on foolish hope and the excitement of our first night together.”
She shook her head, desperate to go back to just a few hours before, when all was well. “I don’t understand why you’re saying this. Perhaps if you told all the secrets you have, too.”
“I don’t need to tell you my secrets, Mary,” he snapped. “They don’t affect this.”
“Don’t they?” she protested, not shrinking under his sudden wrath. “Don’t you think the wounds of your past are what’s driving you to say these things now?”
“No, I don’t,” he said with deliberate control now. “I made peace with those things a long time ago, but you’re not able to make peace with us. If you were, you’d be able to tell your mother now.”
“You’re asking for the impossible,” she cried.
“Am I?” He arched his brow, a cold gesture. “Well, if I’m asking for the impossible, which is for us to be free and for everyone to know it, then our marriage is impossible.”
She tried to understand what he was saying. And then she understood. “You can’t be leaving me,” she said. “That’s not possible.”
“Anything is possible, Mary,” he said, his lips curling in a hard smile before he looked away. “Or I thought so. This was a vast mistake.”
“You think I’m a mistake?” she rasped, her throat tightening.
“Don’t you think I’m one?” he countered, his broad shoulders as unyielding as any stone wall.
She matched him, shoulders back, head high. “No, I don’t.”
“You do,” he disagreed, his eyes narrowing. “Otherwise, you would be able to tell your family. You’d be proud to be with me. You’d be proud to be out walking the streets with me, to hold my hand. But you’re not. And that’s the truth.”
She swallowed back a wave of nausea.
Was that how he saw it?
He must.
She took a step towards him. “Please, I—”
He snapped up his hand, a gesture meant to keep her in her place. “No, Mary, I can’t talk to you right now. I have to think about this.”
“You have to think?” she repeated.
“Yes, perhaps you’re so used to getting your way in this world. Perhaps you think I shall just go on living in the shadows if you wish it.”
“Getting my way?” she repeated. “You know nothing of my life.”
“I know a great deal of it,” he replied without sympathy. “Yes, you suffered with your father, but you don’t know what it means to truly suffer, to be denied, to be abandoned. And now,” he said, “you’re abandoning me.”
Those words cut through the room like a knife. And her heart twisted in horror.
“I’m not abandoning you,” she insisted. “I’m here now.”
“Yes,” he growled. “You’re here now when it suits you, when you don’t have to tell anyone about it, as if I’m a dirty little. . . ” He stopped himself. “Please leave. I’m done with shadows.”
She could not breathe.
This was not how this was supposed to be. This adventure was not supposed to turn into a tragedy. That’s what Drake had said once, that they were not supposed to be a tragedy, but a love story.
“Richard,” she said, almost pleading as her heart broke.
“No,” he ground out. “I don’t wish to speak of this any longer. I asked you to tell them, you could not, and that’s my answer. I know how far you’re willing to go, Mary, and it’s not far enough.”
She bit back a cutting reply and said instead, “I understand I have disappointed you, but you have never let me in, and I don’t think you ever will. So perhaps we have disappointed each other. I want to know more about you, but you don’t want to tell me.”
“Then, we are far too alike,” he said, turning to the fire. “It’s best we end it now.”
It hit her then. There was nothing she could say to ease his pain or change is mind. Nothing that would defend her actions or lack thereof to him.
With that, she turned on her heel and headed out into the corridor, her heart pounding.
She could not think.
As she slid into the hall, a horrifying thought came to her. She was running away from him again.
When she looked back now, she knew that morning when that footman had knocked on Heath’s door, telling her of her father’s death, and she’d left him then, that that had been a coward’s choice.
This morning, when she’d walked out of her mother’s room without telling the truth, that was a coward’s choice too.
She was a coward, and she did not know how