Page 81 of Homeless

The blood drained from his face and seemed to pool somewhere in the pit of his stomach. “I am no rake, Elizabeth.”

“Neither were you innocent. How many women have you bedded before me? I do not see you claiming any duty to them.”

His chest was heaving now, and his knuckles ached from how he was knotting them in his trousers. “That is not something a man discusses with his wife.”

“And that is as good as a confession.”

He ground his teeth. “I am nine and twenty years old! Did you honestly expect I would have no experience? Fathers see to it that their sons are taken in hand early. There are respectable arrangements which —”

“There, you said it yourself. Respectable. A willing woman, a matter settled and concluded as a business affair, and neither party is bound by some lifelong contract.”

His hand went slack, and the trousers dropped once more to the floor. “This is an entirely different situation! You are a gentlewoman, with no protection but your own reputation and the oath I swore to you in Tudela!”

“Do you not find it odd that a gentleman need have no fear for his reputation? Why can men do precisely as they please with whomever they like, and they are afterwards not labelled as a whore or a wife?”

“You may call it unjust, but that is the way of the world, and it cannot be undone just because you are sorry for drinking too much wine and taking me to your bed! If it is a confession you want, you shall have it. I came to find the imbalance distasteful some years ago, when my eyes were opened by an unfortunate…”

He stopped, put a fist to his mouth and breathed, then closed his eyes before he spoke again. “Someone tried to take advantage of my sister. They did not succeed, but the thought of her ruin, and the realisation of how other women came to such straits, made me so uneasy with the practice that I have not touched a woman in three years.”

The tautness of her figure softened, and she blinked for a few seconds. “You have not?”

“No, and I wish to God I had no memories but those of my wife, but neither will I deceive you.”

Her lashes fluttered strangely, and she turned her head towards the window.

“Elizabeth, I do not deny that you have the right of it. A man may do as he pleases, while the woman pays with her body, with her name, and with whatever future remains to her. Whether you choose to admit it or not, you are no longer innocent. I took that last night. It is not spared for some future husband of your choosing, and I cannot let you bear that consequence alone.”

She turned round to him again. “Since you are sensible of the consequences, and you agree that they would be mine to bear, I pray you do me the justice of letting me choose them. It is I who would suffer, is it not? You may congratulate yourself that you offered what a gentleman ought and were refused.”

His veins had turned to ice, and he could hardly pull air into his lungs. She could not mean that. She could not mean any of this nonsense! Last night might have begun in wrath, but it had ended in a tenderness and intimacy that he had only ever dreamed of. And he had been so sure that she felt the same, that she had wanted him as he had her. How could she be speaking so differently now?

He turned away, his movements stupid and listless as he fumbled to pull on his trousers. She had found her gown and likewise turned her back. He could hear the fabric being shaken out and pulled into place, and he did not attempt to look at her until they were both fully attired.

She was unjust in claiming she would be the only one to suffer if he released her. She had owned a piece of his heart for two and a half years, and now, she had made his mind, soul, and body hers, as well. There was no walking away now, no clean restoration, no second life untouched by her.

And what if there were consequences from last night that even she could not deny? Would she confess their marriage then? He found himself hoping savagely that he had got her with child, that she would suspect it by the time they returned to England, and that she would be forced to claim the name Mrs Darcy for good.

And she would resent him for it.

He could not bear it, and he felt the tears squeezing from his eyes. He dashed them away and turned around. “I would never keep you by force.”

“You could not keep me, by force or otherwise. Last night changes nothing.”

He should have been silent. Honour, mercy, common sense, all told him so.

Pain moved first.

“Ten to one,” he said, and heard venom eroding his voice even as he spoke, “you were so drunk you do not remember it anyway.”

She stopped as if a shot had gone off between them.

One hand was at her sleeve ribbon. She did not finish tying it. She looked at him with such naked astonishment that for an instant, he believed he had done what cruelty always pretends it means to do and won some advantage.

“It must be a bitter blow for you, Mr Darcy, to discover you are so forgettable.”

If she had struck his face, he might at least have understood which part of him hurt. But this was worse, because it took the most holy night of his life and reduced it to a common, blurred, dismissible matter, a thing so little marked in her memory that he might as well have been any other man.

When she spoke again, the anger had flattened into something almost businesslike. He hated that tone more. Anger, at least, had blood in it.