Her gaze held steady on Robert. Almost accusatory. He wrinkled his brow, for there was a flicker in his mind. A memory he couldn’t quite access. An itch. But then it was gone.
“For his money?” he asked. “His position?”
“No, that would be a normal reason for a father to trade his daughter,” she said. There was no mistaking the bitterness in her tone. “My father believed my nature was wanton. And as a man of what he considers a godly bent, he had to crush that in me. He believed that marrying a man like the Earl of Gainsworth would put me in line. Break me, I think he put it.”
Robert froze. There were a great many ways to break a person. He’d watched some of them, watched his friends endure horrible childhoods. He’d felt some, too. From his father. When his mother died. When he found out why.
The idea that Katherine’s father would want her unique spirit broken made him hate a man he’d never met. And it tugged him toward her. To protect her. Hold her where no one like her husband or her father could ever touch her again. He wanted to close her wounds and tend her scars.
He shook away those unexpected needs that roared up in him like a tidal wave that had been constrained but now burst through the dam. This conversation was about understanding, nothing more. What he would share with her could heal some of this pain, but that was not his responsibility.
It never would be. This was a temporary distraction and it would end.
“Didhe break you?” he asked.
She sucked in a sharp inhalation of breath. “My husband turned out not to be the man my father believed him to be. Oh, he looked as pious as my father, but he was not. He liked a young wife. Liked having me on his arm and implying what his prowess was to have me. And he liked my body. He used it, training me in what he liked. Wanted.”
Robert tensed. “Forced?” he asked, thinking of her earlier accusation that he would simply take what he wanted if she didn’t offer it freely.
“No,” she said swiftly, and to his great relief. “Iwastitillated by what he desired. What a man and a woman shared in their marriage bed. And at first, I was an eager student. But as weeks passed, I began to feel more and more empty. He had pleasure, that was clear. But for me? There was never anything but flutters. A tease of something more that he never allowed.”
Robert shook his head in disgust. Katherine was so damned responsive, it was incredible to him that a man would not tend to her pleasure. Seeing it last night was like watching magic.
“He never brought you to completion?” he asked.
Her cheeks brightened with embarrassed color and she darted her gaze away swiftly. “Can I—do I—must I…”
“No. Not if you don’t want to share.”
She kept her gaze from his for what felt like an eternity. Robert so wanted to touch her. To kiss her. To take away these painful memories, wash them clean with sensation. And yet he didn’t. He waited for her, as patiently as he could.
She finally glanced up. “I began to touch myself.”
He blinked in shock.Therewas an image. Katherine splayed out before him, hands between her legs, eyes locked with his as she pleasured herself. Readied herself for him and what he would do to her.
“There was pleasure then,” she admitted softly. “But Gainsworth discovered what I was doing. He accused me of being just what my father had always said. A whore. Dirty. Wrong.Wanton.”
She emphasized the last word sharply, leading Robert to wonder how many times it had been spat at her. By her father, by her husband. No wonder how she recoiled when she heard it whispered by those in Society.
“He was a bastard,” he said.
She shrugged, but there was a flash of gratitude to her expression. As if she was pleased to find an ally in her tale. He supposed she would be. So many were against her. Both in truth and in her mind. The fact that she was telling him this at all took so much courage.
And trust. Which he hadn’t earned. Which he vowed now, just to himself, never to betray as she had been betrayed before. Loyalty, at least, he knew he could give.
“I suppose you wonder about the night he died,” she whispered.
He did wonder, though he’d never considered asking her. That night was a private moment that had already been dragged into the light in the worst way possible. It had buckled her beneath the weight of gossip and half-truth. It had brought her to this place where she could hardly breathe, couldn’t look at him, believed that anyone who knew her only saw her as the countess who had killed her husband with her wanton needs.
“Of course you do,” she said, almost beneath her breath. “It is all anyone wonders when they look at me.”
Her cheeks darkened again, the color of humiliation. The color of pain. The color of desperation.
He waited, holding his breath, as she struggled. At last, he moved just a little closer. “Tell me, Katherine. Not to satisfy my curiosity, but because I can see it devouring you from the inside. Tell me so it doesn’t destroy you.”
Chapter Thirteen
Devouring her from the inside. Yes, that was the most apt description Katherine had heard to describe what she felt. Those feelings rose up all the higher as she confessed to Roseford. She hadn’t meant to do that. She’d been determined to keep the wall up between them, to only allow herself a bit of pleasure.
