Never Courted, Suddenly Wed (29 page)

Sophie arched a golden eyebrow. “Oh, so you didn’t marry me for my dowry?”

“No.” The word exploded from his chest. He drew in a steadying breath. “I can certainly see how it might appear that way.”

“Come, Christopher,” she said. “Would you have me believe you married me for love?”

The declaration he’d come up to her chambers intending to make, withered upon his lips. To utter those words now, even if they were the truth would only be perceived as one more lie he’d told. Still, he needed her to know. “I love you.”

Sophie’s laugh came out as a near-hysterical cackle that spoke to the thin shred of control she had over her emotions. “Goodness, you must take me for a bloody fool if you think I’d ever believe
that
. Do you know what I believe you love?”

“What?” he said, past dry lips.

“My dowry. Tell me, how does the woman you love feel knowing you gave her up for my fortune? Was it twenty-thousand pounds? Thirty? Forty?
More?”
She asked, her high-pitched question, a testament of her shock.

He forced himself to look at her. “God, Sophie, I…”

“How much?” she cried.

“One-hundred thousand pounds.”

Her eyes widened to the size of half-moons in her face. Then, a smile twisted her lips up. “One-hundred thousand pounds? That is quite a sum. I see how you’d be willing to endure a life wed to even me for that amount.” She returned her attention to the window, presenting him with her rigid back.

Christopher dragged a hand through his hair. He felt Sophie slipping away from him. Gone was his spirited, mischievous, ever-smiling Phi. In her place was this cynical, hard-eyed, ice-princess. Nausea twisted in his gut with the realization that he’d wrought this tragic transformation on his sweet, loving Phi.

With a sick intuitiveness, Christopher realized if he didn’t find the right words, didn’t make her understand, that Sophie would be forever lost to him. “Will you hear me out?” he said, his voice hollow to his own ears.

Sophie shot a bored look over her shoulder.

But she didn’t say no, and Christopher had to find encouragement where he could.

“My father ordered me to court you.”

Her hands fisted the sea-foam blue fabric of her afternoon gown, the only tell-tale indication that she’d been affected by those words.

“How very clever you were.” She spoke the words, more to herself. “You appeared so honorable. Why, you even called on me, and confessed your father’s
wishes
for you to court me.” She laughed, the sound hollow. “I even commiserated with you. Oh, the laughter you and he must have had at my expense.”

“Never.” That one word wrenched from deep inside him. At her likening him to the marquess, his stomach churned. He wasn’t like his sire. “My father wanted me to ruin you.” He flinched, at the ugly truth—in the end, Christopher had done just that.

She shoved back the gold-damask curtains and gazed out the window.

Christopher rushed to have out every last sordid detail. “My father owed your father a significant debt. More than that, my father had made a series of disastrous business ventures. We are…were on the cusp of financial ruin. He insisted I wed you, Phi. I said no—until he threatened to have me carted off to Bedlam if I didn’t agree to his plans. I was going to do as he demanded, Phi. But I changed my mind in Lord Brackenridge’s library.”

Sophie pressed her forehead against the pane. Her visage, reflected back in the glass panel, contorted as if she were suffering physical pain, and he nearly doubled over from the agony of what he’d done. “Marriage to me was so abhorrent to you that you’d brave Bedlam?” she whispered.

Christopher cursed. He was bumbling his way through this. He reached for her, and then remembered she couldn’t see him. “I said no because I didn’t want my father to turn me into a fortune hunter.”

“Isn’t that what you are, Christopher?” That weary question belonged to a more aged, bitter woman than his Phi. “Do you have nothing else to say?”

He went on. “There was a woman.” She recoiled like he’d struck her. Christopher swiped his hand across his eyes. If he could take a dagger to himself and spare her this hurt, he would. “I didn’t truly know her, Phi. We’d met just once. She was a dream of a woman. A dream of freedom from my father’s rigid control. She made me forget all that was wrong with me.”

“She sounds like a paragon.” Her voice came out flat, devoid of any and all emotion.

“She didn’t know my flaws. Not like you, Phi. That day of the stable fires, you discovered my secret shame and I hated you for that,” he said, at last truthful with both himself, and her.

