Mary Jo Putney (51 page)

"I want to be your wife."

"You
are
my wife, remember? Therein lies the problem."

There was barely controlled savagery in his tone as he continued. "I want a legal separation. My assets are not limitless, but I will give you an income sufficient to support a fashionable life. I hope you won't utterly disgrace the name, but short of murder, there is no way I can constrain you, so I must rely on your nonexistent sense of honor."

Ignoring the insult of his last sentence, she took a deep breath before answering. "I don't want your money and I don't want a legal separation." Summoning all her sincerity, she tried to catch his eye. "I would rather be your mistress and have your love than be a legal wife forever separated from you."

"Certainly the situation was more satisfactory when you were acting the role of mistress than it has been since you revealed yourself as my wife," he agreed, his level tone belied by the tightening of the skin across his high cheekbones. "Unfortunately, I cannot go back to that state of halcyon ignorance. If you are wise, you will accept the separation. It's my best offer. If you fight me, I may decide to sue for divorce. Doubtless there is an abundance of evidence to prove your adultery, but I would rather not expose Geoffrey or you or myself to that. Especially not Geoffrey."

"There is no evidence of infidelity, Gervase. I have never lain with any man but you." Diana's fingers locked together in her lap, the nails biting deep.

"This very afternoon I saw you and Francis embracing in the gardens. My own cousin, at my own home. And you expect me to believe your lies?" He leaned his head against the chair back, as if too weary to support its weight.

"It was the embrace of friends. Why don't you ask Francis what the truth is, my lord husband?" Her resolution to be calm was shredding away in the face of his relentless distrust.

"I have not wanted to hear him admit you are lovers." He drank the last of the brandy in his goblet. "Fond though I am of Francis, I doubt I would be able to forgive him, and I can't afford to lose any more friends."

She flung her hands up in exasperation. "Why are you so sure he will confirm your suspicions?"

His eyes finally met hers, the gray depths bleak with pain. "If he doesn't, I will know you have corrupted him with your lies, and that would be even worse."

"So you have already judged and condemned me," she said unsteadily, frustration stabbing deep inside her. "In your eyes I am already damned."

"Undoubtedly," he agreed, pouring more brandy. "When we first met, I thought you looked like an angel of innocence, but you came from another direction entirely."

He drank off half the goblet at one gulp, his throat working against the fiery liquid. "I knew I was damned from the age of thirteen, but with time the knowledge faded. I began to think there might be some kind of salvation for even the worst of sinners. So you were sent from hell to drag me down again. And I..." His mouth twisted. "Fool that I am, I desire you so much that even now, in spite of everything, I want you."

"God help you," she whispered, chilled and repelled by his words, "you sound like my father."

"I'm not surprised. The esteemed vicar thought that women were the source of evil and suffering, and I am inclined to think he had the right of it."

"Stop it!" Her voice was nearly a scream. "I can't bear it when you talk that way. What have I done that you despise me so? I didn't tell you who I was at first because I was fearful, and wanted to know you better. What is so dreadful about that? I never meant to hurt you." Her voice was between pleading and anger. "Why am I asking you for forgiveness when it is you who have wronged me most horribly?"

"Neither of us seems capable of forgiving the other," he answered with dry precision. "You can't forgive my violence, and I can't forgive your duplicity. Judging by the splendid performance you are putting on, you are no more capable of being honest with yourself than with me."

"I don't know what you are talking about!"

Gervase banged the goblet on the table so hard that brandy splashed on his hand. His face ablaze with angry pain, he leaned forward and said with harsh precision, "You found a man who had the strongest of reasons to doubt that any woman could be trusted, seduced him with sweet loving lies to the point where he believed that trust was possible. Then when he was utterly vulnerable, you betrayed him."

Breathing hard, he ended with a denunciation the more bitter for its softness. "Only a woman could so thoroughly and ruthlessly betray. No man would know how to be as subtly, treacherously cruel as you."

Diana noted that even now, he could not name himself as the man betrayed, and supposed that was a gauge of his pain. All she could do was repeat numbly, "I never wanted to hurt you. One reason I didn't speak was that the more time that passed, the harder it was to explain why I had not spoken earlier. It was easier to drift, to let events take their own course."

She stopped to marshal her arguments, trying to find words for what she had done by instinct. "I thought that if you came to love me, we could put the past behind us, that how our marriage began would be unimportant compared to how we had come to feel about one another." She spread her hands helplessly. "I never imagined that you would think I had trapped and betrayed you from a desire for revenge. Obviously I was wrong, but is that so unforgivable? I never claimed to be perfect."

He leaned back in the chair, his face lost in shadows, his voice tragic. "Ah, but I thought you were."

For a moment she was shocked and unbearably moved by his words. Then anger came. "I can't help that! It isn't my fault if you thought me more than I am. To love is to accept the whole person, imperfections and all."

She tried to penetrate the shadows with her gaze. "Why can't you accept that I love you in spite of my misjudgment? I know you are not perfect, that you can be cold and suspicious, even violent, but I love you anyhow."

