Gil swallowed. Just saying that much made him feel raw and exposed. And it didn’t work anyway. Rose still looked angry. Completely unmoved by the words he’d forced out with such difficulty. But really, what had he expected? Gratification that she’d brought him so easily to his knees?
Well, there was nothing like that in her gaze, just weary anger and disappointment. And it was then, in that moment, that he realised, not only that he was in danger of losing her—he might have lost her already.
“You could have a mistress right now, and I wouldn’t know,” she said in a flat little voice.
“There is no one else!” he protested, shaken. “You must believe me, Rose! You are my wife now.”
“I was your wife before,” she pointed out.
He forced himself to be honest. “It didn’t feel like that to me.” And that was the truth of the matter. He’d gone through the wedding ceremony and consummated the marriage, but he hadn’t felt like he owed her commitment or fidelity. Not then.
“So, what happened to make me suddenly become your wife, Gil?” she asked, voice icy.
“You know. We became lovers. You became pregnant with my child.”
“I don’t need to be your wife to be your lover or, indeed, to carry your child,” she replied. “There is only one thing that makes me your wife, and it is not the fact that I lie beneath you when you want me or that you planted your seed in me. The only thing that makes me your wife is that farce of a wedding ceremony we went through five years ago. The fact that I’m carrying your child doesn’t change what happened then. You can’t pretend the last five years never happened because it suits you now. You can’t expect me to forget it!” Her voice had risen by the end of her speech, and her face was flushed, the depth of her anger and resentment suddenly very clear.
Two months ago, Gil had thought himself very magnanimous, offering to forget the Eve episode and proposing that they get on with their marriage for the sake of the child. In truth, he’d taken it rather as read that his part of their shared history was forgiven. Or, perhaps, he thought with painful honesty, that it didn’t need to be forgiven.
“I didn’t realise you felt this way,” he said, feeling desperate now. “And I wish to God there was something I could do about it. But there is not. We have to put it behind us.”
“No, we don’t,” she retorted, “We don’t have to put it behind us at all. Why should I forget the past? You won’t! You won’t even let my father sleep under the same roof as you because of the past.”
She turned and stormed away from him and into her dressing room. At first, he just stared after her. Not her father again! How had everything got back to Miles Davenport? The very mention of the man was like a red rag to him, but he was determined not to be riled. Rose’s tears over Davenport earlier had made him feel like the lowest sort of cad. He wanted time to think over her request that Davenport stay with them properly before they spoke about the man again.
By the time he followed her into the dressing room, she had managed to get the dress off somehow and was stripping away her stockings with sharp, angry movements.
“Don’t bring your father into this argument,” he said calmly. “My views about him are between him and me. They have nothing to do with you.”
“What!” she cried, lifting her head to stare at him in disbelief. “They have everything to do with me. The reason you hate him is because you were forced to marry me.”
“I hate him because he blackmailed me into a course of action I did not choose,” Gil corrected through clenched teeth.
“He did not blackmail you,” she retorted, enunciating each word slowly and clearly as though he was an imbecile.
“He blackmailed my father. It is the same thing.”
She ignored his warning tone. “For God’s sake, Gil!” she cried. “When are you going to face up to the fact that it was your father who did this to you? Yours. He gambled away your family’s property, no one else!”
The silence that followed was crashing. It was one thing for him to think such things of his father. It was quite another to hear the words from someone else’s mouth.
“I’m sorry!” she snapped eventually, breaking the silence, though her angry tone belied her words. “But it’s true, and if anyone needs to put the past behind him, it’s you, not me. I’ve spent every day of the last few months putting the past behind me. Every day, telling myself not to mind, that it doesn’t matter. Every day, that the past is the past. And then tonight—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Tonight, I realised that it does matter. That I hate what you’ve done to me. When I think of the—God, years—that I’ve wasted, hoping…” She broke off again, and they stared at one another across a silence that grew heavy with five years of accusations and bitterness.