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Andrew Lord of Despair(43)



“Andrew, why? I would gladly bear your children, and if—”

“I would not be a good father,” he interrupted before the entire conversation blundered into more questions and worse pain. He kissed her knuckles and wrapped his arms around her, but being Astrid, she did not let the matter lie.

“Is it that you do not want to have children with me?”

He gathered her closer, hating Herbert Allen for planting a seed of self-doubt in the mind of a woman who didn’t deserve that misery. He hated himself for nurturing that seed, but for the first time, and with surprising ease, he hated Julia Ponsonby too.

“If I were to have children with any woman, it would be you. I am not willing to sire children at all, though, and thus you have the terms of my offer.”

Also his heart on a platter, which was no improvement on the bargain. Would that he had perished in that damned accident and Adam had survived. Would that he could assuage Astrid’s doubts with tales of familial insanity or inherited weakness, but the weakness was his and his alone.

“I cannot accept such an offer, Andrew,” she replied, sadness in every word. “I do not know why you have so little faith in yourself, and I know not how to argue the point. I think we are saying good-bye.”

She was brave, and she deserved so much better.

“Ah, love, don’t cry,” Andrew whispered, shifting over her to kiss her cheeks. “Please, please don’t cry. I should never have taken liberties with you, knowing it would come to this, but believe me, Astrid, it is for the best that we part now.”

“No, Andrew,” she said through her tears, “you do not have the right of it, not this time. You are being stubborn, misguided, and f-foolish. I am glad we took liberties with each other, but I wish you would reconsider this rule you have made, or at least tell me why it is so important to you.”

She asked for so much more than she knew. She asked for him to watch the love in her eyes turn not to fond recollection or puzzled indifference, but to dismay and even hate.

He kissed her forehead as her weeping subsided. “Shall I take myself off to Enfield or disappear back to Sussex? Gareth and Felicity will understand, if it would be easier on you not to have to see me.”

Astrid bit his nipple, and not gently. “You want my permission to slink away, Andrew Alexander? I think not. You have said we are friends, and that is not how I would have my friend treat me. I will go back to Town with Douglas, armed with warnings of your suspicions, and I will be careful. Once I am gone from here, I understand you will keep your distance. But you will stay this weekend, and you will be the doting brother-in-law you’ve always been.”

“If that is your wish,” he said, inordinately relieved she wasn’t sending him away, equally concerned she would be going back to live in the Allen town house while he remained in the country—of course—thoroughly loathing himself because their dalliance was ending exactly as he’d foreseen it would.

With Astrid hurt.

“My wish is that we remain friends,” she said. “Someday, you know, I will be too old to have children, and I am waiting to hear what excuse you come up with then.”

As an attempt at humor, her words were paltry, but as an olive branch, they sufficed.

“You are forgiving me.” He wished she wouldn’t. He wished she would make him beg and suffer, and most of all, he wished she would make him reconsider.

“I am not forgiving you, Andrew. There is nothing to forgive.”

She bludgeoned him with her tolerance, pushed him overboard into seas that heaved with guilt and bewilderment. More guilt. Now he wished she’d bite him again, this time hard enough to draw blood.

“Astrid, promise me if you feel at any time unsafe with the Allens, if you have any evidence Douglas means you ill, then you must allow this marriage. Your pride, and even your feelings for me, aren’t worth your life.”

“Of all the arrogance…” Astrid huffed out. “You would ask me to be your wife, expecting me to look the other way while you sought pleasure with others? And what of me, Andrew? I am supposed to become a nun, sacrificed on the altar of your antipathy to fatherhood? Do you expect me, knowing my feelings for you, to lie with other men while you smile and wish me best of luck?”

Astrid on a verbal tear was frightening. She wielded truth like a delicate épée, slicing cleanly to the bone with every stroke.

And yet, Andrew parried her ripostes. “If we worked at it, we could come to tolerate married life. I am asking you to put your safety and that of your child above your infatuation with me. In time, you will understand I’m not worth these feelings you have for me. In time, you might even be relieved I would put no demands on you. But love me, hate me, or disdain me altogether, I would very much rather have you and your child alive to do so.”