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“You have a duty to me too,” she said. “I’m your wife.”

“So be my wife. Support me in this. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, Ina,” he said, sounding weary.

“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened and this responsibility that’s fallen to you—I truly am—but I’m miserable here, Gavin.” Her voice broke as she finally said the words that had been running through her mind every waking hour. “I’m losing who I am the longer I stay here.”

“We haven’t even been here a month,” he said.

“You say that and yet every time we speak you delay our return. Now you’re making it sound as though we’re never going to return. As though we’re going to live here. You even said you think I should delay entering the Royal Sculpture Society exhibition.”

“That was a mistake,” he said. “We can move your studio here. Norris and Harper can make the arrangements and you can still enter.”

“And what of my plans to reveal who I am once the judging is completed?” she asked with a cocked brow. “What will your mother think of that?”

He pursed his lips and she could see him turning over the consequences of what her announcement would mean. Headlines about her. Vitriol from people who objected to her work—let alone Leander’s nudity. Laughter from men who thought Gavin was too emasculated to control his wife. When they’d just been Mr. and Mrs. Barrett of Edinburgh such a daring announcement had been one thing. Now that they were Sir Gavin and Lady Barrett of Oak Park with a house in London and connections it was entirely different.

“Hang what my mother thinks. I’ll support whatever decision you make,” he finally said, but his answer had been too long in coming. She’d seen his reservation. She knew that the steadfast support he’d once given her had changed. The realization that she was losing her Gavin lanced through her. The man standing in front of her was becoming more Sir Gavin every day.

“It isn’t enough. I don’t want to move my studio,” she said quietly. “I like my studio in our home. I don’t feel like an impostor being judged for every little thing she does when I’m there.”

“You’re not an impostor.”

She shook her head. “Stop trying to placate me like I’m a china-doll wife you can put up on a shelf and take out to play with when you feel like it.”

“When have I ever treated you like that?” he asked.

“Right now. I don’t want to manage a household like Oak Park or receive endless callers or play my part in county society. I don’t want to go to London for the season and try to care about Ascot or any of the other rubbish that we’re expected to do now. I have greater ambitions than being a baronet’s wife, Gavin.”

A flash of anger. “You are a baronet’s wife whether you like it or not.”

“Right now I’m finding I don’t like it at all,” she shot back.

“I should never have let that Sullivan woman rope me into this ludicrous excuse for a marriage. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh, that’s right. I was hoping to save you.”

“I didn’t need saving,” she said, even though they both knew that wasn’t true. The injustice of it still infuriated her, but she couldn’t regret it. Even in the depths of a fight, she still had Gavin, and these few short weeks of their marriage had changed her so much for the better. That was why it hurt so badly that she could feel them growing farther and farther apart as the days went on.

“You don’t need to remind me how little you need me. I’m constantly made aware of the fact that I was only slotted into the role of husband because I was conveniently there on the night. I didn’t even propose to you. You took it upon yourself to propose to me,” he said with a bitter laugh.

“I should never have asked you to do any of this. You’d be happier now,” she said.

He turned sharply on his heel, his gaze boring into her. “What do you mean?”

“I know about Grace,” she blurted out so fast he looked stunned.

“What do you know about Grace?” he asked.

“I know what you were to each other once and how your families conspired to work against you and on your brother’s behalf. I also know that had I not stolen away to Mrs. Sullivan’s library, you would’ve been free to marry her now.”

He stared at her, his gaze hard and unforgiving, and every little bit of guilt she’d held close to her chest burst forth like water from a dam that had breached its barriers.

When he finally spoke, his words were dangerously quiet. “Is that what you really think of me? That I’m some pathetic man who’s still fixated on the woman who threw him over ten years ago? That I would want my brother’s widow less than a month after he died?”

“I—”

Anger pulsed off of him. “You think I’d bring my wife to live under the same roof as a woman I loved? That I would ever be that cruel?”

The argument had somehow turned on her, and now Ina was scrambling to defend herself.

“You could never have understood that circumstances would’ve been like this,” she said.