“He needed me to be perfect,” Hugh said.
“Your father.” Her voice barely carried.
He nodded, still staring at the shabby house. “My father. Hugh the first, Hugh the greatest, for I have likely never lived up to his name, at least not in his eyes. I’m sure he rolls in his grave regularly when I make the wrong decision.”
“That sounds like a great deal of pressure for a boy.”
“It was,” he said, thickness entering his throat. “I could not make a mistake. If I didn’t know how to do something immediately, I had failed and that was unacceptable.”
“But failure is how we learn,” Amelia said. “Did he not know that?”
Hugh glanced at her over his shoulder and saw the pain on her face. Empathy for him. He wanted to reach for her, but turned away instead. “Apparently not. He required that I hide my emotion. Anger was not to be accepted. Certainly not fear or pain. I had to hide any lack of understanding. Any need for more. If I didn’t he would—”
He broke off. He didn’t want to say whathewould do. How the crack of a switch felt against his skin. How the fear of worse to come felt.
“Hugh,” she whispered, and then her hand touched his arm. Once again he felt the weight of her fingers on his skin, but this time it didn’t feel like pressure. It felt like relief.
He looked down, lost in gray-blue eyes. Her soothing, safe gaze felt like a cocoon that he could wrap around that broken part of him. Perhaps even heal, which had never felt possible before.
Now she offered that, and in that striking moment he realized one fundamental fact. He loved her.
He nearly staggered beneath the weight of that realization. Love was something he hadn’t truly believed in for a very long time. He had slowly been a convert to its existence as he watched his friends find it. But when it came to himself? He hadn’t dared to dream there would be love in his future. Certainly he’d never thought he’d find it in such a short time, after such an intense and troubled exchange of lies and passion.
And yet here it was, in the form of the utterly beautiful, completely perfect woman who held his hand. A woman who in no way felt the same about him. Yesterday she had declared it once more, lamenting all she’d lost when they wed.
The pain of that fact, combined with the other, was almost unbearable.
She reached up and touched his cheek. “I see all those hurts, still alive in your eyes,” she whispered. “And I wish there was some way to take it all away.”
He leaned into her palm. Old hurts stung, yes. But it was the new one that burned. Boiled. Sliced like a knife.
“You are taking it away right now,” he whispered.
“You and I are more alike than perhaps I ever knew,” she said, her fingers stroking his jawline and sending shivers through him. “We have fought our whole lives to earn the love that should have been freely given. We havebothfelt like outsiders to our own existence.”
He pressed his lips together. Yes, there was that. That common bond that now flowered between them. She was here with him now, after all. Looking up at him with sweetness and gentleness, with true caring.
Wasn’t it possible that she could love him? Given time, if he worked at doing exactly what she suggested, earning her love…couldn’t she?
“You are looking at me so closely,” she said, her fingers dropping from his face. “I’m becoming a little nervous.”
He pushed aside the thoughts in his mind. He would not share them. He would simply start today, now, to show her that he was worthy of her heart. That was all he could do. Woo his wife and try to make up for what he’d done in the past.
Even if she didn’t know about it.
“You shouldn’t be,” he said, hoping his voice sounded calmer than he felt. “I was only pondering that despite our shared pains in our past, we handle them so differently.”
“How so?” she asked, stepping away from him toward the little playhouse. She leaned down and smiled as she peered into the window at the chair that sat half-broken in the middle of the dirty, rundown room.
“You flow with change,” he said. “As elegantly as you dance or walk or move at all.”
She blushed as she faced him. “You think I do?”
“I know you do. I’ve watched you. I stole everything you ever wanted.” He bent his head. “And you glided into the future you didn’t want with a grace and kindness that I certainly have not earned.”
“It was a difficult situation,” she said slowly. “For both of us. I will admit that I hated you at first, but you are quite frustrating, Hugh, for you make it impossible to hate you for long. And since I cannot hate you, and since thisisthe life I will lead, I feel the best choice is to make it a life I want. There are a good many things about it…about you…that make that easy.”
He frowned. “I have not found that talent of optimism in the face of unwanted change. Where you are light, I seem to be dark.”
