She ran a finger along the edge of the bath, making patterns from the water droplets. “Security. Position. Power. Only fools marry for love—to their detriment.” Her throat tightened at those last words, and she wiped her hand across her doodles. It wasn’t a throwaway comment. She truly believed what she was saying.
He turned toward her, leaning back against the sink. “I thought all young girls wanted love.”
She gave a wistful smile. “The last time I thought I was in love, it was with a footman. I was eight years old. My nanny found a love note I’d written hidden beneath my pillow and gave it to my father.”
“I can’t imagine he was too pleased.”
“He took me down to the rookery at St Giles.”
Benedict swore. “That’s no place for a young girl.” St Giles was a seedy part of London where young bucks would pay a thruppence to tup a whore against the side of a building. It wasn’t discreet; rather it was an open cesspool.
She cleared her throat. “Yes, well, my father made it very clear what happened to girls who married for love. Watching them sell themselves on the street to pay for food, I vowed that would never be me. For a woman, the only security from that life is money and position.”
Benedict swallowed and turned back to the sink, wiping away any traces of shaving soap. Her words had painted an image in his head. Not of the cheap streets of London but of a cheap room in Paris. Of his mother swathed in wisps of fabric, her face pale as snow, her eyes red. She may have had a roof over her head while she sold her body, but she too had married for love and then spent the latter years of her life prostituting herself to the aristocracy. He had barely made it to her bedside before the syphilis claimed her.
He hadn’t noticed the time that had gone by until he felt Amelia’s hand covered his. She’d surrendered the bath and wrapped herself in his robe.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Nowhere good.”
“If the newspapers are correct, neither of us need worry about ending up in St Giles. You have money and I have position—and I’m quite adept at leveraging both.”
Her words dragged his focus back from his memories of France to the here and now. To his dressing room. To the woman in front of him. “I feel like ‘quite adept’ doesn’t pay deference to your real abilities to manipulate a situation.”
She smiled. “Why, that’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me.”
“That you consider it a compliment is, frankly, terrifying.”
She laughed, an unconscious belly laugh that gripped his stomach and squeezed. It was the same feeling he’d had watching her build her structurally unsound snowman.
She took a seat on the bench by the bathtub, leaving enough space that he could fit beside her. Likely as close to an invitation as he was going to get.
“Tell me more about your business.”
His business. The one balancing on a precipice due to their unfortunate marriage. The one that might fail and take down his whole damn village. The one he definitely did not want to talk about.
But she was his wife, and she had a right to know more about him.
“You’d stoop so low as to discuss work?”
She gave him a wry smile. “The more I know, the more I can plan my next trip to Bond Street.”
He snorted, but underneath her flippancy, there was genuine interest. “I make steam engines, for rail.” He waited for her to recoil or, at best, nod politely.
Instead she leaned in. “For transporting coal? Lord Pallsbury has one of those running from his estate.”
“Transporting coal, mail, people even.”
That’s when she recoiled, almost slipping into the bath in the process. “Transporting people? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“It’s becoming safer. That’s a lot of what we’re doing, actually. Creating safer engines. There are too many accidents.” Too many working men dying in order to fill the coffers of the aristocracy.
“Do you test them?” There was real concern in her voice.
“Of course we test them.”
“You. Doyoutest them? Because I’m not comfortable with that.” Her tone became clipped, demanding. It was touching, in an overbearing way.
