“What of your honour?” she flung at him. “What of the fact that she is a girl in her third or fourth Season whose marriage potential lowers with each year she is out? Do you truly believe she would rather be a spinster than a countess?”
“I had not thought you a proponent of marriage.”
She gave a wild, angry little laugh. “Why, because I would not marry you? I have the luxury of choice, Henry. And I—” She broke off, swallowing whatever words she had been about to say. “I have my freedom and my independence. She has neither. You, too, are a better husband than many.”
He scoffed at that. “Not good enough for you, evidently.”
“I would not make you a proper wife.”
“Is that the reason for your refusal?”
Her eyes sparked, and she gave him a little shove. “You asked me to forgive you for your role in my marriage. And I do not. I cannot.Thereis your reason.”
He felt the words like claws in his chest. Something tore, and a dull feeling of pain settled through him. The kind he had felt once before, in a small house on Ryder Street, when he had first known what it was to have his heart broken.
Briefly, he wondered what damage it was doing and if he would ever recover, or if a man could die of it.
“And that is your final answer?” he asked, and he thought he caught a flicker of distress in her eyes, as though she could sense his pain and was sorry for it. Or, perhaps, because it echoed through her body, too.
But she inhaled and the expression vanished. “Yes,” she said. “Marry Miss Winton and forget about me. Whatever it is you feel for me cannot continue forever.”
Perhaps that was true, but it had endured this long. He could not imagine a world in which he did not love her.
“And if it persists?”
She shook her head. “It won’t.”
“But if it does, Louisa. What then?”
“Then you will have to live with it.”
“And you?” he asked, although he already knew the answer; perhaps he had known it the instant he had kissed her, the moment he had pushed inside her, the moment he had held her in his arms after they had made love and felt as though she was slipping through his fingers like sand. “What will you do?”
She gathered her hair into a loose knot at the back of her head and picked her gloves up from the floor, straightening herself as she went. A lady once more.
“I will do what I have always done,” she said. “I will secure my independence by any means possible, and I will endeavour to forget you.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Henry sat alone in his room, perched on the bed that was still rumpled from their lovemaking. Before she had gone, she’d taken the letters, and no doubt now she was working to re-establish her freedom and independence from Knight. Yet another thing she would not let him help her with.
He had made a mess of things. Asking her to marry him the way he had, as though he had planned it from the off instead of realising that he could not bear to see her walk out of the door and away from him again. She had done that once before; he had not thought himself strong enough to bear it again.
Yet she had. And he was now learning the depth of his endurance.
There was only one thing for it: to leave the house party and return to London. But first he would have to explain the situation to Miss Winton and beg for her forgiveness. And to Comerford, who would no doubt brand him the fool he was. Comerford, who had never harboured more than a light-heartedtendrefor a girl, and who had never been rejected. At least, not to Henry’s knowledge.
After a long time, during which the sun set and Henry had ample time to relive every mistake regarding Louisa he had ever made, he dressed and gave his reflection a cursory glance. Acceptable, though he looked gaunt.
As luck would have it, he encountered Comerford on his way downstairs. The other man started, giving him a once-over. “Good God, man,” he said. “You look awful.”
“Thank you,” Henry said dryly.
“What happened? Your father finally gambled away the clothes on his back?”
At the mention of his father, Henry felt another surge of guilt. Duty dictated that he marry Miss Winton and use her dowry to save the estate before his father gambled the whole thing away. If he did not, everyone would suffer.
The surety he had felt in his bedchamber, Louisa dressed before him, vanished in the candlelit dark. “I hope not,” he said, “but it is always a possibility.”
