“Then what? You wouldn’t have married me?”
“I’m not sure I ever had a choice in that regard,” she said. “My father wanted me to marry you. You’re the only person in the world who has ever offered to provide for my sister. I don’t know how I could have made a different decision.”
“I’m surprised you’re bold enough to raise this subject with me,” Arthur said. “I didn’t expect that you would come and talk to me about it directly.”
“And that’s why you never bothered to tell me?” she asked. “That’s why you thought you could leave me in my room, alone, with no discussion of this whatsoever? You thought you didn’t owe me an explanation and that you could get away with not giving one because you assumed I would never be bold enough to ask?”
“Well, I didn’t think of it in those terms,” he replied, regarding her as if she was an interesting essay in a book—something he wanted to learn more about, possibly, but not a person who mattered to him. “But since you say it that way, yes, I suppose that’s why I didn’t tell you. It never occurred to me that you would want to know.”
“Of course I would want to know.”
“But you said yourself that it wouldn’t have changed anything for you. That you would still have wanted to enter into this marriage. What difference would it have made if you had known?”
“At least I would haveknown,” she said, unable to articulate why it would have meant so much to her to feel respected and why she felt so strongly disrespected by the current state of things. “Thank you for your explanation, Your Grace.”
“Arthur,” he corrected her.
She had used his honorific on purpose. If he could put distance between the two of them, so could she. She nodded now, but shedidn’t use his name. “I apologize for disturbing you,” she said. “I’ll return to my bed and leave you to your work.”
She turned and fled the room before he had the chance to call her back. She didn’t know whether he would have done it or not, and she didn’t really want to find out. She didn’t want to give him the chance to disappoint her again. Not tonight.
Back in her room, she extinguished her lantern and sat in the dark, thinking about the way her life looked now. What the future held—and what it didn’t.
How she wished her sister was here to talk to! She would have given anything to discuss the day’s events with Felicity. Felicity would have understood the way she was feeling.
Even Caroline, the closest thing she had to a friend here, couldn’t really understand. At least, Isabella doubted she could. And Caroline was still too new to her for Isabella to want to turn to her in this.
She lay awake long into the night, pondering, trying to decide whether this marriage had been worth it, and when the sun appeared over the horizon, she was still awake and no closer to an answer.
CHAPTER 10
After the confrontation of the night before, Arthur didn’t expect to see Isabella at breakfast. He was surprised, then, to come downstairs and find that she was already at the table. She’d beaten him there and had helped herself to eggs and sausage.
She didn’t look up when he arrived. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he said cautiously, feeling strangely as though he didn’t want to provoke her. He didn’t enjoy the feeling. This was his house, after all, and he shouldn’t have been worrying about provoking a lady who had been here less than a day.
She was so impressive to him, though. The way she had come down to breakfast as if she owned the place, taken her seat at the table, and started to eat. She hadn’t waited for him to give her permission. Last night’s altercation had had the opposite effect of what he had expected. It hadn’t cowed her at all—it had emboldened her.
“Did you sleep well, Your Grace?” she asked.
And really, that was taking things a bit far. He understood that she had been frustrated with him last night, but were they going to go on like this? “I’ve asked you to call me Arthur,” he reminded her.
Now she did look up at him, setting down her knife and fork in order to meet his gaze. “I know what you asked me to do,” she said.
“Are you refusing to comply?”
“Have I ever refused to give you what you wanted?”
“You mean, other than the very first time we ever met?”
She planted her hands on her hips. “I don’t know that you can count it as me refusing to marry you when we’re currently married,” she said. “I think at this point, Your Grace, you need to concede that I did give you what you wanted on that occasion.”
“Only because you saw that you were going to get something out of it yourself. It isn’t as if you married me out of any desire to grant me my wish.”
“And is that what you want? A lady who marries you, not because she herself has any reason or desire to do so, but simply because she wants to please you?” There was a fire in her eyes, that same fire that had so intrigued him upon their first meeting.“If that was what you wanted, Your Grace, then I’m not the only one who made a mistake entering into this arrangement.”
“Do you truly think that you made a mistake?” he asked her.
