“What did they argue about?”
“Everything.Nothing.It… Sometimes there was glass shattering and thumps and the next day, the servants would clean the room and say nothing.”
“I did not know, El.”
She shrugged.“I did not tell you.”
But he had known she had been quiet sometimes, he’d known something was wrong but not what.He’d done his best to cheer her, and he’d snuck out at night and stayed with her in the treehouse and he’d invited her to family dinners, and Lady C had taken them both under her wing.Slowly, her smiles had become more frequent, and she’d spent more time with his family than hers, and then her mother and father and died, and she had been sad and he’d done his best to help her with that too.But he’d never known…
The mouth he had kissed a hundred times turned down.“Do you know why my parents married?”
The way she would not look at him told him it was not a happy tale.Taking her hand, he said, “Tell me.”
She stared down at their joined fingers.“They married because my grandfather wished it so.He decided on my father for my mother and nothing would sway him from realising the match.My father was bribed into the union while my mother was ordered to it.Neither were happy, and indeed they were determined not to be.”
Her eyes had dried, her tone clinical, but he could see the hurt beneath.Christ, he wished he could take her pain.He wished he could make this better, but he could not.He could only hold her hand, his thumb rubbing her skin gently, and listen.“How do you know this?”
“How could I not?None were particularly interested in keeping it from me.It formed the basis of many a screaming match.I may not have fully understood what it was when I was a child but I certainly did once I was grown.”She was silent a moment.“My mother was with child three times before me, and she lost the babes three times.Once I was born, she never let my father near her again.I am an only child through fear and spite.”
He had known none of this.How had he known none of this?Why had she never told him?Why had he never asked?“Christ, El.”
She didn’t seem to have heard him, though.“When I was seven, my grandfather told me he had made a match for me.”
“What?”He vaguely remembered she had been affianced, but it was never mentioned and so it was something he had not truly ever thought on.Now, though…He’d known her since they were barely from the nursery room and he could not recall a marriage mentioned after her parents had died.Why had he never thought on what that meant?
“It was with the son of a business associate, someone who sought a rich aristocrat for his family,” she continued, still in that strangely hollow voice.“He told me once I turned sixteen, we would be wed.”
Horrified, he stared at her.“That is too young, El.”
“Is it?”she said, and the lack of inflection in her tone chilled him to the core.“Some girls marry that young.I did not want it.I did not want a marriage such as my father and mother had.I dreaded it, every day.My grandfather, though, he knew what was best.Always, forever, what was best.”Here, her words turned bitter.“The boy I was to marry visited us a few times, dragged there by his father, no doubt.He was older, seventeen perhaps, and resentful of the match.He would taunt me and pinch me, and then he would tell me all the things I could not do once I was his wife, because I liked running through the grass and climbing trees and—” She took a breath.“I liked you,” she said almost inaudibly.
His hackles rose.If that pissant had tried to take El from him, he would have ended him.
El didn’t notice his tension.“He also said… I did not know at the time, but now, thinking back on it, he…said things one should not say to a child.”
Christ.Christ.“Who is he?”He’d bloody kill him.
She shook her head.“It does not matter.
It bloody did.“Tell me.”
“It never happened, so it does not matter.”
He flexed his clenched fists.He could not allow his emotion to drown out El’s.She was the one who had lived this.That he wanted to beat this boy bloody was his own damn problem.She was confiding in him.He would listen, even if it bloody killed him.“Why did it not happen?”
“My father refused to give his permission.His great act of defiance against my grandfather, I suspect.Then, grandfather died before he could convince my father otherwise and that was that.”
“How long did it hang over your head?”
“Three years.”She was silent a moment.“I do not think it is solely worry for my wealth as to why I do not wish to wed,” she finished, her voice breaking.
Brushing his lips over her temple, he didn’t know what else to do but to hold her closer.
She burrowed into him.“They should never have married, Benedict.”
His arms tightened.Perhaps not, but if they hadn’t, El would not be here and he…he would not know what he would do if she were not here.
Exhaling, she rubbed her nose against his chest.“However, it is of great luck for us I am not wed, and even greater that I never will be.Imagine, we would not be here if not for that, so all is not lost.I am here, with you.”
