That part of her welcomed it. Because a woman like her should be punished. A woman like her deserved to be taught a lesson.
Dear God. She couldn’t look at him.
“I—I should have stopped you from saying the things you said that night,” she whispered. “I didn’t, because…”
Because I didn’t know. Until this moment, I didn’t know.
He leaned closer, tried to see into her face. “Because I wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let you—”
“No.” She looked down at her gloved hands. “I didn’t stop you because I wanted… Iwantedyou to hurt me.”
He touched his fingers to her chin to raise her face to his. “Why would you want me to hurt you?”
So gentle, his hands. It was his gentleness that undid her, made the truth stir and rise from that deep, secret place inside of her, the place where she ached and bled, and she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t close the hole in her chest, and the truth kept rising, tearing loose until she couldn’t force it back down anymore. All the pain and the secrets and the guilt shoved against her lips, gushed from her mouth, seeped from her pores—all those wet, dark, ugly truths.
“Because I… I deserve to be hurt.”
He sucked in a quick, harsh breath, as if a fist had landed in his stomach. “No. No you don’t, Charlotte.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know what I did. What I am.” She didn’t want him to know, to see it, to seeher, because once he saw that ugliness he’d leave her at Hadley House alone, just as she deserved.
He cupped the back of her head in his hand and looked into her eyes. “Idoknow who you are. It’s you who doesn’t know anymore. Tell me what happened here, Charlotte. To Hadley. To you.”
She drew a deep breath. She’d never told anyone the entire truth, and she wouldn’t tell Julian now—not the worst of it. Not what had happened to her, because it would only hurt him to know, and it was a useless, meaningless pain. There was nothing he could do—nothing anyone could do.
But she’d tell him as much as she could. “Hadley died.”
Julian remained silent, waiting.
“He was about to ride to a hunt. I was standing nearby to see him off when all of a sudden he decided to take a high jump. But his horse balked at the last minute, and Hadley was thrown. The fall broke his neck.”
Julian made a low, pained sound deep in his chest. He pressed his palm flat against the nape of her neck. He didn’t speak, but he held her so she wouldn’t look away from him.
“It was my fault. He was trying to make me look at him, toseehim, to…to make me love him. And I wanted to, you know—I tried to. I tried so hard, but it was no use. He knew, and he kept trying to find a way.”
Julian slid his hands into her hair. “It wasn’t your fault. You can’t make yourself love someone, Charlotte, any more than you can make yourselfnotlove someone.”
Tears pressed behind her eyes. “But I promised I would love him. When I married him, I swore it. I thought I could, but it became a lie. I lied to him, and then he died, and now I’m being punished.”
“No.” His voice was fierce. “No. You can’t really believe that, Charlotte.”
She gripped his wrists. “I do believe it. It’s true, Julian. If it weren’t, then none of the rest of it would have happened.”
He stroked her hair back from her face. “What happened after he died?”
The truth tried to rise in her chest again, to tear free, but she forced it back. The whole truth of what had happened—that burden was hers to bear alone.
Tell him what you can, but nothing more.“His mother, she—”
She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to hear the dowager’s screams in her head, but no matter what she did, no matter how many whorehouses she visited in London and how much scandal she courted, she couldn’t silence it.
“The shock of Hadley’s death destroyed what was left of her mind. She blamed me from the first, and she never forgave me. She wept every day after he was gone, right up until the day she died. I tried to comfort her, but whenever I came near her she’d shriek and wail and work herself into a frenzy. She said she wished her son had never married me, that I was a curse upon him. That it was my fault he’d died. That I’d killed him, and it should have been me instead.”
He clasped her face in his hands and looked at her with such tenderness, such grief. “She was mad, Charlotte. You said yourself she was out of her mind.”
“Shewasmad, but she wasn’t wrong. Hadley was a good man, a kind man—he deserved better than to spend the last months of his life with a wife who didn’t love him, could never love him. He deserved so much better—” Her throat closed on an odd, choked sound. “So much better than me.”
He caught her to him, wrapped his arms around her and held her, so tight and so close she felt every thud of his heart in her own chest. “Let it go, Charlotte. Let it out, or it will keep hurting you.”