Sophie turned to face him.

His palms grew moist. He opened his mouth to admit his humiliating failings but the words wouldn’t come out. “I…struggle to read.”

She cocked her head. “What?”

He glanced away. His gaze wandered the room. “There is something wrong with me. I…I’ve always had the finest tutors but words on a page…they don’t make much sense to me. I was convinced early on that I was mad. My father thought I wasn’t dedicated enough to my studies. He beat me.” A memory of his father applying the birch rod to his back while he read from Shakespeare’s,
King Lear
, trickled to the surface. “It didn’t help,” he said. “You found me reading aloud that night. You laughed. In my frustration I accidentally upended the lantern you’d left behind. I thought you’d gathered all the truth about me. From then on, I…it was too hard to be around you, Phi. You reminded me of everything wrong with me.”

Emotion flooded her cornflower blue eyes.

“I don’t want your pity, Phi. I just need you to know why I didn’t want to wed you. That all changed when I spent time with you.”

“What about Mallen?” Her question, the faintest whisper, cut into his words.

Christopher momentarily covered his face with his hands and pressed the tips of his fingers against the corners of his eye. “I knew Redbrooke and your mother were both enamored of his title.” His lips twisted. “Who would settle for an earl when they could have a duke?”

Her sad eyes ran a path over his face. “You thought it all out, didn’t you?”

He took a step toward her. “I thought I did, Phi. I didn’t consider that I’d fall hopelessly in love with you.”

“Don’t,” she rasped. “Please, don’t.”

“But I love you,” he said, taking another step closer.

Sophie stalked across the room, eyes blazing. Her hair whipped about her like she was some kind of warrior princess. “You are nothing but a liar, Christopher. You can’t possibly expect I should believe anything you would ever say.” A cold, near-hysterical laugh bubbled past her lips. “What a fool I was.”

He shook his head. “No, Phi…”

“I fell in love with you against my better judgment. Even as you courted me, I was suspicious. I only have myself to blame. I should have turned you away when you came to call. And I certainly should never have followed you from the ballroom at Lady Brackenridge’s. I would have been better with a ruined reputation than you as a husband.”

Christopher swallowed, and nearly choking on the lump of anguish that clogged his throat, he touched his hand to his chest to be sure his heart still beat.

“Leave, Christopher,” she said, her voice tired.

“No.”

“Leave!” The order climbed in volume.

He held firm. If he left her wounded and angry as she was, he suspected he might never attain her forgiveness.

The plump mounds of her breasts heaved up and down with the extent of her emotion. “Very well, I’ll leave,” she cried, and stormed toward the door.

Duke, sensing his mistress’ upset sprinted toward Sophie, and cut in front of her.

Sophie cried out and stumbled over the fawn-pug.

Christopher’s long strides ate up the space between them. “Are you hurt?” The moment transported him eerily back to their first exchange in Hyde Park when Duke had run out in front of his horse and nearly unseated him. It was as though he and Sophie had moved in a full circle, with Sophie leery of his motives and wanting him gone.

He fell to his knee and reached for her ankle.

As though the fight had drained from her body, Sophie laid on her back and stared with emotion-deadened eyes up at the ceiling. “I’m fine, Christopher.”

Christopher’s heart squeezed painfully. He turned his attention to her ankles, removing first one satin silver slipper, and then the next. He rolled down her stockings. “Allow me to check for a sprain.”

Sophie draped her arm across her eyes. “There is no sprain,” she said, tiredly.

“Still…” His words died on his lips. He stared, his gaze transfixed upon a very familiar heart-shaped birthmark along the inner portion of her trim, dainty ankle. He blinked.

It couldn’t be.

It wasn’t possible

He touched a finger to the marking that had haunted his dreams after he’d met his mystery Athena.

Christopher released her ankle and sat back on his haunches.

The irony of this moment was not lost on him. He’d initially avoided marriage to Phi for the sake of some nameless nymph he’d met in Lord Thomas’s library during the masquerade.

In the end, Sophie was the mystery woman he’d longed for.

She was his Athena.

How had he not seen it before now?

Sophie took advantage of his distractedness. She grabbed her slippers and stockings and pointed to the door. “Get out, Christopher.”

