Tempting the Bride - By Sherry Thomas Page 0,83
not the kind of answer she would have liked to hear from him. She kept her face blank and her voice uninflected. “What do you know of her situation?”
“According to her, she has an American chap she fancies. He has promised to marry her if she can obtain a divorce.”
“Why not let her go?”
Andrew took the kettle off the spirit lamp and poured hot water into the teapot. “Well, it’s a nuisance, isn’t it, a divorce?”
She watched him closely. “If you let her go now, she can marry the man of her choice and build a family with him.”
He shrugged. “She and I were all right as we were. I know I’m used to it. We’ll just carry on as we’ve always done.”
When Helena had awakened from her coma and found herself married to a stranger, she’d administered a test of character. Hastings had refused to put his own happiness above his daughter’s welfare and passed the test with flying colors.
Andrew did not. They’d already established that he had no particular objection to a divorce—if Helena would marry him afterward, he was more than willing to go through with it. But without the prospect of personal gain, he would keep his wife in their utterly unprofitable marriage, denying her everything for which she’d striven with such purpose and dedication, simply because he didn’t care for the “nuisance” of the process.
“Do one thing for me, Andrew.”
“Anything.”
“Grant your wife the divorce. Don’t keep her tethered to you just because it doesn’t matter to you. It matters intensely to her. She is no more at fault in this marriage than you are, and I’d like to see you treat her fairly, the way you yourself would have liked to be treated.”
He blinked, confused. “But what will I do then?”
“Anything you like. Your life will hardly change, since you and she haven’t been in the same house for years. You will go on writing your histories and I will go on publishing them.”
He bit his lower lip. “But you won’t marry me?”
“I can’t leave Lord Hastings—we are already married.”
“Oh,” said Andrew.
“Promise me you’ll let Mrs. Martin go?”
He nodded dejectedly. She kissed him on the forehead and left the table. “Be sure to send volume three of your history to me as soon as it is finished. And don’t dawdle, Andrew—I will not tolerate a manuscript of yours being six months late again.”
Helena climbed into her train compartment, despondent. She might have known, even before she left Easton Grange, that she would not choose Andrew, but it was still disappointing to have him turn out to be a lesser man than she’d believed.
The train began to move. The last time she’d been on the same train, going toward Kent, the sudden return of four years of memory had completely staggered her. This time it was unlikely anything particularly earth-shattering would happen, since she’d already regained the vast majority of her—
So many different voices. She recognized Venetia’s and Fitz’s, but none of the rest. They were all talking about her. Why hadn’t she woken up yet? Shouldn’t she be conscious by now?
What did they mean, she was unconscious? She tried to let them know that she was perfectly aware of what was happening around her. But to her horror, she couldn’t move her lips, her eyelids, or a single fingertip—she’d been imprisoned inside her own body.
The voices gradually died away. No one spoke anymore. The silence was excruciating, as if they’d already forgotten her existence. She shouted. She screamed. She might as well have been at the bottom of the Atlantic, for all the notice they took of her.
Then came his sensationally beautiful voice. Would anyone mind if I read to her? At last, someone still remembered her.
He read her a fascinating primer on the inner workings of publishing. Helena loved books: the sight of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. She adored tracing her fingers over embossed titles and gilded edges. She cherished the almost inaudible creak a new book’s spine made when it was opened for the first time. And were it at all possible, she’d like to capture in a vial the scent of a room full of books antique and new, the redolence of vellum and parchment commingled with the perfume of fresh ink.
He read to her for days on end. She hung onto his words, his voice, whether he was reading the publishing primer, the news, or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From time to time, when they were