“Are your hands paining you?” he asked, changing the subject for the moment.
The Nell he knew would have been galloping across the field by now.
“I am not as reckless as I once was,” she said softly. “I took a fall from Thunder, and I was badly hurt.”
This was news to him.
“When?” he demanded. “Why was I not informed?”
“It was about two months after you left.” She kept her face trained forward, gaze fixed upon the copse of trees on the horizon. “I did not want you to know.”
“How badly were you injured?” he asked next, alarm flaring inside him.
“A broken wrist and a badly bruised back.” She cast him a quick look. “It was not as serious as it could have been. I was riding him too fast, and I had been drinking wine. The fault was mine.”
She had been drinking. Riding recklessly. She had not said it, but they both knew the reason why.Him.
He ground his molars. “Damn it, I would have returned. I would have wanted to know. You had no right to keep it from me.”
“I feared that if I wrote to you with what had happened, you would return.” Another glance in his direction, this one quite quelling. “And I wanted you to stay gone.”
Her words lodged their barbs firmly in his heart. She had preferred to suffer on her own rather than see him return. “You should not have mounted a horse in your cups, Nellie. You know better.”
“I did.” She was once again facing forward, her profile serene. “But I did not care. For a long time, I did not care about anyone or anything. Most especially not myself. But I did care for Thunder, and it was my fear I would injure him with my foolishness.”
“When I reached Paris, I drank enough wine to kill a man,” he told her. “I spent an entire day casting up my accounts and wishing myself to perdition.”
She slanted him a look. “I spent a great deal of time wishing you to perdition as well.”
And he had almost found himself there.
“I wished you there too,” he confessed. “I devoted a great deal of time to cursing the day I married you. To hating myself for loving you so much.”
Her brow furrowed. “Youwere angry withme? Forgive me for failing to see why.”
“I was furious with you.” His hands tightened on the reins as remembrance washed over him. “Your lack of faith in me was devastating then. It still is. But I have also had three years to ponder everything that happened and to realize I would have believed the same of you, had I walked in upon a similar scene.”
Her chin tipped up, her stare returning to a point somewhere beyond them. “I never had another man in my bed, Jack.”
“Then,” he agreed, hating the surge of jealousy that accompanied the reminder.
“Ever,” she said.
It was his turn to frown. “I distinctly recall you blithely informing you had fucked half of London in my absence.”
“It was a lie,” she admitted. “I have not welcomed anyone to my bed.”
He had already told himself what she had done during their time apart did not matter. Still, he could not deny she had shocked him.
“What of Sidmouth?”
“Not yet.” Her voice was cold. “I decided when next I welcomed a man to my bed, he would be my new husband. I had no wish for an endless string of lovers. My heart was far too bruised and battered for that.”
She had not bedded the insufferable, pallid viscount.
“How long did he wait until I had gone to go sniffing after your skirts?” he asked grimly, knowing he should not issue the question. Knowing he did not want to hear the answer.
Sidmouth had been in love with Nell years ago, when Jack had been courting her. But everyone was in love with Nell. She was captivating. Vivacious. Beautiful. Everything a woman ought to be.
