the knowledge that each day they spent apart was provisional. That he was always a steamer or a rail journey away from her, wherever he went.
She stared at him, her lips parted. “I… I want to be happy again. That is what I want.”
Her admission was akin to a knife to the heart.
He could not shake the feeling that for the first time since his return, he was seeing a glimpse of the real Nell behind the mask she had donned.
“I want your happiness as well.” Gently, slowly, he took her hands in his.
They were cool and soft. She was not wearing the engagement and wedding rings he had given her. Instead, there was a new ring in their place. He ran his thumb over the diamonds and emeralds shaped like a flower.
She stiffened. “Then let me free. Tom makes me happy.”
“You are wearing his ring,” he said, needlessly, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.
“I am to be his wife.” There was no regret in her tone. Her gaze did not falter.
He stared down at the hated ring, the symbol of what Sidmouth had already taken from him. Of what he hoped to steal next.
“You are my wife, damn you.” He clenched his jaw against a rush of feeling. Jealousy. Anger. Confusion. Hurt. Wounded pride.
“I do not want to be any longer.” She tugged, trying to escape him.
He held fast, reluctant to allow her retreat. “We had a blissful marriage, once. Do you not remember how good it was between us, Nell?”
She did not answer immediately, and for a moment, it was as if the pain, the bitterness, the anger was suspended. In the depths of her gaze, he saw the Nell he had once known. He thought he had reached her.
But then her nostrils flared and her lips tightened. “Before or after I found Lady Billingsley in your bed?”
He could hardly deny what she had seen. It was the truth. At one of their wild house parties, he had been so deep in his cups that he had been seeing double. In those days, his devotion to drink had surpassed his devotion to anything else, including Nell, and he had stumbled to his chamber with a bottle of whisky in hand. The last thing he remembered was spilling liquor all over his clothes and removing them, tossing them all over the Axminster.
When he had risen to a hand on his stiff cock, he had assumed the hand belonged to his wife. The lips on his, too, he had assumed were Nell’s. But the scent had been wrong. The caresses, too. In his befuddled state, it had taken him too long to realize the horrible truth, that Lady Billingsley, also desperately in her cups, had wandered into the wrong chamber…
He returned to the present with a jolt. “I did not invite her there, Nell. What I told you then remains as true today. Nor did I bed her. I was sleeping when she entered my chamber. And she was too deep in her cups to realize she had entered the wrong chamber.”
Nell tugged her hands from his grasp, and this time, he allowed it. “A pretty story. You explain your perfidy away with such ease.”
She turned away from him, presenting him with the elegant lines of her back. The lush fullness of her bottom was on definitive display in her dressing gown. He followed her slowly, his strides determined.
“Let us speak of that day now,” he suggested, trailing her to the opposite end of the room, where a trio of paintings he had never seen before hung, further evidence of her hand upon Needham Hall. “If we talk about it, mayhap we can finally move past it.”
She whirled about, her braid flying over her shoulder with the force of her action. “How can we move past it, Needham? You betrayed me. You had another woman in your bed.”
That, he could not deny. “Not by choice. I was cupshot, Nell. I admit that. We were having one of our wild parties. I drank far too much of the poison. But I promise you now, just as I did before, that when I laid my head upon my pillow, I was alone.”
“You told me you had no recollection of going to sleep that night,” she reminded him, her voice as acrimonious as her countenance. “You said you awoke thinking Lady Billingsley was me.”
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “Damn it, Nell. What more do you want from me? I