Page 68 of The Duke of Ice
Her hand stilled, but her lips turned up in a sultry smile. “You’re trying to avoid conversing.”
“Perhaps.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. Actually, it was precisely that. “It’s difficult for me to talk about the past.” That his present held joy was astonishing. He was afraid of ruining his fortune.
“Would you like me to start?” she asked softly, her lips curving into a gentle, sweet smile.
He brought her head down and kissed her. She pulled back after a moment, and he gave her a lopsided smile. “If you must.”
She swatted at his chest and lay down beside him, snuggling into the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder. “I wished we’d run away together. In my mind, we did. I’d imagine us eloping to Scotland and never coming back. We’d live in a tiny cottage in the Highlands where we would have our children and our love, and we didn’t need anything else.”
It sounded idyllic. “Why the Highlands?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Because it was far away, I suppose.”
“I imagined us farther than that—America.”
“Did you?” She leaned up to look at him again. “I thought you hated me.”
“I did, but once in a while, I’d let myself fantasize about what could have been.” Particularly when he’d been miserable on campaign with the Fourth. “If you hadn’t been—” He stopped himself before he said something crude he would regret. She didn’t deserve that. He’d meant what he’d said, that she truly hadn’t had any choices. His twenty-two-year-old self hadn’t been smart enough to know that. “Forgive me,” he said.
Her gaze turned soft. “There’s nothing to forgive.” She kissed his cheek, then settled back against him.
He found he wanted to know the specifics. After all this time, he could learn the truth. “How long after you left Bath did you marry Pendleton?” He recalled reading about it, but didn’t remember—or maybe he’d purposely forgotten.
“Almost immediately. It was about four weeks, I think. Just long enough for my father to arrange the marriage settlement and have the banns read.”
“You had no say in the marriage?”
“None. I sometimes wonder if they chose the worst possible person, someone who was bound to make me unhappy.”
When he thought of what she’d already told him about Pendleton, he wanted to rouse the man from the dead and kill him all over again. But perhaps his anger was misguided. Perhaps he ought to direct it toward the living—namely, her mother and father. “Surely your parents wouldn’t be so cruel?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, but they refused to let me marry the man I loved.”
Loved. She used the word in the past tense. He thought she loved him still, but she hadn’t plainly said so. Did he love her? He’d loved her then—as much as he’d grown to hate her, he didn’t doubt that he’d loved her first.
“Tell me about Pendleton,” he said gruffly, both wanting to stoke his hatred of the man and realizing it would be torture to hear. He suspected she wanted to reveal her secrets. She’d been the one to ask for this conversation.
She hesitated before asking, “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.” And when it became too much, he would say so.
“He was a philanderer. I hated being married to him.”
A philanderer...Nick tamped down his ire. What good would it do now? “I’m sorry to hear you had to endure such a marriage. And there were no children?” He, of course, knew she’d been unable to carry any, as Mrs. Linford had told him. He thought of her dream of the Highlands—there’d been children in it.
“I can’t carry them.” Her response was so faint, he had to strain to hear it. “I became pregnant several times. After the third loss, Clifford decided I wasn’t worth lying with. As sad as I was, my relief was greater.”
Nick squeezed her tight against his side. There was a unique pain associated with losing a child, and he suspected the desolation was the same even if they hadn’t been born. “Fate hasn’t been particularly kind to either one of us. How did Pendleton die?”
“A lengthy illness, compounded by excessive drink, I believe. And perhaps laudanum. He started taking it for coughing fits. By the end, he was ingesting far more than the prescribed amount.”
“I can’t imagine you were sad when he passed.”
“No, which made me feel a bit guilty.”
He kissed her head again. “You mustn’t.”
“Was your marriage happy?”
