Page 11 of Miss Barton's Mysterious Husband
“Oh, I’m not feeling generous. I’m not feeling generous at all.”
Charmian believed that. She heard the controlled rage in his voice.
Her gaze searched his features. She wanted to know what he was feeling. About their situation. About her. Did his anger extend to his wife? It had, she had no doubt. Had what they learned tonight changed that?
She’d been angry with him, too. Furious and resentful and hurt. Hurt to the depths of her soul. But now, now only one question mattered. “What do you want to do?”
A grim smile lengthened his lips. “Apart from push your aunt into a snowdrift?”
She shouldn’t laugh. Nothing about this debacle was funny. But a huff of bleak amusement escaped her nonetheless. “Can I help?”
His smile broadened, and for a charged moment, they stared at each other without animosity creating a wall between them. For a fleeting instant, she was the girl who had married him, who had adored the ground he walked on, who had been convinced that she’d found the other half of her soul.
Whether that was true or not, her soul had been in bleeding tatters since the day she’d left him.
The shutters fell back over his eyes. He couldn’t have said “keep out” any more clearly. “Sit down, Charmian.”
In a haze of misery, she let him settle her on the edge of the bed. His hand on her arm felt like the only warmth in the entire cosmos. As if to confirm that winter had conquered the world, a gust of wind rattled the windowpane.
When Roland released her, she wanted to howl like that icy wind. She’d been cold for three long years. She didn’t want to be cold any longer.
Instead of sitting beside her – it was humiliating quite how much she wanted him to stay – he crossed the small room and sank into the Windsor chair near the fire. Without speaking, he lowered his head and studied his linked hands. She stared at his untidy dark hair and wished with futile but piercing longing for a chance to do everything all over again and make different decisions this time.
Charmian prepared for him to rage at her, to blame her for the disaster that their marriage had become. Now that she knew the facts, she couldn’t help but think she deserved it. Yes, her family had interfered. Unforgivably so. But she’d allowed it to happen. She’d gone along with her mother and her aunt’s plans for her with no word of complaint. She just assumed that they were making the best decisions, when in fact their meddling hadtransformed a hiccup in a new marriage into three wretched years.
But when he spoke, his tone was gentle. He didn’t look up at her which was something of a relief. Those dark eyes always saw too much.
“When I met you, I thought you were the most wonderful girl in the world.”
She tried not to wince at his use of the word “were.” What else did she expect? Whatever he’d done since they’d parted, and she couldn’t imagine he’d slept alone every night like she had, it was clear that the estrangement with his wife had taken a toll on Roland, too. Contrary to her aunt’s predictions.
“Everyone at Celia’s house party admired you. All the girls wanted your attention. Heavens, even all the boys treated you like a hero. I couldn’t believe you noticed me, let alone fell in love with me.”
Slowly he raised his gaze, although she couldn’t read his expression. Charmian supposed that he must be asking himself the same question. She was well aware that she looked a mess. She’d started work before dawn, and her dress was crumpled and stained. Not that it came anywhere near fashionable when it was clean. It certainly wasn’t fit for a baronet’s wife.
She looked, she was bitterly aware, like the peasant she was. And Roland would recognize that, which stung more than it should. After all, they had worse problems to sort out than her smarting vanity. But, oh, how she wished that he’d found her rosy-cheeked with health and wearing silks and satins and sipping tea in a salon. Instead of tired and worn and heartsick and wearing a frock marked by a day’s physical labor.
Charmian struggled not to raise her hand to wipe her face or smooth her hair. She felt vulnerable enough already without revealing to Roland how her shabby appearance made her cringe.
So often, she’d fantasized about meeting him. The dreams that had hurt the most had him opening his arms and saying he’d always loved her and their separation was a tragic mistake. In other dreams, she was dressed to the nines and the toast of society, and he was crushed to realize what a glorious woman he’d lost.
None of her fantasies had involved her frazzled after a chaotic day and trying to make sense of a heinous betrayal from those closest to her.
His smile was reminiscent and surprisingly sweet. “How could I not fall in love with you? You were beautiful and vital and…real. All the other girls there were paper dolls in comparison.”
The sadness in his answer undercut the compliments. The implication, Charmian was well aware, was that she was none of those things anymore. Too late to wish that she’d never left Roland at that inn in York. Too late to wish that she’d stayed and fought for her future. Too late – and pointless as well – to wish that she knew then what she knew now.
Charmian had met Sir Roland Destry at a house party at Lord Hibberd’s Yorkshire estate. Her father had made a fortune as a brewer in Bristol and had ambitions to move up in the world. Ambitions that both his wife and his sister had derided, Charmian now recalled. After all, her aunt’s favorite saying was “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
Nonetheless Harry Barton had bought himself a pretty little manor near Wells and set up as a gentleman. He’d raised Charmian, his only child, to be a lady and sent her away to an expensive school near Bath, where the gentry educated their daughters. There she and Lady Celia Hibberd, whose father had hosted that fateful house party three years ago, had become friends.
The rambling old house in the Dales had been crammed to the rafters with eligible young people. Charmian mightn’t be as blue-blooded as her friends, but she was her late father’s heiress. When it came to marriage prospects, all that gold made up for any shady origins in trade.
But the moment that she met Sir Roland Destry, those other gentlemen might as well not have existed. He was four years older than her nineteen and had the polish of Cambridge and a couple of London seasons. More than that, he’d been sweet and funny and kind. And handsome enough to make any girl dream of winning his heart.
For Charmian, the dream had become reality because he’d fallen in love with her just as swiftly as she fell in love with him.
She hadn’t thought back to those first golden weeks with Roland in years. The pain of comparing that euphoric idyll with the loneliness of life since was too excruciating. But seeing him again – still handsome – brought back a tidal wave of memories.
