Courtney Milan (53 page)

Chapter Five

G
INNY WOKE IN HIS ARMS
the next morning. He’d been caressing her as she slept—a gentle, sweet rhythm. When she opened her eyes, she was almost surprised at the look on his face: somewhere between stunned and solemn.

“Good morning,” she whispered. It wasn’t just a good morning: It was a great one, great and terrible. She’d agreed to marry him in a matter of some hours.

“See here,” he said. His mouth curled down with the look of a man who had been planning a speech for a while. “I have to say something. I know you don’t love me as much as I do you, but I’m going to change all that. I don’t care how long it takes.” He leaned in and rested his forehead against her shoulder. “You are going to love me.”

For the first time since they’d kissed yesterday, a cold chill ran through her. “You think I don’t love you?”

He snorted. “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered into her shoulder. “You married someone else. What was I supposed to conclude?”

She turned away from him. “That I didn’t want to be poor? That you were threatening to cart me off to Gretna Greene, no matter what I said? I didn’t know how else to stop you. I was in a panic.”

“I wasn’t threatening!” he said. And then, as if he remembered how hot his temper might have run, he threw out: “At least, not seriously. If you loved me enough, the money wouldn’t have mattered!”

He’d said that so many times, and every time, she’d felt a burden of lead collect in her belly. It was an old argument, this one. “I have a horror of being poor,” she said. “It wouldn’t have mattered how much I loved you. It wouldn’t have mattered how much you loved me. Only saints can love through hunger, and neither of us is a saint.”

He sat up, resting on his elbow. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know how I feel. If you loved me the way I loved you—”

She heard herself make an inarticulate cry, and she batted at his questing hand. “No.
You
wouldn’t say that if you’d ever really been hungry. You’ve never eaten bits of coal out of the refuse pile just to have something in your belly. You’ve never been so cold that you couldn’t sleep at night, and yet hadn’t the strength to shiver. It doesn’t matter how much you love someone. If you’ve not got enough, you resent every scrap that they have and you do not.”

He frowned at her. Her breathing had grown faster; her heart was racing. “We weren’t so poorly off when I was first born. But Papa lost everything, betting on the ’Change when I was eight. And after that… I remember ripping a crust of bread from my elder sister’s hands one time. I was practically an animal.” She shut her eyes. “When she died of diphtheria, I was sad. But part of me, some horrid part of me deep down, thought—‘Good. That means more for me.’”

He was staring at her in consternation now. “You were a child,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the same, now.”

She shook her head and drew her knees up, to curl into a ball. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t come to my aunt because my father died, you know. He kept trying to win his money back, and it kept going more and more wrong. At the end, just before I left, a man came one night. I heard him tell my father that he would settle it all if he could just borrow me for a week.” She could feel those old shivers taking her now. “I was ten, but I knew what he meant to do with me. So I left. I slipped out the window while they were arguing, before my father had time to consider how many debts he might put to rest with a ten-year-old’s virtue. It took me two weeks to walk the sixty miles to my aunt’s house. When I arrived, I begged her to take me in. That’s what it means to be poor. I shouldn’t have had to doubt whether my own father would sell me. But love is not stronger than fear.”

She drew a deep breath and looked at him. His eyes were round, fixed on her.

“It doesn’t matter. Just thinking about that—it still makes my stomach hurt. I told you I had a horror of poverty. I didn’t mean that I required silver-plated spoons and liveried footmen. I meant that I fear it, with every part of me. I have an absolute horror of it.”

“You’re shaking.” He put his arms around her. “God,” he said. “You’re cold. You’re so cold.”

His arms were warm. And perhaps he was not the only one who had stored up bitterness, because her next words spilled over from some wounded place, buried deep in her heart.

“You could have waited,” she said. “I asked you to wait. Wait until you had a trade of your own, until you could provide for us without begging your parents. But no. It always had to be now—today, and not tomorrow; this month, and never next year. Don’t tell me I didn’t love you. You weren’t willing to hold off a few years for something that mattered so deeply to me.”

He had grown utterly still as she spoke.

She drew another shuddering breath. “It was
not
all my fault. It wasn’t.”

“Oh, Ginny.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was just…used to pushing at you. I thought it was just another aspect of the game we always played—my insisting on one thing, and your demanding another.”

“I loved you,” she said. “Just because I knew it was impossible didn’t mean I loved you less. And I
hated
you for forcing me to choose.”

He was wrapped around her, warm and solid. Their breaths combined in a ragged symphony. As much as it had hurt, it had felt good for Ginny to let out that tightly-controlled emotion, to release it into the air. Every breath she took was charged with the pain she’d buried for so long.

But his arms around her told another story. Yes, they’d hurt one another. But he could still make her feel better.

And then he took a deep, shuddering breath.

She opened her eyes. “But here we are,” she said. “After all these years. Maybe it can still be possible.”

“No.” His voice was quiet. Too quiet. “It can’t. It bloody well can’t. I can’t do this to you.”

She tilted her head. His mouth was set in a grim line; he’d made fists of his hands.

She had been so certain that he’d been joking in the beginning. When he’d threatened to hurt her—he’d never meant it. She gave him a watery smile. “Is this the part where you rip out my heart and stomp on it?” she asked.

“No.” He let out a long, slow breath. “This is the part where I rip out my own. I told you I was a wealthy man. It was...not exactly a lie. But, you see, I’ve made an investment. I’ve mortgaged everything I have to finish a railway line. We’re weeks from completion. If I’d managed it, it would have created a direct line from London to Castingham, the first ever. I would have been richer than I’ve ever dreamed.”

