His jaw hardened, and he raked a hand through his hair, thoroughly mussing the dark strands. “She attended the ball uninvited.”
Elizabeth had worked diligently on the invitations for the ball with Hattie at her side as guide, and she knew well enough that the countess had not been on the list of lords and ladies meant to be in attendance that evening.
“You didn’t invite her?” she asked.
“Christ, no.”
Once again, he seemed to be telling her the truth. There was no sign of prevarication. He held her gaze without flinching or glancing away. Her inner desperation to believe everything he had said was overwhelming her. Confusing her, too. She didn’t know what to think.
Elizabeth inhaled slowly, forcing her roiling mind to think. To demand answers.
“And yet, you left the ball with her to go alone to your study,” she countered. “That hardly seems the action of a man who didn’t wish for the countess to be present at his ball.”
“I took her to my study to speak with her,” he said. “Nothing else. Everything that happened after we crossed the threshold was my fault, and I beg your forgiveness. But I didn’t want any of it to happen.”
She closed her eyes and sucked in another breath, before expelling it, trying and failing to make sense of her turbulent thoughts. He told her that he loved her, and yet he admitted to taking Lady Worthing to his study. He said he hadn’t wanted anything to happen between them, and yet he acknowledged everything that had transpired was his fault. He begged her forgiveness, and yet he had not said anything thus far to prove to her that he deserved it.
“Explain,” she demanded. “Your trousers were unbuttoned. She was touching you. I saw it, Torrie. You cannot tell me that it didn’t happen, for I was there.”
Words failed her, for fury and outrage were once more clawing up her throat, making it tight, hampering speech.
“I’m not telling you it didn’t happen. God, Bess. Please. Open your eyes and look at me.”
There was such pleading in his voice, and her rational mind knew she should ignore him, but she couldn’t seem to keep herself from obeying. She opened her eyes. Drank in the sight of him as if it were the first time she had looked upon Viscount Torrington, the sinfully handsome, unequivocally charming rake she had loved for far too long. Initially from afar, and later, from too near.
“Lady Worthing came to the ball to impart some…news,” Torrie said, as if the words were acidic on his tongue, difficult to form. “I was coming to find you on the terrace when she found me first, and she told me that she is carrying a child.”
A child. Of course, she was. How like a woman as lovely as the Countess of Worthing, who already had three young children, to have another. Elizabeth stifled the surge of envy inside her, knowing it was unworthy. The remnants of a woman who had been forced to become a governess and surrender her dream of having a family of her own.
“I fail to see why Lady Worthing carrying Lord Worthing’s babe would be of such significant import that she would attend our ball uninvited,” she said, before a strange, unwanted thought occurred to her.
“Because…” Torrie’s eyes closed, his expression anguished. When they opened again, his brilliant gaze was bleak. “Because I am the babe’s father.”
The father.
Torrie.
He was having a child with Lady Worthing?
Elizabeth reeled, nearly losing her footing and grasping the back of a nearby chair for support to keep her upright. Suddenly, she understood all too clearly the reason for his suggestion that they carry on with this conversation whilst seated.
“She is carrying your child?” she managed.
Torrie inclined his head, looking grimmer than she had ever seen him. “Although I took great pains during my association with Lady Worthing to avoid an unwanted issue, apparently, she isenceinte. She was announcing so, and with great pleasure, to everyone within our vicinity. I took her to my study to spare you the gossip. It was wrong of me to take her there, and I realize that now, believe me, Bess, I do. But I was shocked, and all I could think was that I was going to lose you and cause you shame, and I couldn’t bear either of those outcomes, so I took her away to my study. Only, that made everything worse.”
“Yes,” she agreed numbly. “It did.”
“I told her that I’m a happily married man, but she was insistent. I didn’t welcome her advances, Bess. Her touch repulsed me.”
Elizabeth stared at her husband in the early-morning sunlight, the cheer at his back casting him in an ethereal glow that made her wish this was nothing more than a dream from which she would wake, thankful none of it had been real. His jaw was so strong and rigid, held at such a firm angle, and the fanciful, ridiculous thought occurred to her that if she touched it, that jaw might cut her open and make her bleed.
She felt as if she were bleeding now. As if she were losing a part of herself she hadn’t known existed until it was gone.
Torrie was having a child with the Countess of Worthing.
He was waiting for her to speak. It was her turn. She had to say something. But what? None of this made sense and her mind was a hopeless, helpless jumble.
“You say that her touch repulsed you, but the buttons on your trousers were open,” she reminded him tightly, those words nearly choking her in their bitterness. “She was on her knees before you when I opened the door.”
