Page 19 of His Betrothed
“I didn’t want to be your duty! I knew nothing about you—I most certainly didn’t love you.”
“You are naive if you think love has anything to do with marriage. It was about our families taking what they could from each other, merginginto a strength no one but the queen could touch. But your stupidity cost your father the dowry he’d promised for you. ’Tis mine now, and I’m here to take it. If you don’t believe me, go ask your father.”
“I don’t speak to my father after the way he treated me,” Roselyn answered, ducking beneath his arm to escape the prison he’d created for her.
“Don’t you have that in reverse?” Spencer saidas he awkwardly turned around and rested his back against the door. He gave her a cold smile that made her want to shudder. “Hewon’t speak toyou. He disowned you, didn’t he?”
The pain she’d caused herself and her family was too private to show anyone, especially this man. She clenched her jaw and spoke through gritted teeth. “You obviously know this already. Does it make you feel like a manto taunt me with it?”
He took a deep breath and didn’t answer immediately. She saw that the strain of standing was beginning to affect him, but she’d rather let him fall than offer him help now.
“I am not taunting you,” he said stiffly. “I am only trying to make you understand that you are an intruder on my land.”
“I refuse to believe you. And even if it were true, would you be so cruel asto make a widow leave her home?”
“Widow?” he said with a sneer. “You are not a widow. Your lover may have died, but that still only makes you his whore.”
Roselyn’s hard-fought calm vanished beneath an onslaught of wild, pent-up rage. She slapped him hard, using the weight of her body behind her arm. She heard his head hit the wooden door, watched with dawning uncertainty as he fell—luckily ontohis own pallet.
She almost ran to help him—until his cruel words reverberated through her brain, closing up her throat with tears she refused to shed. He could help himself.
Thornton rolled onto his back and lifted himself up on his elbows. His cheek had darkened from the imprint of her hand. “Striking me won’t change the truth. You made sure I can never legally wed another, that I can nevergive my family an heir. I will at least take all the property owed me.”
She didn’t answer, just clenched her fists to keep from hitting him again.
“I’ll wager your father doesn’t even know you’re here. Is the bailiff in on your deception?”
“The Heywoods are good people—they run this estate better than anyone else my father could hire.”
“So they house you, and you bake their bread. Do theyenjoy watching you serve them?”
He might as well have struck her, and she gasped. “They are my only family—if you dare to make trouble for them, you’ll answer to me.”
They stared at each other, both breathing heavily, the air between them thick with anger and mistrust. Roselyn finally turned away. Sobs pressed against her ribs, tears stung behind her eyelids, but she would not let Thornton knowhow terrified she was.
Why hadn’t she just left him on the beach, like any sensible woman?
She knelt down and began to pick up the scattered vegetables with hands that shook. She felt his mocking gaze on her, but she refused to look at him. She didn’t know what to do, had no one to turn to. Now that he knew who she was, there was nothing to stop him from hurting her, especially if he was aSpanish spy.
But what if he was only an angry, rejected bridegroom? Regardless of the cruel things he’d said, she had humiliated him before all of London society, which seemed to matter to him.
But that didn’t give him the right to force her to leave her family home. She wouldnotbelieve that her father would part with Wakesfield, where she’d spent so much of her childhood.
Roselyn didn’tlook at Thornton as she hung another cauldron of water over the fire. She kept her back to him as she chopped vegetables and checked on the salted mutton she’d left soaking in a bowl. With each repetitive stroke of her knife, she became even more numb to the despair she thought she’d long ago buried—
Until she turned around and saw him watching her with black, fathomless eyes. A knowing smirkturned up the corners of his mouth. She froze, barely keeping herself from flinging the vegetables at him.
But it would only make more work for her.She put the vegetables and mutton and seasonings in the cauldron, and tossed the bowl back on the table. Without looking at him, she calmly opened the door and went outside, where she took one step, then another, and another, until she started torun, as if she could outrun the coming darkness.
Roselyn didn’t stop until she fell to her knees in the tall grass overlooking the ocean, and finally let the sobs escape her aching chest.
