“How is it that the two of you have become such close friends?” Persephone would normally have been alarmed at her own audacity but was too perplexed by the man she’d married to hold the question back.
“Does it seem hard to believe because we are so different?”
“And he is so hostile toward you.” Persephone sat on a sofa facing the fire, feeling her brows furrow with her confusion.
“Adam is hostile toward everyone.” Harry shrugged. “It is just the way he is.”
“Does he never show any tenderness of feeling?” Persephone felt her heart sinking lower with every word. She had been entertaining some hopes that Adam would improve upon closer acquaintance—that, perhaps, he was simply wary of strangers. An odd character trait, she admitted, for one who’d chosen a stranger to be his bride.
“Tenderness of feeling?” Harry pushed a log further into the fire with the toe of his boot. “Not within the last two decades, I’d say.”
“And before then? Before the last two decades?”
“I met Adam at Harrow,” Harry said. “Twenty years ago. I have no idea what he was like before that.”
“Then you forged a friendship with someone who was . . . was . . .” How did she put it into words? She finally decided on, “Hostile?”
Harry smiled. But a different smile than he usually produced. It was sentimental, fond; not laughing or joking. “Adam saved my skin,” Harry said. “First year at Harrow. I was something of a runt, and the other boys found that grounds for torturing me. Adam set them straight.”
“They weren’t unkind to Adam?” Persephone knew how children could sometimes be.
“They were afraid of him,” Harry answered. “Even then. They still are. Everyone is.”
“He would have only been seven or eight years old.” Persephone tried to imagine a child Artemis’s age already intimidating and hard.
“Seven,” Harry confirmed. “He was a force to be reckoned with even then. The only shell in the history of Harrow, I’d guess, who ran the school.”
“Shell?”
“The youngest year,” Harry explained. He chuckled as if remembering something. “A few of the boys, now grown gentlemen, of course, still whimper when they see him.”
“But to be so frightening when he was only a child.” It was unfathomable. And not a very encouraging sign. Perhaps there wasn’t a gentle side to Adam, after all.
“It wasn’t that, exactly.” Harry strode from the fireplace to sit on the sofa facing Persephone. “He was, still is, remarkably intelligent. And he is authoritative, the kind of man few people question. Even at seven he was very much that way. And he is unafraid.”
“Unafraid? I don’t imagine anyone could be entirely unafraid.”
“I would wager a pony he hasn’t an ounce of fear in his entire body,” Harry said. “And if he does, he squelches it with alarming finality.”
“There is nothing that frightens him? Nothing that intimidates him?”
Harry rose as if to leave. “Not that I’ve seen.”
Persephone digested that as Harry made for the door. A man without fears, in control in every situation, who had been intimidating, apparently, all his life. And she, who had always been quiet and happy at home, dreaming of her future cozy family life, was married to him. What had ever led her to believe that this marriage could be remotely like the one she’d always hoped for?
“Why doesn’t he ever look at me?” she asked the instant the question jumped into her mind. She immediately regretted asking. Persephone felt herself color up.
“What do you mean?” Harry stopped a step from the door.
“Never mind,” Persephone whispered, knowing her face was flaming brighter than ever.
“No. There’s no ‘never mind’ here.” Harry walked back toward her. “He never looks at you?”
Persephone shook her head. “And he moves away if I sit near him. I thought, that morning at breakfast, it was only because I sat on his right side. Considering his . . . um . . .” She was getting flustered.
“Face,” Harry finished for her. “Adam’s mother makes a lot of fuss over Adam’s scars. More than she needs to. At Harrow, when one of the other boys would sit on his right at meals or something and started staring, Adam didn’t move. He made the boy who was staring move. And they always did.”
“Then it wasn’t because of the scars?” Persephone’s heart plummeted. If his reason hadn’t been the scars, then it had to have beenher.