She looked down. “I knew that. I’ve followed your company’s progress in the papers.”

“Ha. There’s something you should know that is
not
in the papers. There’s a canal owner who wants to stop me. He’s bought a majority of my company. Tomorrow, he’ll record the transfer of shares, and after that, he’ll call a special meeting of the shareholders. It’s only a matter of time until he stops work altogether. I have liens on everything—my home, my business, even my expectations from my father. All of my debts are about to come crashing down on my head. I’ll have to sell my damned cuff links just to make the final payroll. When everything has settled, I’ll be destitute.”

She didn’t know how to describe the emotion that filled her—hard and impossibly prickly. She hadn’t known the extent of his debts. And…he’d believed that he had nothing, and he hadn’t told her?

She was still reeling from this when he spoke again. “That’s why I had to marry you today,” he said flatly. “Not tomorrow or next week. Because if I’d waited even twenty-four hours, the news would have become public. And you wouldn’t have married me.”

She’d buried all her worries next to her heart for so long that they’d become second nature to her. This time, she wasn’t going to let them fester. She didn’t try to hold back how upset she was, didn’t try to smooth it into calm politeness. “You knew I had a horror of poverty, and you were going to trick me into it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful.” She was crying, now. She didn’t care if he saw it—she wanted him to know, this time, how furious she was.

“Oh, Ginny.” His thumb traced the tear down her cheek. His hands were still warm.

She still loved him. She could have forgiven recklessness on his part. But to deliberately imply an untruth about the one thing that he knew would matter to her? He’d intended to put her back in the hell she’d gone through before—only this time, he would have bound her into it with matrimony, swallowing any chance of escape. She loved him, but right now her love seemed a painful thing.

“I’ve bungled this so badly,” he said. “God. I’ve made a mess from the start. I wish I’d—I wish I’d done
anything
except hurt you.”

But he had. He’d hurt her seven years ago, when he’d not listened to her protests. And he’d hurt her again now.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He’d hurt her, but still he held her through her tears. He held her until her sobs faded to sniffles.

“I’ve made one fortune,” he finally said. “I can make another.”

A new wave of anger hit her, and Ginny looked up. “You still think this is about nothing more than the money? I was crying because my best friend in the entire world lied to me and admitted that he was planning to defraud me. I was crying because I am afraid that I’ve found you only to lose you again. It’s not just about the money. It’s about the fact that you think you can push me into doing whatever it is that you want by any means necessary.”

“It has to be about the money!” he protested. “I can figure out how to make money. I can’t figure out how to make this right.”

She took that in silence, waiting for him to hear what he’d said.

It took only a few heartbeats for his cheeks to grow pale. Then she spoke. “You can’t tell me I don’t have a problem simply because you can’t figure out how to solve it.”

“I know. I know.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I know it all. And I have to go back to London this morning. My things are all at the inn.” He let out a shaky laugh. “I have a fortune to lose on the morrow. I can’t be late. But I can’t leave you like this.”

“Yes,” Ginny said stiffly, “you can.”

He winced, and then stood on shaky legs and took two steps toward the door.

She sniffed. “Put on trousers before you go.”

He stopped, turned, and crossed the room to where his clothing lay in a heap and shook out his shirt. He didn’t say anything as he dressed, but his jaw was squaring once more, with that familiar determination. When he’d pulled his coat on, he turned to her.

“So this is what I have to do. Obtain a massive fortune. Figure out how to stop being such a damned beast, when I’ve been one my whole life.” He nodded. “It basically seems impossible.”

Ginny sniffled again.

He crossed the room to her and then knelt beside her. “I love you,” he said. “And I may have a bloody stupid way of showing it, but I will fix this.”

“It’s not a thing to be fixed,” she said. “Don’t you see?”

He shook his head. “It will be,” he said grimly. “Once I’m done with it.”

He snapped on his ostentatious cuff links. He shouldn’t have looked so handsome in a rumpled cravat and a wrinkled coat. But he did. Her heart hurt, deep inside her.

“You’ll see,” he repeated doggedly. “I’m not sure how, but…” And on that note, he sketched her a short bow and left.

Her whole body seemed to ache in time with the sound of his retreating footsteps. She could run after him, but…

Her bedroom door opened, and Alice bustled through. She stopped at the sight of Ginny, still unclothed, nestled in the sheets. Ginny wiped frantically at her eyes, but the telltale ruddiness in her cheeks gave everything away.

“Well,” her maid said. “That did not go quite according to plan, did it?”

“I was improvising.” Ginny scrubbed at her eyes. “Circumstances rather demanded it.”

Alice frowned. “Are you still going, then? After he made you cry?”

Ginny looked up at the ceiling. All that pain was fading to a dull throb, settling into numbing disbelief. He’d hurt her. He’d made her cry. If he had actually trapped her into marriage under those circumstances, she wasn’t sure if she could ever have forgiven him. But he hadn’t done it.

He’d just wanted to.

But no matter how her mind circled, no matter how her heart ached, she would find no answers sitting in this house waiting placidly for his return.

Ginny let out a resigned breath. “I’m going. How long do I have?”

“If you still mean to board at Anniston, rather than Chester? You’ll have to be out of the house in thirty minutes. Charles is coming with the cart.”

Ginny got out of bed, and Alice came to help her dress. “My valise?” she said, as Alice tightened her corset.

“Is packed downstairs.”

“And the tickets?”

“In the front pocket of the valise, along with your tulip money.”

Twenty pounds. Barely enough to cover the cost of the trip and the deed-stamps.

“Good,” Ginny said. “I’ve got one impossible thing to do. The rest, I suppose, will be up to him.”

Chapter Six