“No, and you don’t want the bother of attending to my banking either, do you?”
“What nonsense is this?”
But she ignored him, raging on. “Is it too much trouble to you, my lord? Just as I have been from the start, is that it? Well, I did not ask for your interference, if you remember. It was no scheme of mine to drag you all over the country in search of my past.”
“Have you run mad?” Raoul began to feel utterly disoriented. “Why are you ripping up at me like this? I was trying to help, for God’s sake!”
“No, you weren’t,” she blazed. “You wanted to be rid of me, and this —” she threw the bank note at him — “is what you think of me! Even at the auction you thought I was worth twenty, you arrogant, hateful —”
About to answer in kind as she broke off, Raoul caught the husky note and his chest caved in. She was not angry. She was distressed. He could not bear it.
“Felicity, don’t!”
He came around the desk and tried to catch her by the shoulders. She evaded him, backing off and throwing up her hands.
“Don’t touch me! I can’t have you touch me!”
A resurgence of hurt cascaded into his chest and he paused. “That’s why you refused me, isn’t it? Felicity, do you find me so repulsive?”
“Repulsive?” Was it bewilderment in her face? “Of course not.”
A thread of hope flickered. “Then why do you shy away from me? Tell me, pray. Let me understand.”
“Because I can’t beconvenient, Raoul. To live without affection? Without feeling? I couldn’t do it.”
There were tears in her eyes and he wanted more than anything to catch her up in his arms, but her very words held him aloof. He hesitated, but the yearning forced him to try. “That’s why I let you go, Felicity. I hoped, if you went to Angelica that you might, in time, learn to feel some affection for me.”
The film in her eyes cleared as she stared at him. “Learn to?”
“Is it asking too much?” Anxiety rode him. “I don’t expect you to feel as I do, at least not all at once, but in time —”
“What are you talking about? Feel as you do? You don’t care for me! You wanted a wife who would not bore you, remember?”
He recalled his words with an odd feeling of distance. Had he said so? It seemed impossible he could have been so stupid. He passed a distracted hand across his brow. “Yes, perhaps I did think it. At the start.” He tried to remember back to the previous evening, before his world had been turned upside-down. “When first I broached the subject, if I am honest, I did think that was it.”
Felicity’s eyes flared again. “I knew it! Then when I said I would not, you went cold on me and threw me out of the house!”
Exasperated, he flung up his hands. “I wish you will stop talking nonsense, you idiotic woman! I think I must indeed have windmills in my head to be falling in love with such a shrew!”
Felicity’s mind blanked. She stared at him, quite unable to believe she had heard what she thought he’d said. Her tone was hushed. “Falling in love?”
His mouth twisted in that wry look. “Yes, God help me! Though indeed I did not know it until you pierced my heart with your affirmation that you couldn’t marry me.”
Felicity blinked at him. “What?”
He eyed her with an intensity she found painful. “Oh,Icouldnot. That is what you said. With so much revulsion in your tone, Felicity!”
Stunned, she gazed at him, a wild hope fluttering in her bosom. She struggled to get the words out. “I said it because I could not bear the thought of — of being obliged to accept your — your caresses without — without responding as I wished to.”
It was Raoul’s turn to blink. “Why in the world would you not respond? If you wanted to, I mean.”
Felicity sucked in a sobbing breath. “Convenient wives are not expected to … to be affectionate in … in that kind of situation.”
“But I want you to be affectionate!”
“Well, I couldn’t be if I was only convenient, could I?”
His gaze softened into amusement. “You idiot woman!” But then his features became once again suffused with anxiety, his voice rough as she had never heard it before. “Felicity, does this mean —? If you are saying this, if you want to be affectionate, does it mean —? Do you feelanythingfor me? Any tenderness at all?”
