"I'm aware."
"And now I'm his heir. Well, if you were willing to kill to get this house once, you might do it again."
"Oh, don't be absurd."
"I'm going to have to insist that you speak to me with a little more respect," James said. "But don't worry. Our time together will be short."
"You mean to leave?" She seemed to deflate slightly as some of the tension left her body, and James could see that the idea pleased her.
"What I do will be my own concern," he told her. "But I certainly mean foryouto leave."
"What are you talking about. I'm not going anywhere." Her eyes were wide now—he'd frightened her. Of course he had. She knew that he had the power to make her leave if that was what he wanted. She knew she could do nothing to overrule him.
"The rumors about you have begun to affect me, as I told you," he said. "For a time, I truly thought to leave this situation alone. I have no desire to share quarters with a stranger, believe me. It's the last thing I want. And I'm not pleased to find myself responsible for you. But now I find that I need you out of my life. I need to be able to conduct business without worrying about questions regarding a duchess and her potential crimes."
"I'm innocent of any crimes," the duchess said, folding her arms across her chest. "But you won't be able to control the gossip, I'm afraid. I've never been able to do that."
"It doesn't seem to me as though you've tried very hard to control it," he returned. "You seem as though you've been content to allow it to exist. You don't look like it bothers you to be thought of as a murderer."
"I could allow myself to be bothered or I could live my life. I'm smart enough to know that I have no control when it comes to what other people think—but it seems like you never learned that lesson yourself."
He held up a hand. "Spare me," he said. "I didn't come here to argue with you, and there's really nothing to argue about. The fact of the matter is that I am going to see you married to someone else."
"Wait a moment." The duchess frowned. "You intend to marry me off?"
"That way, you and I will be out of one another's lives for good. You will be someone else's problem, and I will no longer have to worry about answering questions about you—letting people know what I think about your guilt or innocence when it comes to the matter of my cousin's death. Soon enough, no one in my circle will think of you at all anymore when they speak to me, and that's what I want. So yes, a marriage seems just the thing to solve the dilemma."
"I don't want to marry," the duchess said. "If I wanted to marry, I would have taken steps to do so."
"Well, I don't recall asking you what you wanted," James said. "You're living in my house and you have done so for the past two years, but that's going to come to an end. As my cousin's wife, you are someone I have responsibility for, so I can't send you out into the world with no one to care for you. I'm not that kind of man."
"Send me back to my father's house, then," she suggested.
"No," James said. "A lady ought to have a husband, and that's the right thing for me to do—ensure that you have one. So that's what's going to happen."
"You can't do this. You can't just come into my home in the middle of the night and uproot my whole life!"
"If the rumors are true, that's exactly what you did to my cousin," James told her.
"The rumors arenottrue!"
"Then this will benefit you as much as it will me. It will help you to get away from the things people are saying about you. It can't possibly be the case that you truly don't care whether people believe you to be a killer or not."
"I've told you it doesn't matter to me."
He shook his head. "I don't believe you," he said. "I think that's something you tell yourself so that you can live with the situationyou find yourself in. But deep down, you want to be liked and admired just as much as anybody else does."
"You don't know me at all."
"No," I don't," he said. "And soon enough, that won't matter, because you and I won't have to see one another again. Have a good night, Duchess. I've had a long journey and I'd like to get some sleep now."
He turned and walked away from her.
His heart was pounding. He hadn't minded the confrontation, but now that he was here, he had to admit that he had other concerns—concerns that he had tried his best to ignore as he had traveled.
He couldn't escape the fact that he was now sharing a home with someone who was thought to be a murderer.
He would do his best to get rid of her quickly, but in the short term he would simply have to find a way to share space with her—and that was a terrible thought. He didn't want to admit to the fact that he was afraid of her, but he was.
