her she was responsible for their lack of progeny, Tom thought grimly.
“You are not barren, however,” he prodded, needing more from her. Needing the words, the confirmation. Somehow, it did not feel as if he were going to be a father. Not until he had the truth from her pretty pink lips. Not until she looked him in the eye and admitted it.
“It would seem I am not,” she agreed softly. “I am with child, Tom.”
His lungs burned and his heart thundered as if he had run a great distance. “Please tell me that you were not intending to hide yourself in the country and keep our babe a secret from me.”
“I did not know what else to do. Neither of us bargained for this. It was meant to be an entanglement of a fortnight, no longer.” She tugged her hands from his and burrowed them into her skirts, clutching the silk so tightly, her knuckles rose in stark relief from her dainty fingers. “You need not fret I expect anything of you. I most certainly have no wish to seek a marriage proposal if that is what you fear.”
“I do not fear it.” He gathered up the remainder of the biscuits and set the plate aside. Taking her chin gently between his thumb and forefinger, he forced her gaze to meet his. “Nor do I fret, and neither should you. We conceived a child together, and now we must do our duties to the child.”
Hell.
Was that the best reassurance he could formulate? It was hardly heartening, was it? Nor was it romantic in the slightest. He recognized his mutton-headed error the moment she stiffened beneath his touch, pulling her chin from his grasp.
“And what do you consider your duty?” she asked. “I will not be an albatross to you, and neither will this baby.”
This baby?
Our baby, he wanted to correct her, already filled with an indescribable sense of love and responsibility for the tiny life beating in her womb.
Long-awaited anger finally resurrected itself inside him. “Is that what you think of me, that I am the sort of man who will consider the ramifications of his own actions a burden? My God, Hyacinth, you gave yourself to me for a fortnight. You ought to have saved yourself for a man you thought better of.”
His knees were beginning to ache, and he felt at once helpless and woefully ill-prepared for this dialogue, for this moment. He had mucked it up quite badly. But so had she. Look at the two of them, stubborn and foolish. Lovers who had gone their separate ways only to reunite on the carpet of the sunny salon, biscuit crumbs scattered about them like their misunderstandings.
“I promised you there would be no child.” Hyacinth’s vivid eyes welled with tears, bringing forth the violet in her irises. “I do not want you to think I entrapped you. Becoming with child was never my intent.”
“Why should I think it was when you were plotting to leave me again, none the wiser?” He ought to punish her for that, he thought, but he could not bear it.
She was his, this woman. And he could not bear to see her suffer any more than she already had. When he thought about all she had endured at the hands of Southwick—all that she had revealed and all that he suspected—her reaction made sudden sense. Having spent years trapped in a hateful union, why would she wish to risk another?
“I was not plotting to leave you.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I simply cannot bear to remain here, watching your new lovers stroll up the pavements to your door. And neither can I bear for the baby to suffer because of my own reckless actions.”
“The babe will not suffer and neither shall you,” he promised, catching that tear on the pad of his thumb, halting its downward slide. “Nor would I have taken other lovers. There is only one woman I want in my life, Hyacinth.”
And it was her.
She rolled her lips inward, shaking her head as if she waged an inner battle over whether or not she should speak.
“What is it, sweetheart?” he asked, the tenderness she brought out in him roaring back to life. “What do you want to say to me?”
When she cried, it was as if she were tearing his own beating heart from his chest. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her to him, promise her all would be well for them. But