He held his palms up. She needed to know. “I have to tell you…”

“With the exception of good-bye, there is nothing else I care to hear from you.”

“But you need to know…”

She slapped him with such ferocity, his head snapped back under the force of the blow. The sharp crack echoed around his tortured mind.

He accepted that pain; embraced it because it was no less than he deserved for lying to her.

Sophie recoiled, as though in touching him, she’d been sullied.

“Just go,” she whispered. Tears flooded her eyes, threatening to spill over. “If you care for me at all, you’ll leave.”

And because he’d rather sever his own arm than inflict any pain upon her, Christopher rose. He sketched a bow. “This isn’t done,” he said, when he’d reached the doorway.

A fat teardrop streaked a path down her cheek. Then another. And another.

He reached for her.

“Please, go,” she pleaded.

Christopher nodded jerkily.

He would do as she asked. For now.

Lady Ackerly’s Tattle Sheet

While taking part in a Frost Fair chair-pushing event with Lady E.F., Miss S.W.’s chair slid into a number of ice-skaters on the Thames River. There were no real injuries. Just outraged ice-skaters

~23~

“Enter,” the Marquess of Milford thundered from within his office.

Sophie took a deep breath, and turned the handle.

She stepped inside his lair.

The marquess didn’t pick up his head from the ledger in front of him. She used his distraction as an opportunity to study him. Somewhere in his sixtieth year, with stark white hair, and a hard-angular face, she imagined there’d been a time when he’d been very handsome. Sophie tried to imagine Christopher’s mother.

Had the woman loved the cruel, condescending man? Or had theirs merely been an arranged match between two suitable individuals.

He finally looked up. His gaze narrowed. “You.”

All the earlier resolve that had driven her down, was restored at the chilled reception. She arched a brow. “Me.”

His mouth went slack, and she suspected that he’d expected her to flee his office, with a quivering lip and terror in her heart. Not for the first time she wondered if he delighted in kicking small pups and gave thanks Duke was tucked away in her chambers. “Do you know, my lord, not for the first time, I wonder that my father ever claimed you as a friend.” Her father had possessed a pure heart whereas the marquess seemed to possess no heart. What an odd pairing of men.

She wandered deeper into his lair. “There is something I want to say to you.”

“Oh?” His bored tone fueled her ire.

“You are a horrific human-being, and an even worse father. I’m sorry that Christopher grew up in such a household.”

“So you’ve come to insult me,” he drawled.

“I’ve come to tell the truth,” she said. She dusted her palms along the front of her gown. “It pains me to know the abuse Christopher endured at your hands. Hopefully, at some point, in these late years of your life, you reconcile the harm you did to your son…and search for peace, because if not, I’m certain there is a dark place in hell reserved for the soulless cowards like yourself.” She nodded. “That is what I came to say.”

With a flounce of her curls, Sophie walked out as casually as she’d entered, closing the door softly behind her.

In the early hours of the morning, when the black night sky still reigned, Sophie left.

Lady Ackerly’s Tattle Sheet

In spite of the well-lit walkways at Vauxhall Gardens, somehow Miss S.W. stumbled upon a trysting couple and pitched forward into the colorful fountains. Her emerald satin gown was ruined beyond repair.

~24~

Christopher struggled to open his eyes. He blinked back the fog of sleep, wincing when he moved too quickly. His mind tried to make sense of why he sat crouched on the floor in the corner of his chambers.

Then reality rushed in with all the force of a sudden, summer rainfall. He leaned his head against the door that separated his and Sophie’s chambers. Throughout the day, her shuddery sobs had penetrated the walls between them. He’d knocked, pleading with her to allow him entry, but silence met all his requests.

So, he’d sat at the foot of her door, and tortured himself with the aching tears of despair she shed for him and his deception.

At some point, exhaustion had forced him into a deep slumber.

He rubbed the corded muscles in his neck and stood. His body throbbed in protest, but Christopher embraced the pain. It seemed a small penance for the sin of breaking Sophie’s heart.

He swiped a hand over his face, hoping that in the light of a new day, after a night of tears, Sophie had reflected on the sincerity of his words. Mayhap she'd, if not forgiven him, pledged to move forward.