“I begin to think I am not welcome anywhere within these walls,” he told her, sliding the spine of the volume he had been perusing at her entrance back onto its shelf.
Even the books had been changed. The grim Latin tomes of his forebears and other achingly boring works had been removed. In their place were poetry and novels. New books with fresh spines by authors who were living contemporaneously instead of long dead. Briefly, he wondered what she had done with the old books, before deciding he didn’t care.
Her full lips tightened, and she tilted her head at him in a way that was at once familiar and yet new. “Why should you believe that you were?”
“Because this is my home.” The words felt strange on his tongue as he pushed away from the shelves and moved toward her. “Because you are my wife.”
And that word felt odd too. She was the wife he had taken in the wake of his best friend’s death, torn between the desire he felt for her and the crushing despair of losing the man who had been like a brother to him.
But shewashis wife, even if the appellation felt unfamiliar for its lack of use. She was his wife, whom he had hurt. His sunshine-haired, freckled, beautiful girl who had been fearless and bold and wild. But she was different now. She had blossomed into an elegant duchess who looked at him with knives in her eyes and spoke to him with ice in her heart.
How could she be so familiar, and yet so much a stranger? She was at once his home and his heartbreak, his greatest comfort and his everlasting regret.
“You’re too late in remembering that I am your wife,” she said quietly. “And presently, the duty feels quite foreign, given your extended absence.”
What could he say to that? She was right. He had made a terrible mistake in leaving her as he had, though it had taken him a great deal of time to realize that, lost in the abyss of grief and the guilt of the desire he felt for Vivi. A desire he had promised Percy he would never act on years ago before his friend’s death. It was the only vow he had ever broken.
“Is that what I am to you, Vivi? A duty?” He reached for her, unable to help himself.
Needing to touch her. His heart was thundering hard in his chest despite her angry reaction to his return, despite her cool aloofness. God, how he had missed this woman in his life, in his heart, in his bed. He felt so much in that moment. Too much.
He felt everything.
But she flinched away from his hand, his fingers only succeeding in glancing over silk before she flitted to the opposite end of the library like a startled butterfly.
“I want you to leave, Court,” she told him instead of answering his question, stopping before a mullioned window to gaze down at the sprawling park below. “I am expecting guests in two weeks’ time, and Lady Clementine has already arrived. It would be best for you to go before anyone else comes to Sherborne Manor. The fewer witnesses to our acrimonious marriage, the less salacious gossip shall be spread. Our estrangement is already well known in Society. Your presence here will only muddy the waters unnecessarily.”
The resentment in her voice was like the barbs of a thousand tiny pinpricks all at once. But one word concerned him more than all the rest.
“Our estrangement?” he repeated.
“Yes, our estrangement.” She enunciated each syllable crisply, her voice carrying a whiplike crack. “How else would you characterize your abandonment of me for an entire year, Bradford?”
Was that how she saw the time he had spent away from England? That he had abandoned her?
“I didn’t abandon you, Vivi. I always intended to return.” Court struggled to find a means of sufficiently expressing the turbulent emotions so at odds within him.
There had been grief, vast and deep and all-consuming, upon word of Percy’s drowning at sea. And then there had been the night he had surrendered to the long-burning desire for his best friend’s sister and the accompanying intense guilt of betrayal that had suffocated him afterward. He had hoped that time and distance would diminish the ache, that if he repented long enough, he would be able to forgive himself.
“You intended to return,” she scoffed, her lip curling in a sneer. And even looking at him as if he were the lowest creature alive laid before her, she was the most beautiful sight he had ever beheld. “What a comforting thought.”
Her biting sarcasm was not lost on him.
“You didn’t always have such enmity toward me,” he said, trying to find the old Vivi. The Vivi he’d once known so well. The Vivi he had held in his arms the night when they had found solace in each other.
She shot him a seething glance now. “That was before you left me alone in England without a backward glance. Before I was subject to all the stories of your womanizing ways on the Continent.”
He hadn’t womanized. He had been faithful during his absence and his travels. He had expected she would have done the same. For the first time, he wondered if she had strayed. If she had spent time in another man’s bed, in his arms. His gut clenched violently at the thought. Regardless, her assessment was unfair.
“I was not an unfaithful husband.” He held her gaze. “You know why I left.”
“No.” She shook her head, the ice leaving her for a moment, sadness shining through the polished veneer she had donned. “I don’t know why. I’ve never understood it, not that morning and not any of the mornings that have followed. But nor do I care any longer. The past is where it belongs. Whereyoubelong. Now, if you please, see your trunks packed. There is another train leaving this afternoon, and you can easily be on it before any of my guests discover you were ever here.”
He was moving again. Drawn to her, to the need to dismantle the distance she kept attempting to establish between them. Drawn to her as he had always been, from the time she had made her debut in Society and he had seen her as far more than a girl. Far more than his best friend’s younger sister, though he had known he could never act upon his attraction to her.
He was suddenly furious with himself for staying away as long as he had. Furious with Percy for leaving them. Angry with Vivi for her coldness toward him, for all the ways she had changed.
For wanting her more than he ever had.
