He could not marry Isabella.
When he had felt nothing for anyone else, it had been an easy decision. She wanted a wealthy husband and escape; he wanted a pretty wife and to hide from his responsibilities. Neither had wanted to be better than their circumstances had made them.
Now, everything had changed. He did want to be better—Emily made him want to be better. He wanted to make herlaugh, to ease her burdens and care for her in ways no one else had.
He did not want to marry Isabella.
No, hecouldnot. No man could stomach marrying one sister when he craved the other. Any respect he might have had for Isabella had disintegrated after learning how absolutely she had taken advantage of Emily.
“Emily,” he said, not knowing how to tell her, but knowing he must.
“We must think of Isabella.” Emily paced past him, the ice preventing her from striding. “She deserves better than a sister who would betray her in this way.”
“You haven’t betrayed her, Em.”
“How can you say that when I kissed the man she is going to marry?” She touched her lips. “Iaskedyou to kiss me.”
“If you want to get technical about it, darling, I rather suspect I begged.”
“What do the nuances matter when the action itself was so cruel?”
“She doesn’t know, and she won’t. And besides, it doesn’t matter—”
“Of course it matters!” She placed the back of her hand against her forehead in a gesture of frustration. “How could I have been so selfish?”
He almost laughed at the idea of Emily being selfish when it was Isabella who had been selfish all their lives. And now he was being selfish, because he wanted everything.
“Listen to me,” he said, reaching for her arm and tugging her to a stop. She looked up at him, cheeks flushed and eyes shining with shame. “It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, or how you behave, because I can’t do it.”
“What do you mean? You can’t do what?”
He took a deep breath. “I can’t marry Isabella.”
Chapter Sixteen
Thewordssoundedasthough they had come from far away. She grasped them, struggling to make sense of what he had said. When she’d first heard of the match, she had been disappointed, but now she knew better—she knew what sort of man Oliver was, and what a good husband he would make.
She could not allow any man to break her sister’s heart the way Marlbury had broken hers.
“Don’t say that,” she said, the words thick. “You have to marry her. Youpromised.”
“I did, before I knew what it was I was promising.” He gripped her hand, but she tugged it free. “But we are not engaged. There’s nothing between us but—”
“Butyour word.”
“We made idle plans when I thought money alone could bring harmony to an ill-suited marriage. That is all, and nothing more. There is no formal agreement, no arrangement, and what little expectation there may be will soon be repaired. I’ll admit my actions are not what I might have hoped they would be, but thatdoes not make your sister an innocent maiden left to perish in her own grief.”
“An ill-suited marriage?” She remembered Marlbury, those heady summer days where he had wooed her with sunshine and his father’s whisky. He’d promised her love and fidelity, and with him, she had thought she had a future. Happiness.
That had lasted just a few weeks, but in her young mind, she had spent a lifetime in his company.
She recalled the way he had lain her back on the picnic rug and pushed her skirts up to her waist, kissing away her protests and telling her love made him do it.
Love made him do so many things—and she had welcomed it, believing that this was the highest form of adoration.
But that had not been the worst part. No—that had been later, when he had stopped coming. And then, when she had cornered him, desperate and heartbroken, he had attributed his lies to her consumption of the whisky. Told her that she could never be tempting to a man like him; compared her ailing charms to those of other girls who had pleased him better; claimed that she was delusional to think he would ever want to be with someone like her.
Isabella could not suffer the same.
