from him.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s raining. No one will notice. I must get back. Mama’s carriage will go to Mrs. Roake’s to collect me, and I’ll have to change before it arrives. And return to my family. That life. After this brief escape. What have we to do today? The blasted aquatic fête on the Thames. When will we be done with this curst pretending? It doesn’t suit us, Ashmont, either one, and it only makes everything more complicated.”
“We could stop pretending,” he said. “We could marry.”
“Don’t. Not now. I need to . . . think. Collect myself.” She turned away from him and left the doorway. She walked quickly, but he caught up in a few strides. His heart thudded with the riotous feelings, now compounded by anxiety, balked lust, and self-loathing.
“Cassandra.”
“When you do what’s right, it makes all the rest—all the waste of yourself—all the more galling,” she said. “I wish I’d left you lying in Putney Heath and simply dealt with it myself and endured the consequences. Instead I go from joy to despair and back again. Again and again. It’s maddening. I’ve become a woman I despise, maudlin and irrational.”
She’d kissed him so passionately. He’d answered passionately.
She said she loved him madly. Was that what it was? Madness? Certainly it was maddening, stealing moments together, snatching at every straw she offered him. She’d upended his world, and now it lay strewn about him.
Like the Pooleys’ belongings.
It was too much: the child, too small, practically weightless, who’d simply assumed she was safe with him. The two children whose parents had been cheated and taken advantage of while they only tried to live decent lives.
It was more than he could make sense of at this moment. He couldn’t put a sentence together. Words and images tumbled through his mind. These last few weeks. All that had happened since the morning in Putney. But it stretched back further than that, and he hadn’t known.
All these years she’d been there, somewhere in the dim background of his useless life. He’d never noticed her, and she’d loved him, and he’d disappointed her again and again.
An instant passed, or maybe months. It was all the same to him. Then they stood at the entrance to Furnival’s Inn once more. The rain continued steadily, unaffected by the doings of two unhappy people. They were drenched, but this was a warm summer day, and they weren’t delicate creatures.
He remembered her, soaked through in Putney, because she’d gone for a doctor. She’d gone out in a storm for Keeffe, who was so important to her. She loved her sister dearly, but Keeffe was her Blackwood and Ripley, the one she’d trust with her life, the one who’d helped give her life direction and a measure of freedom. He’d made her life tolerable, in other words.
She hadn’t really needed Ashmont today. Any male would do, to keep the men from bothering her, all those men who believed it was perfectly acceptable to accost women who had the audacity to walk about London unaccompanied.
She could have managed today’s business on her own. If he’d stayed in the background, as she wanted, then perhaps all of this would have been easier to endure. For her. For him.
He was doing the same as he’d done with Olympia: charming and disarming and wearing down her resistance without a thought to who she was and what she wanted. He’d understood nothing of Olympia’s character, wishes, dreams. Who she was hadn’t mattered. He’d wanted a wife and she fit the requirements and he’d simply set out to obliterate the barriers.
He was doing it again, and this time with a woman who’d come to mean everything to him.
Not five weeks had passed since Putney Heath. Not nearly enough time to undo the decade and more of hurt and disappointment he’d inflicted on her. Not nearly enough time to prove himself. He was a spoiled, shallow, thickheaded man who’d refused to grow up and take responsibility for himself.
Small wonder he was causing her so much confusion and anguish.
He took her to the hackney stand and handed her into the coach.
“You’re right,” he said. “This is maddening.”
He gently closed the door and walked away.
He had work to do.
Chapter 14
In spite of the rain and the consequent delays in making her way across London, Cassandra was ready and waiting when her mother’s carriage came to Mrs. Roake’s house to collect her.
She had no time to confide in Hyacinth. Cassandra hadn’t even time to think