Love. Anger. Hatred.
Pain.
Blistering, soul-piercing, mind-shattering pain.
She somehow managed to stumble backward. Where was her chamber? She fumbled along the corridor until she could locate the door to her suite.
This was what he’d been attempting to tell her all along. This was the marriage he’d envisioned.
She closed the solid door behind her. She couldn’t allow him into her room. She couldn’t allow him to touch her tonight. She couldn’t imagine allowing him to touch her ever again.
After putting his hands on another woman.
Emily held a handkerchief over her mouth to muffle the cry she couldn’t hold back. God! It was the one he’d handed her earlier today.
When she’d begged his forgiveness.
When she’d practically begged him to make love to her.
She could not tell Cecily any of this. She felt humiliated. Mortified. Degraded. Marcus never told her that he loved her. She’d been naïve to hope his love would come.
Beyond naïve. She’d been irrational to imagine he’d feel something he’d promised her he never could. To imagine that she was good enough…
Would he push his member into a total stranger and then expect to come back and put it inside of her? Inside of his wife?
This thought stirred her to action. She locked the door and even slid a chair beneath the knob.
She never wanted to see him again. She never wanted to speak to him again. At the same time, she wept over the loss of him.
She wept for the loss of hope. Because she’d come to hope for more from him. She’d come to hope for morefor herself.
Hope was for fools.
She pulled on her dressing gown and snuffed the candle.
When he knocked loudly a few minutes later, she feigned sleep. She wished she could have fallen asleep. Any nightmare would have been better than the thoughts tumbling around her brain that night.
All night.
Tormenting her. Taunting her. And finally, teaching her.
When the sky finally turned from black to purple and blue, exhausted from her thoughts, Emily finally drifted off.
She understood now. She’d not bother him again.
She’d locked him out.
Marcus had spent the night on a smaller bed. On a very thin mattress. In a considerably less spacious room than his wife.
He hadn’t slept a great deal.
He’d not considered her such a deep sleeper that she wouldn’t hear him knocking late last night.
Although, his memory failed him as to the actual time.
He’d consumed far too much ale. And then afterward, far too much whiskey. Nothing like the offerings in Prescott’s study, but a man made do with what was available.
Any other lady and Marcus would have attributed the locked door to feminine outrage.
