Page 90 of The Duke's Promise to Her Child
“I mean that I have been letting him win. Even from a grave, I have been handing him victories.” She looked at her hands briefly and then back at him. “I have hurt you. I know that. I did not mean to, and I am sorry for it. It was only that he treated me so badly for so long that I stopped being able to tell the difference between a man who might hurt me and a man who never would.”
“Pray, will you tell me what he did? What happened to make you so frightened?”
She had expected this and thus nodded. “He made me feel like nothing. From the very beginning of the marriage he made me feel foolish and small. I thought I was moon-eyed over him, but I was nothing but a distraction to him, someone to present to the world while he continued on with the Cyprians and ladies of ill repute. And as time went on and he began to suspect that I was not as well-connected as my mother had claimed, he only got worse. He would tell me I was worth nothing, that I had deceived him, that I would never be the kind of wife he needed.” She stopped for a moment. “He held my mother’s Banbury tales against me. Even worse, he grabbed me. He pushed me. There were times he did considerably worse than that.”
She heard the change in his breathing. She saw his jaw tighten and his hands, at his sides, close briefly into fists and then open again. He did not interrupt.
“I know what you are feeling right now,” she said. “And I appreciate it. But let me finish.” She took a breath. “The reason it affected how I was with you is that he was not like that when we were courting. When we first met, he was charming and kind. I believed completely that I knew who he was. And then we were married and he changed, and because of that I kept waiting for you to change too. I kept looking for the moment when the door would close and the real version of you would appear.” She met his eyes. “It never came. Because there is no other version of you. You are exactly who you have always been, and I have known that for a long time, and I could not make the fear stop anyway.”
He was quiet for a moment. A cart went past on the road behind them.
“I am sorry,” Gideon said. “I do not know what I can say to help, to make you understand that I would never raise my hand…”
“I know,” she said. “I do know that I mustn’t let my experience with Huxley destroy what I could have with you. Can you forgive me?”
“There is nothing to forgive,” he said. “Other than perhaps the pie contest, which clearly was not conducted in the proper manner, for there is no way my rhubarb pie should have lost..”
She blinked. Then laughed, which she had not expected to do. “The pie contest.”
“You won under false pretenses. The village was biased toward the Duchess and everyone knows it.”
“The apple pie is superior. The village simply has good taste.” She looked at him. “I understand your rhubarb did not perform as you had anticipated.”
“It did not. Though what you do not yet know is that Mrs. Baker has produced a rhubarb apple pie. A merger of both our selections.” He paused with the expression of a man delivering significant news. “I indulged in the carriage on the way here. It is quite excellent.”
“You had a pie that was specifically the combination of both our choices and you ate it in a carriage without me. I must say, I do not know how to take that.” She grinned at she spoke.
“I was under considerable emotional strain.”
“That is not an excuse. That is precisely the occasion on which one saves good pastry for one’s wife.”
‘Well, you will be pleased to hear that while I did away with the rhubarb apple, there is still an impressive selection of then pies in the carriage. Well, there were. We have not left James in it for some while alone.”
“Ten?”
“He felt the need to bring some back for the Langleys. And presumably his wife.”
He looked at her with the particular expression she had missed for three weeks — that combination of amusement and warmth and the complete absence of performance. “This,” he said. “This is what I have been missing. Our conversations. Our ease.”
“I cannot promise it will always be like this,” she said. The lightness did not leave her voice but she meant it seriously. “I want you to know that before we go any further. It is going to take me time. There will be days when the old fear comes back up and I do not handle it well, and days when I am less easy than I am right now.”
“I know,” he said. “I have never asked for easy. I have asked for you.” He looked at her steadily. “As long as you are willing to give this a genuine attempt, so am I. That is the whole of it.”
She held his gaze. And then she nodded — the short decisive nod that meant she had made up her mind and it was settled.
He stepped toward her and he put his arms around her. She took a deep breath and leaned into him. They held one another as the traffic continued to pass them by, and then, she took a step back.
“Lavinia has been asking for you,” she said. “Every day. Giddy gone, repeated at regular intervals, with increasing grievance. She was most upset by your absence.”
“Well, we shall have to hurry to the posting house so I can see her and she can see me. And when we go back, I will have a very well trained little pig she can be friends with.”
Helena’s eyebrows rose. “You kept Ruby.”
“Of course, I did. She has grown a bit and made rather a mess of the pen but she is a good, vivacious little pig. I am sure she misses you. Also, I thought her to walk on a leash.
“A leash?”
“She took to it after some negotiation.” He said it without embarrassment. “I had a great deal of time on my hands.”
