the one who was doing you harm. How dare she do such a thing to you? If she were here now, I would claw her eyes out for hurting you. I would take my knife and—”
He silenced his fierce warrior wife with his mouth, kissing the rest of her words away. Kissing her and kissing her, with gratitude and tenderness and raw, pure need. He kissed her as if this was their first and their last, putting all of himself into it, trying to show her how much her compassion meant to him.
How muchshemeant to him.
He pulled his lips away and pressed his forehead to hers. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you for sharing that part of you with me.” She kissed him slowly, tenderly. “Thank you for reliving your pain to tell me the truth. I am so very sorry,mo chroí.”
My heart, she had called him. He knew enough of the language of her homeland thanks to intercepted dispatches and various communications he had received, both ciphered and raw.
Leo pulled back to take her in, her midnight hair drying in luscious skeins of curls around her face, her retroussé nose and blue eyes and pink lips utter perfection. “What does that mean, those words you said just now?”
She did not hesitate. “My parsnip.” Her nostrils flared, almost imperceptibly.
His lips twitched. The woman would never learn her lesson. He kissed her again. “Mayhap one day soon, you will trust me enough to tell me the truth. Until then, I am, as ever, your faithfully devoted parsnip.”
Bridget stared at him, eyes wide like a doe caught in the wilderness. For a moment, he thought she would turn and flee. But then her lush mouth rippled with mirth. The smile she gave him was roguish. “I trust you, my faithfully devoted parsnip, else I would not be here. But this is difficult for me. I have been alone for so long, and you are the embodiment of everything I have always believed was wrong.”
Her confession should not have felt like a blade between his ribs, but it somehow did. Despite what she said, she was not ready or willing to trust him entirely. Not in the way he would need her to if they were to both make it through his plan unscathed. And in Leo’s mind, anything less was unacceptable.
She would not make this easy, but then, she had never made anything easy between them. Not from the day they had first crossed paths. And he had wanted her all the more for it.
“You are not alone any longer,” he told her, and he had never meant words more. “I am your husband, and I will do everything in my power to keep you safe.”
A shadow of something—worry, or perhaps fear—darkened her countenance before flitting away once more. Her lips compressed for a moment to a fine line, almost as if she struggled with herself. “My heart,” she said on a rush. “Mo chroímeansmy heart.”
“I already knew that,” he confessed. The feeling they had crossed boundaries, that they had made definitive, real progress, could not be subdued. Hope rose within him, hope they could make their union work. That she would open to him. Trust him. And hope that one day, if he were so fortunate, she would love him as he loved her.
He stilled. His heart stilled. Everything in him stopped. Froze.
He did not love Bridget.
No.
