“I have had only weeks to acclimate myself to the truth of my circumstances,” he said. “But the circumstances of my birth were never ideal.” He dealt a fresh hand, striving to conceal the wince that wanted to creep across his face. “I’ve known my parents’ marriage began in scandal since I was very young,” he said. “It was still fresh, then. I grew up brawling with boys my own age who disparaged me and my mother for it. Mostly, they disparaged my mother, and I—I hated that. But more than that, I hated myself. For causing her such shame. For being the reason society shamed her.”
Grace capably took a third win and collected the deck again. “I think your mother would disagree with you,” she said.
“Yes; so I have recently learned,” he said as she shuffled. “But for so many years, I thought she must be ashamed of me. That I was a living symbol of the scandal she’d weathered.” A low sigh as he examined his new hand. He raked his good hand through his hair in frustration. “I knew it had not been easy for my parents,” he said. “In the eyes of society, my father married well beneath him. But neither of them thought so, and they were so happy together, and I thought—if not for me, for my very existence, their lives would have been…so much easier.”
“Did they ever say they were ashamed of you?” Grace asked as she dealt him the single card he signaled for. Which, once again, would not be quite enough to win.
“No,” he said. “To be clear, I never doubted they loved me. But they spoke, occasionally, of the mistakes they had made which could not be undone. And I thought myself to be one of them. All my life, I have been ashamed of what I had cost them. And so I committed myself to avoiding those same mistakes. To being the perfect son…as a sort of penance, I suppose.” Hecollected the deck once again, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
Four losses for him already. Their game would be over in seven hands.
Grace settled her palms upon the table, waiting for her new hand. He was warming to the task, managing the cards smoothly even though she was certain it must pain his ruined knuckles. Still, it would not enable him to outwit her. “How unfortunate, then, that you made the same mistake.”
His eyes lifted to hers, bright and intense. “You were never the mistake,” he said. “The mistake was in placing you in the same position as my father had once placed my mother.” With one hand, he tugged at his cravat. She watched him palm a king with the other, and felt…almost proud. Even if she had caught him at it, it had been ably done. Had he managed to deal himself an ace, besides?
She revealed her hand, made up of a few other cards she’d collected earlier in the game. “Twenty,” she said.
Henry blinked in surprise and turned over his own hand. “Twenty-one.”
Another tiny flicker of pride in her chest. “That was well done of you, palming the king.”
Disappointment flashed across his face. “You saw that?”
“Of course I saw. I was betting on you not having the ace.” Still, he’d managed to eke out a single win.
As she dealt a fresh hand, he said, “I was a virgin, too.”
Her hands froze on the cards. “What?” she asked with an odd little laugh. “You were not. You couldn’t have been. How could you have—have—” Done what he’d done. How he’d done it. And he wasthirty, for God’s sake! How many men had not had at least one lover by his age? What man of his station hadn’t taken at least one mistress?
“If you think I hadn’t imagined exactly that with you a hundred times before, you’re out of your mind,” he said. “Iwasn’t ignorant. But I wasn’t willing to place a woman—anywoman—in the same position my mother had once occupied. So I abstained.”
Until he hadn’t. Until he’d surrendered to a need he’d denied the whole of his life. Until he’d wanted her badly enough to ignore his principles, to forget the rigid strictures by which he’d lived his life? For the first time in memory, her fingers shuffled the cards with something less than perfect control.
“Instead, I placedyouin my mother’s position,” he said. “And all I could think was that I might have given you the same shame she had suffered. That you might have to endure the same slings and arrows lobbed at you. And perhaps there would be another little boy—”
“Or girl,” she interjected as she studied her cards.
“Or girl,” he conceded easily as he signaled for another card. “A child who would grow up brawling, just as I had. Who would grow up feelingless thanfor circumstances beyond their control, only because I had failed to control myself. I admit I panicked—”
Grace made a scathing sound in her throat.
“But it wasn’t for the reasons you imagined. It was because Iwantedto marry you. Only I’d made it a necessity instead, and I knew—I knew it would reflect upon you the same way it had upon my mother. That there would be whispers and speculation, and if there had turned out to be a child, then people would be counting the days since our marriage in an effort to paint you as some sort of wanton creature. I didn’t want that for you.”
“Henry,” she said softly. “You can’t control what people say.”
“No,” he said, and his eyes dropped to his cards. “But I didn’t want to be the cause of such slander against you. I didn’t want you to suffer for my actions.” A low sigh as he surveyed his hand. “Another card,” he said, dispiritedly.
Of course, he had to take another card on thirteen points. He could hardly expect to win otherwise. Probably, she thought, hedidn’t expect to win at all.
She slid a card across the table to him.
His brows pinched as he flipped the card, revealing an eight. “Twenty-one,” he said in bewilderment. “A draw?”
Grace turned her own cards. “I’ve only got twenty.”
A long moment of silence drew out, taut and thrumming with tension. “You let me win,” he accused at last. “Why?”
“You’ve got only two wins,” she said. “There are still plenty of hands left. If I so choose, I can still make it a resounding defeat for you.”
