Page 98 of The Earl She Once Saved

“We should return.”

“Not yet.”

Verity stopped beside him. Behind them, the fiddle quickened. Someone clapped in time. Rafe turned the cup slowly between his palms, with something obviously weighing heavily upon his mind.

“Whatever Roland has done, I thought you must feel his absence. That some part of you must …”

He stopped.

“Miss him?” she asked.

His fingers tightened around the cup. “Yes.”

The word sounded dragged from him.

“Would it matter if I did?”

Rafe’s gaze came to her face too quickly. He looked away just as quickly.

“It would be natural.”

“Natural.”

She repeated the word and tasted its emptiness.

“People have told me for years what is natural for a wife. Grief. Loyalty. Patience. Shame.” Verity pulled one glove finger loose. “They have been less interested in whether the husband behaved naturally toward her.”

Rafe’s shoulders tightened. “I did not mean to excuse him.”

“No. You meant to be fair.”

“To you.”

“Then do not ask me to give sorrow where there is none.”

He turned fully toward her. “You did not miss him?”

“I missed the man I believed I had married.”

The truth left a strange ache behind it.

“For perhaps a month, I waited for that man to return. Then I understood he never existed.”

Rafe lowered his cup. “Did you … love him?”

Verity looked down at her hands. The question should have offended her. Instead, it felt like a door she had been waiting years for someone to open gently.

“I did not choose him.”

Rafe did not move. She pulled off one glove and folded it slowly between her fingers.

“My father died before we came home. He left me with no money and no place that was mine. I was a surgeon’s daughter who followed the drum, who could set a bone but scarcely knew how to enter a London drawing room without being stared at.”

The old humiliation touched her, faint but undiminished.

“My mother left me a fortune. Enough to live freely, had I been a man. But I could not control it while unmarried.”

“Your aunt arranged the match.”