Scandal Meets Its Match (The May Flowers #7) - Merry Farmer Page 0,52

room in silence to take the document from Gladys’s hands. Not a soul in the room moved or made so much as a peep, Lenore especially. Her eyes were round with the same sort of fright Phin had seen in them in Trafalgar Square, when she’d first spotted Swan. He could feel that fear in his bones as he glanced from her to the parchment in his hands.

There it was, in black and white. The document was a marriage license issued in Laramie, Wyoming, wedding Bartholomew Swan to Lenore Garrett on the twentieth of April, eighteen eighty-six. The signatures were a bit sloppy, as if they were written in haste, but the seal imprinted in one corner looked as official as anything the high courts in London could produce. Phin suddenly understood that the fear that had been in Lenore’s eyes days before hadn’t been because she was frightened for her life, she was terrified because she knew her deception was about to be found out.

Anger of a sort Phin had never known pulsed through him. He’d understood the concept of betrayal in theory, but up until that moment, he hadn’t realized how deeply it could cut. He set the marriage license deliberately on the table and drew himself to his full height, unable to look at Lenore. He’d trusted her with his heart, with his body, and with his future, and she’d lured him along, teasing and tempting him into making a damn fool of himself when pride was the only thing he felt he had to his name at times.

“I—” Lenore started, shifting restlessly on her spot. No other words came out, though, and she pressed her hands to her stomach as though she were feeling ill. “Phin—” She took half a step toward him.

“Girls, I think it’s time you went to bed now,” Phin said, deliberately turning away from Lenore to fight the piercing pain in his chest. “You’ve been up quite long enough for one day.”

To their credit, Gladys and Amaryllis slouched out of their chairs, sending wary looks to both Lenore and Phin, and shuffled out of the kitchen without a word of protest. Phin hated how pale and distraught they looked, as if he couldn’t protect them any better than he’d been able to protect Lenore, or himself.

“I didn’t do this on purpose,” Lenore said, her voice small and thin. “I—”

Phin walked right past her when she approached him. “I’ll settle the girls for the night, and then we’re going to talk.” He turned to Lenore with his last words, meeting her eyes with a flare of bitterness that left a bad taste in his mouth.

Lenore gulped and took a step back, but Phin didn’t linger where he was to see what else she would do. Hazel stayed with her as he continued to the hall and followed the girls upstairs, but he didn’t hear a word from the kitchen once he’d left it.

The girls were too old to need much in the way of help getting to bed, but Phin needed the few minutes of domestic tranquility the task provided to gather his thoughts and calm his anger. Yes, he was hurt. He was furious that the woman he’d made love to so passionately not more than an hour before, whom he’d pledged his heart and his life to, had been married to another man the entire time he’d known her. The betrayal he felt demanded to know what kind of a woman would throw herself around so glibly.

The tiny voice of rationality that attempted to poke up through the pain he felt whispered that she was a woman who was genuinely afraid for her life. Not even the wickedest of wantons could fake the sort of terror he’d seen in Lenore’s eyes before their flight from London.

“It’s my fault,” Gladys said, sniffing and bursting into tears as Phin sat on the side of the bed she was sharing with Amaryllis to tuck the two in. “I went into my room to fetch clothes for tomorrow and I remembered Princess Lenore’s box. I wanted to know what was inside.”

“Now you know,” Phin said, his voice full of gravel and sadness as he pulled the bedcovers up over his sisters’ shoulders.

“I thought Princess Lenore was going to marry you,” Amaryllis added in a tiny voice. “I wanted her to.”

“So did I,” Phin confessed with a sigh.

Admitting as much out loud loosened a bit of the anger that had him clamped so tightly. He had