She’d insisted on it.
Annabelle must have spilled the beans, for Elizabeth had told no one it was her birthday. Still, cake and champagne and a table full of foot-stomping well-wishers was not a bad way to end the day, especially when birthdays were usually disasters. Father forever gave gifts too expensive to keep, forcing her and Bella to pawn them back. And if he gave no gift at all, it sent him spiraling with guilt so that his daughters spent their fêted day striving to improvehisblasted mood.
This birthday, however, had felt different.
As to where her husband was, Elizabeth did not care. Perhaps he’d left the house to avoid the hubbub. Perhaps he was visiting Miss Li again this night. Given all she now knew, why shouldn’t he choose Li over her, his wife? It didn’t bother Elizabeth in the least whom her husband now spent his nights with, so long as he did not spend them with her.
She brushed back a tear, irked by her annoying emotion. Equally irked when Gerald, not Ginny, poked his head in.
“Ma’am.” He refused to meet Elizabeth’s eye. “The Baron asks that you attend him in his chamber.”
She wanted to howl her fury at the moon. Had the man no soul? And on her birthday no less? To send Gerald to deliver such edict too, rather than her maid, felt all the more debasing. Whywas Milton so unfeeling? What had made him into such a beast? Her thoughts brought little comfort as she flung off the bedclothes and pushed her night-rail to the floor, slipping on her stockings before she threw her banyan about her naked limbs. She’d lie there like a lump again, an unresponsive wife, and see how well he likedthat.
She stomped down the hall in her stockinged feet to her bedroom, pausing to steal a look at the nearly-completed shelves lining two walls. Elizabeth steadied her pounding heart, entered her husband’s chamber, and gasped.
Milton knelt at the foot of his bed, naked, in the same position he’d taught her to assume. His head was bent and his palms lay flat at his sides behind him, every sinewed muscle in his bearing bulging and straining, his jaw clamped rigidly shut.
She stared at him. “Is this some joke, sir, meant to mock me?” Her eyes flitted to the object lying prone beside him on the floor: a ruler. “Do you find this humorous? Piquant? To present yourself tomenow for punishment?” Her ire rose. “Or is this meant instead to goad me into action so you might turn on me more savagely than before?”
“For God’s sake, Lizzie, just take the bloody ruler and beat me with it!”
His anguish made her freeze, his voice unrecognizable. For one terribly long breath she contemplated his very real words before she hefted the vile implement in her hand and tested its feel, tipping it for balance before she poked him with it.
He did not flinch.
“You do not jest,” she said in shock.
“No.”
“You wish me to strike you as you struck me.”
“Yes,” he hissed.
“You are insane.”
“No, Elizabeth.” He ground out her name through clenched teeth. “I have given this great thought.”
“Great thought?” She felt insane herself. “You have given itgreat thought?”
“I wish us to start over. This … evens the score.”
“My God, you are a fool or fiend—nay, both, to imagine this might even the score.” She shook her head. “What does that evenmean, Milton, what score? Are we keeping points as to who’s been beaten more, who’s the greater cad, the lesser whore? What the devil do you mean, to present yourself so … so …” She was suffused with rage and sorrow and such wretched, awful confusion, she couldn’t finish.
“Elizabeth, take the ruler and beat me, woman, you know you want to. Do it, blast it. Justdo it!” His gaze was so intense she had to tear her eyes away.
She picked up the tool and braced herself to perform as her husband demanded. She stared at his naked back, at the scars riddling his flesh, and dropped the ruler to the floor, sinking to her knees beside him as her lungs gulped air.
She was better than this. Elizabeth would not strike a fellow human, even if that human ordered it.
Her next breath caught on a cry she did not utter. And then she fisted his hair, to hell with his rules. She forced him to look at her. “I will not.”
He seemed stunned.
“This does not even the score, it only makes me into you, as someone surely made you into them.” She was shaking so hardher teeth rattled in her head. “I will not beat you or any person. I’d rather you beat me yourself than be forced to mark you now.” She trembled with the truth of it, even as she let his head drop to his chest.
He choked back a sound and Elizabeth drew him to her without thinking. She cradled him to her breast and stroked his silken curls, feeling his chest heave with effort. His weight sank deeper against her until she enveloped him in her arms. And then she pulled him across her lap as if he were a boy and not a man.
In that moment a strange calm overtook her, for she recognized the gift she’d just received. Her husband had opened himself to her in the only way he knew how—through pain. She might not agree with his approach, but shockingly he had tried.
