“Yes,” she said.
“Our marriage has had a strange and somewhat strained beginning, hasn’t it?” he said. “But in one hour’s time or less, the last barrier will be down and we can proceed to live happily ever after. Can we?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You are not sorry, Abby?” He squeezed her hand again. “Not sorry that you acted so impulsively and married me?”
She shook her head, watching her free hand, which she spread in her lap.
“I acted just as impulsively,” he said, “and I am not sorry at all. And that is such an understatement that it is laughable.”
She brushed an imaginary speck of lint from her lap.
“I told you something both last night and the night before after making love to you,” he said. “You did not respond on either occasion. Do you not feel the same way, Abby? Is there any chance that you will in time?”
She pulled her hand away from his and turned to look out through the window. “That is nonsense talk,” she said. “That is not why people marry. Marriage is for companionship and for comfort. And for children. The rest is nonsense. Imagination. You were being silly. There is the house. Oh, your coachman knows where to stop.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Are you ready?”
She sat back in her seat. “Yes,” she said.
She sat still while a footman put down the steps and while her husband vaulted out and turned to reach up a hand for hers.
“Are you ready, Abby?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Abby?” he said when she did not move.
Her hands were twisting in her lap.
“Abby?” He leaned into the carriage and touched her on the knee. “Shall I go in alone, love? I would prefer it anyway.”
She turned to look into his eyes, those blue eyes that had always turned her weak at the knees but that now she found it hard to look into for a different reason.
“Miles,” she whispered to him, “take me away from here. Please? Let’s go home.” She bit down hard on her upper lip.
He turned to give an order to his coachman and was back inside the carriage with her a moment later, her hand firmly clasped in his again.
She closed her eyes. Not a word was spoken on the homeward journey.
SHE HAD ENTERED the house on his arm without speaking a word, and when Watson had stopped him in the hallway with a note that had been delivered half an hour before, she had drawn her arm free and run up the stairs.
The note was from Miles’s mother, inviting them to dinner before the Warchester ball. He went to his study to pen a quick reply and sent the note on its way with one of the servants.
She would probably have ordered tea already, he thought as he climbed the stairs. They were going to have to talk again. There was something she had not told him, and until she did so, there could be no happiness for her and no real chance for their marriage.
But she was not in her sitting room. Or in her dressing room.
He found her in her bedchamber. She was lying facedown on the bed. He did not know if she had heard him come in. She did not move. He crossed the room slowly and laid a hand against the back of her head.
“Abby,” he said softly.
When she did not reply, he drew up a chair beside the bed and straddled it, his arms draped over the back of it.
He waited.
“I am a bastard,” she said at last in a dull voice, without moving.
He repressed the quite inappropriate urge to laugh. He decided that she meant her words literally.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“I am a bastard,” she said, her voice a little firmer. “I am not my father’s daughter. I am no relative of yours at all. I appealed for your help under entirely false pretenses.”
“You are a relative of mine,” he said. “You are my wife.”
She muttered something into the bedcovers.
“Abby,” he said, “will you turn over? Your voice is muffled.”
She turned her head to reveal a flushed, bright-eyed face framed by short curls that were considerably disheveled.
“I would not be,” she said, “if I had told you the truth. You must be wishing and wishing that it was not so. And perhaps there is a way out for you. Perhaps you will be granted a divorce when you tell them how I have deceived you and how I am nothing but a bastard.”
“It’s an ugly word, Abby,” he said. “Your mother had you with another man?”
“I don’t even know who,” she said. “She never told me, and I don’t think Papa ever knew. But it was the reason she married Papa. She told me that she would never have lowered herself so if she had not been in such a predicament. But my gallant father—my real one—had abandoned her, it seems, and Papa had been pestering her for a long time. She married him without telling him, when I was already almost four months on the way.”