Page 35 of The Rebellious Countess
He nodded. It didn’t matter how she pictured it, from her perspective he supposed her description was close enough.
“Why didn’t you just leave me there?”
It was the hundred-pound question. “I didn’t trust him.”
She laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “You didn’t trust him? Are you certain that you’re more trustworthy than he?”
He winced but remained silent as she began stalking the room once more, her feet pounding the floorboards as if she were a man twice her size with boots on, instead of her bare feet that were as tiny as he’d ever seen.
“How about Peter? Is he more trustworthy? After all, he did abandon me on land with no money and no direction except to go to The Happy Hag and seek out a woman who cold-bloodedly killed a man in front of me. Is she trustworthy?”
Her voice had risen to the point where he feared someone might hear what she was ranting on about. Yet still he kept his mouth closed.
“No,” she laughed. “It seems I would have been better off with the smuggler in England?—”
“Scotland,” he corrected.
“Oh, yes. Forgive me. The Scots are less trustworthy than any of the Englishmen out there.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“Wasn’t it?” She walked toward him, her bare feet slapping the floor once more as she approached.
“No,” he said, as he looked down into her eyes that were as cold as any Scottish loch. She was half English and half Scot, but he suspected she identified more with her father’s Highland ancestry than her mother’s British blue blood.
“I would not lie to you about that.”
“You would just lie about loving me?” Behind the anger freezing her blue eyes to ice, he saw the cracks of pain in the surface.
“I did not lie.” Her breath hitched, but he continued so as not to give her false hope. “I told you I never wanted to marry before I met you. My feelings toward marriage have never changed. I don’t wish to be married. Ever.”
“You don’t want children?”
He pictured little versions of Máira running across the meadow—the very place he’d asked Máira to marry him. If marriage were possible for a man like him, he would have chosen a woman such as her, but that was not in his future. He would not force her into making the same mistake his mother had made. No woman deserved that.
He shook his head. “No.”
She searched his face once more. “You’re lying. I saw it in your eyes. You want children just as much as anyone else, so why won’t you let yourself?”
“I chose the life I plan to live. I will not subject a family to my choices.”
“Isn’t that your wife’s choice to make?”
“Not when she didn’t know what she was getting into when she married me, no. Máira, you are a wonderful woman?—”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say if you could choose a wife, you would have chosen me.”
“Even if it’s true?”
“But it’s not. From the moment we met, you had a plan in place. Meet me, marry me, use me. How could that possibly involve you wanting to marry me, when you were scheming our marriage from the very start?”
“Because I grew to know the woman you are.”
“Really? In the short time you’ve known me, you believe you could have fallen in love?”
