Dear Gemma,
Marry your earl.
Be happy,Hal
Chilled to the core, Gemma dropped the note.In all the years she’d raced around London, scandalizing the matrons and debutantes and her priggish half-brother, she had never felt this…shamed.
Not since that first handsome, titled young gentleman at her first ball danced with her—then dropped her hand with horrified disdain when a friend leaned over to whisper Gemma’s scandalous background in his ear.
Well.She hadn’t cried then, and she wouldn’t cry now.
Not that she could, even if she tried.She blinked her hot, too-dry eyes and wondered dully if there was something wrong with her.
Hal certainly seemed to think so, if he could leave her side after the night they’d shared.If he could so easily shove her into the arms of another man.
Taking a deep breath, Gemma realized the blanket she’d clutched around her shoulders smelled of the mingled scents of their passions, earthy and darkly sensual.
With a curse, she cast it off and grabbed for her clothes, thanking heaven that she had fallen into the habit of leaving her corset laced so she could get into it without any help.She struggled a bit to tie all her tapes and button her sleeves, but she managed it.
Gemma felt slightly better once fully clad, but it still took a surprising amount of self-restraint not to pull the copper pots and pans down from their hooks on the wall and throw them about the room in a fit of vengeful rage.She had to remind herself it wasn’t Hal’s house; he was merely a caretaker.
She didn’t want to destroy the kitchen of some absent duke.She wanted to destroy Hal.
She wanted to marry Hal.
And he didn’t want her.Or, perhaps more likely, he’d already gotten exactly what he wanted and was done with her.
She’d given herself to a man who cared so little for her, he palmed her off on another man while she was still languid and sticky with the residue of their lovemaking.
Well.Call it what it was.Not “lovemaking.”
Fornication.
Fucking.
It occurred to her that she’d finally sunk to the level most of the Ton had always insisted she was destined to occupy.
She could only be grateful that no one knew what a fool she’d been.
Pulling numbness around herself like a cloak, Gemma somehow made her way out of the manor and out through the walled garden to the path.
She hurried down the track, grateful at last for the hated Wellington boots as she slipped and splashed through puddles and slicks of mud.Thunder rumbled ominously in the distance, but she managed to make it back to the inn before the storm.
She slipped upstairs to change, praying she wouldn’t encounter anyone, and for once, luck was with her.Gemma made it through the taproom and up the back staircase unobserved—only to run headlong into the Earl of Stonehaven in the upstairs hallway.
This day truly could not get any worse.
The earl blinked down at Gemma, clearly nonplussed.Gemma smiled tightly and bobbed the briefest curtsey of her life.Her gaze darted to the door of the room she and Lucy shared; so close, and yet, so far.
“Are you well, Lady Gemma?”he asked, as always, all gentlemanly solicitousness and care.It was monstrously unfair, but at that moment, she wanted to smack him.
Did shelookwell?No.She looked as though she’d been dragged backwards through a hedgerow and then thoroughly ravished.Which was essentially the case.What sort of man crinkled his noble brow in concern rather than demanding to know what she thought she was about?
A very nice one, who didn’t deserve to be saddled with the likes of Lady Gemma Lively, that was who.But after that note from Hal, what choice did she have left?
Marry your earl.Be happy.
Well.She could do one of those things.
