Page 92 of Dangerous

“You seem to be saying that a lot tonight, my dear.”

“You found out and divorced her?”

“Oh, not at all.” He laughed at the shock he saw on her face. “I was perfectly willing to accept the brat as my own—why not? If she’d had a son, he’d be my heir and that would have been a relief. I’ll tell you another secret, my love—I never consummated my second marriage.”

Mia blinked.

“Sarah was such a frightened thing I never could manage to get past her terrified eyes and quivering lip. It must have been a month into our marriage when she fainted dead away while my mother and Jessica were receiving guests. It was my mother who told me she was with child. I was still trying to come up with a way to confront her on the subject that wouldn’t kill her with fright when she disappeared.”

“Oh, Adam, no!”

He chuckled. “Oh, Mia, yes. It seems she decided to contact the father of her unborn child, a curate from the vicarage where she’d lived, and let him know of her condition. The young man had apparently decided to drown his sorrows in missionary work after she’d married me and was on the verge of departing to some godforsaken place. He finally came up to scratch and took Sarah with him.”

“How did you learn all this?” she asked in wonder.

“I hired a man to investigate her disappearance. It took him almost three years to trace them from Liverpool to some wretched village in India.”

Mia tried to image it—what her husband must have felt when his third wife had run from him. She swallowed her shame, vowing to show him how much she loved him to make up for his hideous past.

“What did she say when your man found her?”

“Nothing.” His mouth was grim.

“Nothing?”

“She was already dead, both she and the curate. Apparently, they’d arrived in the midst of a cholera outbreak. For the second time I found myself a widower.”

She went to him then, leaving her blanket behind and crawling into his lap.

“Are you sorry for me, my lady?”

She nodded, too shaken to speak.

“You should be worried about yourself—after all, wives of mine don’t fare well, even if I don’t have an actual hand in killing them.”

She sniffed, holding him even tighter. “Adam?”

She felt his lips against her hair. “Mmm?”

“I love you.”

His body froze against hers, his breath warm on her scalp.

“I should have told you that a long time ago. I think I’ve loved you from the night you took me to the theater and I saw you with your friends.”

He remained silent.

“Loving you should have made my life easier, but all I could think was how you’d married me only for an heir and that my love would be the last thing you would want. Mostly, though, I didn’t think of it at all, instead delaying my plans for escape to live in the moment. I’m so sorry.”

“Shhh,” he murmured into her hair, stroking her back as he held her.

Tears rolled down her face. “I just want our marriage to go back to the way we were before Brighton.”

“We can’t go back, Mia.” He pulled away from her and looked down, brushing the tears from her face with his thumbs and smiling. “Besides, I think we should go forward and make our marriage even better.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The storm lasted for two long days but the weather for the rest of their journey proved smooth—both inside the ship and out. Adam would never have believed it, but he was enjoying himself hugely. In some ways it was almost a wedding trip, albeit with a shipload of strange men along for company. The trip would have been completely free of worries had his wife not been headed toward a man who wanted to kill her.