“I haven’t seen her since a few days after we wed.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to.” He said it in the reasonable tone of voice one might use to decline an extra helping of potatoes at dinner.
“But why?” she said again. Then, tormenting herself: “Is she so very awful?”
His mouth twisted. After a long pause, he sighed and said, “The truth is, it doesn’t matter what she’s like. She could look like Helen of Troy and have every accomplishment a woman should possess, and I still wouldn’t want to see her.”
He hates me that much?
The knowledge slid into her like a blade, shocking and sharp. Her chest felt full of something hot and thick. Not blood, but tears, or whatever tears are made of. Misery, maybe. Long moments passed before she had herself sufficiently under control to speak again.
“What happened?” she said. “What did she do to make you feel this way?”
“She didn’t do anything. It’s just that I was forced into the marriage. I didn’t want to marry her, but it was that or ruin. And then, well, things got off to a bad start. I gave her a disgust of me, and it just seemed like the best thing was to leave her. She lives in Northumbria at one of my estates. I’ve not seen her since I took her there after our wedding.”
He turned onto his back, looking up at the ceiling. She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him.
“Ruin? You had to marry her or be ruined?” That didn’t sound right. Rose knew her dowry had been substantial, but there were far richer heiresses Gil could have married if the family coffers were empty.
Gil closed his eyes. “My father’s doing. It’s remarkable what a man can gamble away in just a year. After my mother died, he became reckless. I knew he was gaming deep but had no idea just how deep. Then, one night he played with a man who made his living at the tables. A respectable enough fellow, but a true gamester. The sort of man who could fleece a man like my father.” He opened his eyes and looked at her, and his gaze was flat, unseeing. “He lost everything it was possible to lose that night. Not just money—land. Everything my father had that wasn’t entailed. I think he must have been in some kind of mania.”
A sense of dread began to creep up on Rose as she began to anticipate the revelation that was coming. She had to fight back an overwhelming desire to put her hand to his lips to stop him talking.
“And the man he lost it all to was my wife’s father.”
Rose swallowed against an impossible dryness in her throat. She didn’t have to prompt him anymore; the story was flowing out of him.
“He offered all his winnings back, unconditionally, if I married his daughter.”
So she had brought nothing to the marriage. Merely the writing off of his father’s gaming debt to her own father. And to call it a debt! His father was a fool to have thrown away everything on a game of chance. Worse, her own was unscrupulous to have taken advantage of his idiocy. And Gil had gained nothing. To him, the marriage was merely the means of fixing his father’s unforgivable error.
“You must have been furious,” she whispered.
“I was not pleased when I was given the news,” he admitted. He gave a dry little laugh and finally looked at her again, and this time, she saw something there she’d never seen before. Not anger. Not resentment. Pain. “The truth is, I wanted to marry someone else at that time,” he said.
And that was the moment when her plan—such as it was—crumbled to dust.
She wanted to weep. “Oh God,” she said. “No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
No wonder you hate me. No wonder you want nothing to do with me.
“No wonder you never see her.”
Gil reached for her, pulling her back down to his shoulder, kissing the top of her head. She tried to relax into him, but she felt so traitorous. Yet she had to know it all. “Who was she? The woman you wanted to marry.”
“Oh, a girl I’d known from boyhood. Her family lived near ours, though I only fell in love with her when she came up to London for her first season.” He laughed. “She was very sweet, very innocent. I’d had a little experience with women by then—not much—but once I realised I was in love with her, I decided to keep myself pure for her. I could hardly wait to marry her.” His voice was mocking, deriding the idealistic boy he’d once been.
“Did she know you wanted to marry her?”
“Yes. We weren’t engaged, but I’d told her how I felt, and she knew I planned to ask her father for her hand.”
Rose closed her eyes. The firm flesh of Gil’s shoulder was warm under her cheek. “And what did she say when you told her you were marrying someone else?”