He blinked.
Mary’s cheeks had turned pink. She stared at the edge of the desk and did not look at him, and Evander suspected that whatever image had just crossed his mind had crossed hers as well.
“That will not be necessary.”
“Pity. You make a handsome couple.”
“An Italian woman.” Mary’s voice cut through the dark carriage.
The driver had tied her mare to the back, and they sat opposite each other, the lantern swaying outside the window, while the road back to London stretched out beneath them.
“Your brother had a lover. A woman he met every night for months while my sister was carrying his child.” Mary’s hands gripped the seat. “Charlotte was pregnant, and frightened, and planning to run, and your brother was spending his evenings in a pleasure house with an Italian mistress.”
Evander pressed his lips together. “We do not know the full story.”
“We know enough,” She gritted through her teeth.
Evander turned his signet ring on his finger.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For Richard. For what he has done to your sister. For the position it has placed you in. I will find them. Both of them. And I will see this put right.”
Mary held his gaze for a long moment. The anger did not leave, but something else joined it. Charlotte, alone somewhere beyond London, with no word from the man she was supposed to marry. Evander’s brother, Richard, was spending his nights in a pleasure house with another woman while the mother of his child waited. And Tommy, sleeping in a crib at Blackholm House, gripping Mary’s collar every morning, with no idea that his father had been warming someone else’s bed instead of coming home.
“My sister…” Mary’s voice was low and hard. “Charlotte gave up everything for your brother. Her family. Her reputation. Her future. And while she was carrying his child, he was here. With another woman. In a room he paid for by the night.”
“We don’t know?—”
“I know enough.” She pressed her fingers against her temples. “I know that my sister is missing, and your brother is a liar. Unfortunately, Tommy is the one who will pay for all of it.”
The carriage swayed. Mary dropped her hands and stared out the window. The dark fields slid past, and her reflection stared back at her, pale and furious, and she looked at it for a long moment before she exhaled.
She looked out the window. “That was my first time in a pleasure house.”
Evander heard her tone, much lighter now, as though she were pulling herself back from the edge, trying to focus on any other inane thing than their impossible situation. “I would expect so.”
“It was more… theatrical than I imagined.” She turned back to him. “You speak as though you know these places.”
“I’ve been to many brothels in my search for Richard.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Only when searching for Richard?”
Evander heard the accusation she had carried for weeks, the late nights she had cataloged, the narrative she had built that cast him in a role he had never played.
“Mary…”
“It is a fair question.”
Evander leaned forward. The carriage rocked, and the lantern light shifted, and Mary’s face moved between shadow and gold. He reached across the space between them and placed his fingers beneath her chin, tilting her face up until her eyes met his.
“I have not touched another woman since the day we married.” His voice was low and certain. “Not before the wedding, and not after. Whatever you have imagined about my nights, that is not the reason for the distance between us.”
Her breath came shallow against his fingers. “Then what is the reason?”
His thumb traced the line of her jaw. “I do not trust myself around you.”
Mary’s eyes widened.
“That is a terrible reason,” she whispered.
