“Despite the unconventional beginning to our marriage, yes,” she answered. Though the doubt and questions remained, swirling through her, infecting her thoughts. Dogging her with unfair persistence.
“You have only been married for a month,” scoffed Benny. “You scarcely even know him. He is a member of a depraved club that is renowned for its wickedness. He is the last sort of man I would ever wish to see married to my beloved sister.”
The reminder of his club hit Callie like a pail of ice water.
She had known, of course. She had mined all the scandals and rumors surrounding her husband to write Confessions of a Sinful Earl. But it was difficult indeed to reconcile what she had known about him with the man she had come to know.
“I know about the club,” she said.
“He has dared to take you there?” Benny asked, outraged anew.
“Of course not,” she hastened to say. “He has not spoken of it to me.”
The moment the confession left her, doubt blossomed. So, too, fear. Sin had never once mentioned the club. And he had been gone for so long the day after their nuptials. He had claimed to be visiting his friend. What if he had been lying?
“I wonder what else your new husband is keeping from you,” Benny said grimly, giving voice to her fears.
“Nothing, we hope,” Isabella said, swatting her new husband’s arm. “You promised on the carriage ride here that you would remain calm. That you would not berate her or attempt to ruin her spirits.”
Benny frowned at his duchess. “I wanted her to have a love match, as we have. Callie is worth far more than some arrogant, penniless earl who has the ballocks to abduct her, force her into marrying him—”
“I chose to marry him,” Callie interrupted.
“Because he threatened to reveal you as the true author of those scandalous memoirs all of London is agog over,” her brother countered. “By his own admission! My God, Calliope, I thought you were more intelligent than this. I never thought I would see the day that you would fall prey to a heartless rakehell out to destroy you.”
The virulence of Benny’s words sank deep into Callie’s heart. They found her fears and mingled with them, until her stomach was an endless, churning sea. What if her brother was right? What if she had allowed the glimpses into Sin’s softer side to blind her to the truth of the man that he was? They had only been married for a month.
She must not allow herself to forget the manner in which their marriage had begun. He had abducted her from London, bound her wrists, and even gagged her. And then, he had blackmailed her.
“Callie?” Isabella’s worried voice cut through her madly spinning thoughts. “Are you well? You look dreadfully pale all of a sudden.”
No, she was not well. She felt…dizzy. Sick. Overheated. Her skin was hot. The room seemed to spin. Her eyes could not find a safe place to fall. It was as if she stood still whilst everything and everyone else was whirling around.
The edges of her vision went dark. Benny and Isabella seemed suddenly too far away. Their voices were hushed and strange. And then Callie was falling, falling, falling.
Backward, into the abyss.
Darkness claimed her.
Sin paced the hall outside his wife’s apartments, trying to tamp down his rage and his worry. Callie had swooned. His strong, fierce, fiery wife had bloody well fainted. It still seemed impossible to believe. He had abducted her, bound her, dragged her through the countryside, done his best to frighten her, and she had remained stalwart.
Ten minutes in the presence of her brother and sister-in-law, and she was requiring smelling salts. By the time word had reached him, she had already been awake, propped with half a dozen pillows which had been fetched from God knew where, in a chair in his study. Her pallor and the sheen of perspiration on her forehead had convinced him she was ill.
Dreadfully so.
She had told him she had a terrible megrim.
Sin had summoned a physician.
A physician who had been attending her, along with the Duchess of Westmorland, for…
He plucked his pocket watch from his waistcoat.
One whole fucking hour.
“Have you done something to her?”
The question, more snarling growl than respectable query, emerged from his wife’s brother. The Duke of Westmorland had taken news of Sin’s marriage to his sister worse than he had supposed. He had taken Callie’s sudden fainting spell even harder.