Page 38 of My Hellion, My Heart
“Why not?” Rose countered.
“Because he’s gone,” he whispered. “Gone to a place no one can ever find him.”
Coward.
A coward who has run.
She leaned in to hear his barely audible words. “Why, Henry?”
“Love is a weakness, Rose. I learned that well when they had me,” he said, surprised he was speaking of it with her, and yet, unable to stop. Maybe it was because of Irina’s earlier words. A justification, perhaps, even though he knew no absolution would come from it.
“I never told you or John, but my captors brought in a young girl, a servant from the tavern where I’d been staying. They tortured her…right in front of me. They believed I’d break, that I’d give up the names of my allies, and so they broke her fingers. Her hands. Her knees. They bruised her face and split her lip. They…”
Henry’s stomach turned, the familiar sweat of panic and powerlessness threatening to suffocate him.
“Oh, Henry,” Rose whispered.
“Do not feel pity for me,” he bit out. “I did not know her. She was just a girl. I did not even know her name, and that is the only reason I did not break. If I had known her, if I’d known her name…if I hadcared—” He swallowed hard. “I would have broken. I would have given them whatever information they wanted.”
He closed his eyes, still able to hear her screams echoing down the long corridor to his prison cell.
“They stripped away any capacity for love I might have had that day, though perhaps I never had it in me to begin with. Perhaps there was ever only brutality.”
Henry stared at his palms, clenching and unclenching his fingers, his mind going dark with the memories that haunted him. Even Rose didn’t know what he was capable of…what he wasstillcapable of when his nightmares took him back to dark, harrowing places. No, it was safer for everyone for him to be alone.
Rose stayed quiet. Appalled, perhaps. What did it matter?
“You are kind, Rose, but I am ruined in more ways than one,” he murmured, touching his leg, the old wound stiff and aching. Along his back, the old burn scars, reopened by the lashes of a whip in France during his imprisonment, itched as if alive.
“Some say that about me because I am a widow,” she responded.
He was glad she hadn’t tried to argue with him again. “Then perhaps,” he said with a weak, forced grin, “the two of us make sense together.”
Companionship. Convenience. Safety. That is what this marriage would be. She nodded, but said nothing more.
It would have to be enough.
Chapter Eleven
Irina was relieved she’d brought her own mount to the house party at Peteridge. The Duke of Hastings’s country seat was a short jaunt from London, and though Lord and Lady Dinsmore had balked at her insistence that she ride there on horseback rather than inside their carriage with them, they had, in the end, relented.
It had been well over a week since the Kensington ball. Since Irina had called Henry a coward and stormed from the balcony. She’d tried to focus on anything other than the startled hurt she’d seen in his eyes, as if she had thrust a blade into his heart, but it had proven difficult.
True to her word, Irina had arranged for two thousand pounds to be delivered to Max in as discreet a way as possible, and had then reserved all her focus on waiting for news that he had officially entered the pot. When it had come, she had felt an initial rush of relief, quickly followed by one of nausea.
She was going to marry Max.
It didn’t seem real, but…it would be. She’d get used to the notion, she was certain, and they would both be better off together than they had been before—alone. They were a good team, Irina knew. Everything would be fine.
Packing for Lord Marston, the Duke of Hasting’s house party had thankfully consumed the last handful of days, and now that she was there, she could focus her attention on the diverting events the duke had planned, like the archery contest.
Lord Marston’s stables were not lacking in the least, but when he had announced an archery competition to be held on a course designed for a horse and rider, she was happy she would not have to compete on an unfamiliar mount.
The fact that Jules belonged to Henry only rankled a little.
The fact that Henry himself and his gorgeous bride-to-be were also in attendance at the duke’s annual midseason house party had rankled quite a bit more.
Though if she was being truthful, Irina was starting to like Lady Carmichael. She hadn’t expected to, and she didn’t want to, but when they’d been paired off for a game of shuttlecock on the first day of the house party, she’d found herself enjoying the older woman’s company. Lady Carmichael was fresh and direct, but not in as ostentatious a way as say, Gwen. What was more, she did seem to care very much for Henry. In fact, she reminded Irina much of her own sister, Lana. She’d even stood up to an inquisition from Gwen, which was a feat in itself.
