“That wasn’t what I meant,” he said.
“Wasn’t it? It is what you said.”
Henry swallowed hard, scrubbed at his mouth. “I only meant that there are some actions which cannot be undone.” She could already be pregnant. “I won’t have my child born a bastard.” Ashehad been.
She jerked back as if he had slapped her. “I’ma bastard,” shesaid, her voice warbling across the words. Her expression wavered, that firm little chin quivering. Not just anger, but hurt. Humiliation.
Christ, he was bungling this badly. “Grace—”
“No!” she thrust one hand out to stay him. “My God. You really are no different from the rest of them, are you?” She pursed her lips together to still their trembling. With a scathing sound, she began to shove in the rest of her pins. Haphazardly, with no real care. “Consider yourself absolved of whichever sins you imagine yourself guilty of,” she said. “There isn’t going to be a baby.”
“You can’t know that.” Could she?
“I know that my sister Charity has got an herbal tea which has kept her from conceiving when she didn’t wish it,” Grace said. “So there is no need to worry over that.”
Anxiety tied a knot in his gut. “We still have to marry,” he said desperately. “You’re not a virgin any longer. Your husband will expect you to be.”
“Please,” she said scornfully. “Half theTonlikely thinks I was ruined long ago. Not being a virgin won’t harm my marriage prospects. I have got an astronomical dowry after all. If I wanted a husband, I would have one with the snap of my fingers—my lack of virginity notwithstanding. I don’t need you—no.” Her breath came in fierce little pants between the clench of her teeth, a macabre parody of her passion of only an hour or so earlier. “No,” she said. “I don’twantyou, and I won’thaveyou.”
“You don’t mean that.” Shecouldn’tmean that. They hadto marry. The choice had been taken from her hands the minute he’d gotten her alone in this room.Hehad taken the choice from her hands. His mistake—and now it was his responsibility to rectify it before she suffered the consequences of his actions.
A lift of her chin. The hint of a sneer played about her mouth. “There is no scandal on earth that could persuade me to marry aman who doesn’t want to marry me. One has only to look at your face to see you couldn’t be less pleased.”
Henry yanked at the knot of his cravat, his throat gone tight. “I’ll admit that the circumstances are…less than ideal,” he said. Despite the lessons of his youth, the lengths to which he’d gone to avoid the selfsame mistakes his parents had made, somehow he’d fallen straight into them anyway. And there was no excuse for it. He’d known precisely what he’d been doing. “Grace, there isn’t any choice.” Because he’d made it for both of them already, twisted choice into necessity. He had trapped her into marriage. Even the scantest possibility of a child had ensured it. “Wemustmarry.”
“Don’t. Just—just don’t.” With a ragged little sound she turned sharply on her heel and strode for the door.
“You can’t leave,” he said desperately, rising to his feet.
“I assure you, I am quite capable of making my own way home.”
“Grace, please,” Henry pleaded. He reached for her hand, and she snatched it away from him. “I am trying to do the right thing. The proper thing.” A mistake that couldn’t be undone, but could still be remedied. He could still protect her from the consequences. But it had to be donequickly. “If nothing else, your family will expect that of me.”
“My family would never ask me to sacrifice myself on the altar of marriage just to avert a scandal. God knows we’ve been through enough of them already. I suppose it was simply my turn.” Her hand yanked the door open. For one moment she stood still as a statue, poised just over the threshold. She cast one last excoriating look over her shoulder, those emerald eyes shimmering with recriminations, with loathing.
With tears.
“I amnota mistake,” she seethed. And she slammed the door in his face.
Chapter Nineteen
Grace stole through the front door just as the hands of the longcase clock in the foyer struck three with a merry little chime. She hadn’t cried on the ride home in the hack she had found just down the street from the tavern. But, Lord, she had wanted to.
It was only now, in the safety of the house that had been her home during the Season these last several years, that it seemed permissible at last to be just as miserable and wretched as she felt.
The house was dark and quiet, still far removed from sunrise and the chaos that would no doubt erupt once the children had woken. But the time didn’t truly matter—there had never been a time at which she could not have knocked upon any of her sisters’ doors. No time too late, nor too early. They had never failed to be there when she had needed them.
She trudged up the stairs, weaving a path toward the master suite in the rear of the house, which Charity shared with Anthony. A long, lonely path, but there would solace at the end of it. Comfort. Sisterly affection.
She needed all of those things at this particular moment. And something else besides.
Grace rapped upon the door at the end of the hall and dashed at her eyes with the back of her hand as she listened through the door to the telltale sounds of Charity rising from bed and slipping into her wrapper.
A few moments later the door opened, and Charity muffled a yawn in her hand. “Grace?” she asked. “Whatever are you wearing?”
Grace gave a jerky shrug. “It’s quite a long story,” she said, her voice tight and strained. “Suffice it to say, I need some tea.”
A chiding half-smile curled the right-hand corner of Charity’s lips. “And you couldn’t have rung for a maid?”
