"I will do no such thing."
His jaw tightened. He looked away.
"You are home." Lord Egerton followed his wife to the door. "She is your wife. You'll stay here until you've sorted yourself out. Or until she throws you out."
They were leaving. Actually leaving. Panic threatened to take over as the realisation hit her. She was going to be alone with her husband. There was a time she’d prayed for this, cried over this, despaired because of his absence. And recently, whenever she daydreamed about it, she thoughtshe’d be numb, indifferent. Not so. Her heart was thumping against her ribs, and she could hardly breathe.
"You made your bed, Aubrey," Lady Egerton said, pausing at the threshold. "Now lie in it. Literally, in this case."
The door opened.
"Dr Fielding will call tomorrow," Lord Egerton said, as the door closed behind them. "Good luck, my boy. You're going to need it!"
Footsteps. The front door opening. The sound of the carriage pulling away.
Silence.
Eleanor turned slowly to look at her husband.
He was staring at the ceiling, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his face the colour of ash. His hands were fisted in the cushions, knuckles white.
"So," Eleanor said quietly. “You are now completely at my mercy.”
She walked to the door and yanked it open, startling the servants who’d been standing nearby.
"Mrs Williams, summon the maids to prepare the blue bedroom immediately. My husband,” she emphasised the word and looked over the shoulder at him. His arm was draped across his eyes now, his breathing laboured, “will be staying with us."
Behind her, she heard Aubrey moan faintly. He'd need laudanum. She'd fetch it from the apothecary herself—any excuse to escape the house and catch her breath. She hurried toward the grand hallway.
She didn't look back.
Chapter two
Bloody Idiot
Darkness suited him.
Aubrey lay in what had been meant to be their matrimonial bed, unused save for this moment of supreme humiliation and stared at the ceiling he could barely discern in the gloom. He had refused to allow the curtains opened. Refused the servants' attempts to light more than a single candle. The shadows were a mercy, hiding the flush of shame that seemed permanently etched into his mind.
The pain in his hip and pelvis throbbed with each breath, a constant reminder of his own spectacular foolishness.
Idiot. Bloody idiot.
He had been riding in Hyde Park—riding too fast, taking Phantom over jumps he had no business attempting in his distracted state—when he had seen her.
Rose.
Rose Beaumont, with her dark hair and quick smile, hurrying along Rotten Row in a grey cloak. His heart had lurched. Without thinking, he had spurred Phantom toward the woman, standing in his stirrups, calling out.
And Phantom, startled by his rider's sudden movement, had balked at the next jump.
Aubrey had gone over the horse's head and landed with a sickening crunch on the frozen ground.
It had not been Rose, of course. Some other woman in a grey cloak, who had turned at his shouts with a startled, entirely unfamiliar face.
It could not have been Rose. Rose was gone, driven away to Lancashire with her family because Eleanor—his wife, his seemingly gentle and quiet wife—had made certain of it.
The morphine from the doctor's last visit had worn off hours ago. The pain was excruciating now, radiating from his hip down through his legs, making even the smallest movement agony. He needed laudanum. Desperately. But he would sooner bite through his own tongue than ring for a servant and reveal such weakness before her household.
