He loomed beside her, his coat cut so sharply across his shoulders that if it were any tighter, the seams might burst. But though he would have been close enough to touch if she’d reached out, he maintained a careful distance between them. Evidently whatever emotions he had once harboured for her were long gone.
“What would you like me to say?” she asked.
“That you hate me. Say it and be done.”
She made a tiny, bitter sound at the back of her throat. “As though it’s as simple as that.”
He turned then, looking down at her with a frown, his eyes a soaring ice-blue, the deepest shade of the winter sky. Just as frozen, just as distant. Yet there was a steadiness within it that grounded her, a sense that he was as immoveable as the sky itself. “Is it not simple?”
Yes.
And yet no.
“Very well,” she said, her throat tight. “I hate you. Are you satisfied now?”
He held her gaze for another long moment, and she felt restless underneath it, as though he was seeing more than she would ever have wanted him to.
“Do you truly think Iwantyou to hate me?” he asked quietly.
Anger rose in her, quick and endless as a rolling wave. “I don’t know, Henry. When I went to you then, I thought I knew you. And yet evidently I was wrong. How should I presume to know you now?”
His mouth pressed into a hard line—his mouth that ought to have been bestowed on an angel or the devil incarnate; a mouth for sin that she had tasted in her youth and never forgotten. “If I had loved you any less, Louisa, I would have taken you to Gretna Green when we were first betrothed and made you my wife.”
Hurt flared, sharp and bright as fireworks. “Then why didn’t you?”
“You know why,” he said, voice low. His eyes were blue flame. “Because I wanted our union to be honourable.”
“And so you waited until it was too late,” she said. “How convenient for you.”
“What would you rather I had done? Begun our life together in debt and scandal?” He was impassioned now. Henry Beaumont, he of the iron restraint, had his teeth clenched and his jaw tight and his fists balled by his sides. Henry Beaumont, whom she had supposed to have had all passion disciplined out of him by the army, was looking at her with so much heat in his eyes that it was a wonder she was not singed. “I was merely a boy, barely into adulthood, who wanted you so badly I could not tell what was selfishness and what was love. I was not ready for marriage when you first asked me, and so I bid you to wait. Had I known that Bolton intended . . . but I did not know until you came to my home and begged me to run away with you. I had not a penny to my name. What was I to have done? Ruined you? With your mother to support, is it a surprise that I believed—as I did—that Bolton would have been a better match for you?”
Ahead of them, George and Caroline strolled and laughed, oblivious to the scene behind them. Louisa’s chest tightened.
“If it had not been for your mistaken sense of honour,” she said. “If you had just married me when I first desired you to, we might have been happy.”
“We would have been penniless.”
“At least you would have loved me.”
He shook his head. “And how long would love have fed us?”
“Why, have you been starving all these years?”
The look he gave her then surprised her a little; it was devouring, hungry, an expression that truly did speak of starvation and denial. His jaw was tight, but when he spoke, hisvoice was gentle. “My mother would not have accepted us, at least not for the first several years. We would have been outcasts with no home we could flee to, at least at first. We would have had even less than I had when you came to me—and I had little enough then.”
Her throat burned and her eyes stung, but she forced the emotion back. Henry may have taken her heart, but he would never have her tears. “Understand this,” she said, her voice so low he leant in to hear her. “I would rather weather a thousand scandals, I would rather have lived as your mistress, than marry Bolton again.” A line appeared between his brows and his eyes darkened with consternation. Perhaps even regret. “Comfort yourself with the thought that you did the right thing. Console yourself with talk of duty and honour. But I went to you with my eyes wide open. I knew precisely what it was I was risking, and I was prepared to face the consequences.”
“Knowing what I did then, I thought the consequences of ruin were worse than marrying a man who could provide for you.”
“I had already decided otherwise,” she said, raising her chin to look him in the eyes. “And you dismissed me.”
Her words echoed in the space between them, and his nostrils flared as though her words had been a blow. The unnatural paleness of his face was more acute in the light, the lines drawn more firmly across it.
“I would have risked everything of mine,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Everything, Louisa. But I could never have risked everything of yours.”
“That’s what you don’t understand.” Her voice was sharp, because if it had been anything other than cutting, she might have let him see her hurt. “In abandoning me, that isexactlywhat you did.”
Chapter Three
