Page 90 of Lord Garson's Bride
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Within half an hour, Garson was downstairs. Only to find his wife already waiting in the library.
His gut knotting with inchoate dread, he paused in the doorway to study her. As she sat on the couch and stared into the fire, her expression was desolate. This wasn’t the glamorous beauty who set society in a spin. She looked, in fact, like a better dressed version of the wan creature he’d called on in Dorset. His gut gave up twisting. Instead, it constricted with creeping, freezing fear.
He’d promised to make Jane happy. Given what he saw now when she believed herself unobserved, he’d abjectly failed. Guilt rose until it tasted like bile on his tongue, and he shifted on his feet.
The movement alerted her to his presence, and she looked up. “Hugh, you’re early.”
“So are you,” he said, grimly noting that she didn’t even try to smile.
He checked her hands, but they weren’t doing their nervous dance. Jane was still and composed—and that suddenly seemed the most worrying aspect of all. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was so on edge that the click of the latch rang like a death knell in his ears.
He moved to sit beside her, but she stopped him with a curiously truncated gesture. “No. Please. Sit…sit over there.”
With bad grace, he shifted to where she indicated. The chair was a few feet away, yet he felt like she exiled him to Siberia in the depths of winter. Only when he sat did he realize that the light streaming through the window lit him like he was on a stage and left Jane in the shadows.
“What the devil is going on, Jane?” His roiling panic flared into annoyance. He folded his arms and scowled at her. “You look like you’re about to make a dreadful confession.”
Her mouth flattened in dismal acknowledgment. “I am.”
That rancid feeling in his gut turned nastier than ever. She didn’t look like she was joking.
“Is it someone else?” To his shame, he sounded like he suffocated.
Jane’s eyes were like mirrors. The pause before her answer shredded his heart into ragged gobbets. Until this moment, he hadn’t really believed she’d taken a lover. Yet why the hell wouldn’t she? It was clear that her husband didn’t make her happy.
His raging bitterness almost made him miss her soft response. “I suppose it is.”
Garson’s world turned black as pitch, and the blood in his ears pounded like an angry ocean. “Jane?” he asked through the gathering storm.
He wasn’t even angry—yet—the hurt was too grievous. He started to rise on unsteady legs, but she made another of those keep off gestures, and he slumped back into his chair.
“Hugh, if I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?”
He felt disoriented, awaiting a disclosure, not this calm inquiry. Despite everything, he just couldn’t believe that she’d gone to another man’s bed. “I’ve always been honest with you.”
He hoped to hell it was true.
Another of those bitter little twists of her lips. “Yes, you have.”
A longer pause that felt like the silence before an execution. When her question came, it was from such an unexpected direction, it left him at a loss.
“Are you still in love with Morwenna Nash?”
He lurched to his feet. “What in Hades…”
The temper that flashed in her eyes was the first sign that Jane wasn’t as self-possessed as she strove to appear. “Please answer me.”
“Has someone been talking?” His brows lowered, and he glared at her. “I warned you there would be gossip.”
Her gaze remained uncompromising. “Answer my question.”
Garson ground his teeth. He hated talking about Morwenna and his old engagement. To date, the greatest failure in his life. Although his marriage promised to become a fiasco on an even grander scale.
“I told you when I asked you to marry me…”
Jane rose abruptly and stepped forward into the light. He bit back an appalled exclamation. She looked strained to the point of breaking, her features bleached white beneath the deep red banner of her piled-up hair. “Yes, you did. But a lot has happened since then. I wondered if you’d changed.”
