“So you have already judged and condemned me,” she said unsteadily, frustration stabbing deep inside her. “In your eyes I am already damned.”
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed, pouring more brandy. “When we first met, I thought you looked like an angel of innocence, but you came from another direction entirely.”
He drank off half the goblet at one gulp, his throat working against the fiery liquid. “I knew I was damned from the age of thirteen, but with time the knowledge faded. I began to think there might be some kind of salvation for even the worst of sinners. So you were sent from hell to drag me down again. And I . . .” His mouth twisted. “Fool that I am, I desire you so much that even now, in spite of everything, I want you.”
“God help you,” she whispered, chilled and repelled by his words. “You sound just like my father.”
“I’m not surprised. The esteemed vicar thought that women were the source of evil and suffering, and I am inclined to think he had the right of it.”
“Stop it!” Her voice was nearly a scream. “I can’t bear it when you talk that way! What have I done that you despise me so? I didn’t tell you who I was at first because I was fearful, and wanted to know you better. What is so dreadful about that? I never meant to hurt you.”
Her voice moved from pleading to anger. “Why am I asking you for forgiveness when it is you who have wronged me most horribly?”
“Neither of us seems capable of forgiving the other,” he answered with dry precision. “You can’t forgive my violence and I can’t forgive your duplicity. Judging by the splendid performance you’re giving, you’re no more capable of being honest with yourself than with me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Gervase banged the goblet on the table so hard that brandy splashed on his hand. His face ablaze with angry pain, he leaned forward and said with harsh precision, “You found a man who had the strongest of reasons to doubt that any woman could be trusted, seduced him with sweet loving lies to the point where he believed that trust was possible. Then when he was utterly vulnerable, you betrayed him.”
Breathing hard, he ended with a denunciation the more bitter for its softness. “Only a woman could so thoroughly and ruthlessly betray. No man would know how to be as subtly, treacherously cruel as you.”
Diana noted that even now he could not name himself as the man betrayed, and supposed that was a gauge of his pain. All she could do was repeat numbly, “I never wanted to hurt you. One reason I didn’t speak was that the more time that passed, the harder it was to explain why I had not spoken earlier. It was easier to drift, to let events take their own course.”
She stopped to marshal her arguments, trying to find words for what she had done by instinct. “I thought that if you came to love me, we could put the past behind us, that how our marriage began would be unimportant compared to how we had come to feel about one another.” She spread her hands helplessly. “I never imagined that you would think I had trapped and betrayed you from a desire for revenge. Obviously I was wrong, but is that so unforgivable? I never claimed to be perfect.”
He leaned back in the chair, his face lost in shadows, his voice tragic. “Ah, but I thought you were.”
For a moment she was shocked and unbearably moved by his words. Then anger came. “I can’t help that! It isn’t my fault if you thought me more than I am. To love is to accept the whole person, imperfections and all.”
She tried to penetrate the shadows with her gaze. “Why can’t you accept that I love you in spite of my misjudgment? I know you are not perfect, that you can be cold and suspicious, even violent, but I love you anyhow.”
“Then the more fool you are, Diana.” He downed more brandy. “I could never understand why you claimed to love me. God knows I don’t deserve it, but I wanted to believe you, and you were so convincing.” His eyes filled with weary resignation, he continued. “It is far easier to believe that you are a liar than that you ever really loved me.”
His statement filled Diana with despair. If he truly believed himself unworthy of love, how could she persuade him of her sincerity? Words were not enough, would never be enough.
Gervase gave a tired shrug. “Since you are a creature of emotion, not reason, perhaps you believe your own lies. Perhaps I should take advantage of that and retain you as a mistress.”
She could see the hunger and the longing in his eyes, could sense his barely controlled passion, but his voice was inhumanly detached. “You are the most beautiful of women, superlatively gifted in bed, able to make a man forget his very soul. It would be a pity to waste such talent, especially since I have already bought and paid for it several times over.
“You were a matchless mistress”—his gaze traveled the length of her body, lingering with insulting deliberation—“and the bed was always the most important thing between us. What say you, Diana? Shall I continue to call several nights a week and avail myself of your delightful body?”
“And you say that I know how to be cruel! I never felt like a whore before this moment.” She shrank back in her chair, hating the very idea of what he was suggesting. Bitterly she finished. “Anything I know of cruelty, I have learned from you.”
“Much better,” he said approvingly. “We have no illusions about each other. Didn’t you say something about knowing each other in our imperfections? The truth is that I am a rapist and you are a whore. In its way, a perfect marriage.”
His words triggered fury greater than any she’d ever known. “Damn you!” she cried. “Demean yourself if you will, but don’t put me on your level, for I am better than that! I have tried to forgive, to give love in the face of evil, but you are not worth it!”
Helpless tears poured down her face. “In the beginning, I hated you. The only being I hated more was God Himself, for permitting such a thing to happen. When I first met you in London I was terrified. If I had not been raised to believe that a wife must submit to her husband, if I had not felt compelled to know you better, I would never have allowed you to touch me.
“Then I learned to love you, in the face of your distrust, even when you tried to dominate and possess me.” Her voice caught in anguish. “Now, because you believe yourself unworthy, you have destroyed all the love I felt for you. Only hatred is left, and you have only yourself to blame!”
Even as she hurled the words like daggers, she knew she still loved him, but that the hatred was real, too. “The morning after our hell-born marriage, my father abandoned me in that inn, delighted to be rid of me, with not a single backward glance. I wasfifteen years old,Gervase! Drugged, raped, confused, and terrified, and he left me there penniless, with only the clothes I stood up in because he said I was now my husband’s responsibility. If the innkeeper’s wife had not taken pity on me, put me to work in the kitchens, and paid for the letter to your London lawyer, God only knows what would have become of me.”
The remembered panic of a child’s abandonment lanced through her voice. “Because I was not full grown, I almost died when Geoffrey was born. For two days and nights I was in labor, screaming in agony until I had no more voice to scream.”
Having started, she could not stop, though she knew mere words could not convey the sheer terror she had known. “I had never wanted wealth or status or fame. My greatest dream in life was a simple one: to marry a husband who loved me, to have children to love and cherish.”
Then, with infinite bitterness, “In one casual, drunken act you tore that dream away from me, along with my innocence. Then you left me, neither wife nor maid, forbidding me to see or get in touch with you. My only choices were to live as a spinster for the rest of my life or take a man in adultery. Finally, turning my back on everything I was raised to believe in, I chose to do the latter and went to London, hoping to find a man who would love me in spite of my past. And the devil in all his humor sent me toyou,my husband. And I was fool enough to love you.”