"Then the more fool you are, Diana." He downed more brandy. "I could never understand why you claimed to love me. God knows I don't deserve it, but I wanted to believe you, and you were so convincing." His eyes filled with weary resignation, he continued, "It is far easier to believe that you are a liar than that you ever really loved me."

His statement filled Diana with despair. If he truly believed himself unworthy of love, how could she persuade him of her sincerity? Words were not enough, would never be enough.

Gervase gave a tired shrug. "Since you are a creature of emotion, not reason, perhaps you believe your own lies. Perhaps I should take advantage of that and retain you as a mistress."

She could see the hunger and the longing in his eyes, could sense his barely controlled passion, but his voice was inhumanly detached. "You are the most beautiful of women, superlatively gifted in bed, able to make a man forget his very soul. It would be a pity to waste such talent, especially since I have already bought and paid for it several times over.

"You were a matchless mistress"—his gaze traveled the length of her body, lingering with insulting deliberation—"and the bed was always the most important thing between us. What say you, Diana, shall I continue to call several nights a week and avail myself of your delightful body?"

"And you say that I know how to be cruel! I never felt like a whore before this moment." She shrank back in her chair, hating the very idea of what he was suggesting. Bitterly she finished, "Anything I know of cruelty, I have learned from you."

"Much better," he said approvingly. "We have no illusions about each other. Didn't you say something about knowing each other in our imperfections? The truth is that I am a rapist and you are a whore. In its way, a perfect marriage."

His words triggered a degree of fury greater than any she had felt in her life. "Damn you," she cried, "demean yourself if you will, but don't put me on your level, for I am better than that! I have tried to forgive, to give love in the face of evil, but you are not worth it."

Helpless tears poured down her face. "In the beginning I hated you. The only being I hated more was God Himself, for permitting such a thing to happen. When I first met you in London I was terrified. If I had not been raised to believe that a wife must submit to her husband, if I had not felt compelled to know you better, I would never have allowed you to touch me.

"Then I learned to love you, in the face of your distrust, even when you tried to dominate and possess me." Her voice caught in anguish. "Now, because you believe yourself unworthy, you have destroyed all the love I felt for you. Only hatred is left, and you have only yourself to blame."

Even as she hurled the words like weapons, she knew that she still loved him, but that the hatred was real too. "The morning after our hell-born marriage, my father abandoned me in that inn, delighted to be rid of me, with not a single backward glance. I was
fifteen years old
, Gervase, raped, confused, and frightened, and he left me there penniless, with only the clothes I stood up in, because he said I was now my husband's responsibility. If the innkeeper's wife had not taken pity on me, put me to work in the kitchens, and paid for the letter to your London lawyer, God only knows what would have become of me."

The remembered panic of a child's abandonment lanced through her voice. "Because I was not full grown, I almost died when Geoffrey was born. For two days and nights I was in labor, screaming in agony until I had no more voice to scream."

Having started, she could not stop, even though she knew mere words could not convey the sheer terror she had known. "I had never wanted wealth or status or fame. My greatest dream in life was a simple one: to marry a husband who loved me, to have children to love and cherish."

Then, with infinite bitterness, "In one casual, drunken act you tore that dream away from me, along with my innocence. Then you left me, neither wife nor maid, forbidding me to see or get in touch with you. My only choices were to live as a spinster for the rest of my life or take a man in adultery. Finally, turning my back on everything I was raised to believe in, I chose to do the latter and went to London, hoping to find a man who would love me in spite of my past. And the devil in all his humor sent me to you, my husband, and I was fool enough to love you."

There was satisfaction in seeing that her words affected him like physical blows, that he felt some shadow of her suffering. Contempt in every syllable, she finished, "As if your damned fortune could ever compensate for what you have done to me! There isn't enough money on earth to buy you a clear conscience."

"I know that. If there were anything on earth I could do to make amends, I would do it. You are angry and have every right to be." Gervase's face contorted with despairing guilt, bruised shadows underlining his light eyes. He drew in a shuddering breath, then finished in a voice raw with pain, "Can you listen to your own words and still deny that you wanted revenge?"

His question was like a splash of ice water in the face of her fury. Hearing the echoes of her words, Diana was appalled by her own bitterness. Shaking her head in vehement denial, she buried her face in her hands, her curtained hair isolating her with her thoughts. She had thought that she had transcended the anger about her marriage, that she had become a loving, forgiving woman, and now she stood condemned by her own words.

Terrified that she was not the person she had believed she was, Diana searched the darkest corners of her heart with harsh, relentless will, to learn if vengeance had truly been her motive. It was one of the most difficult things she had ever done.

She found anger, some of it for Gervase and her mother, more directed at her father. She found guilt, the tormented doubts she had known at bringing Geoffrey to London when she embarked on a life of shame. But she found no malice toward anyone, no desire to torment and destroy her husband.

When she was sure, Diana raised her head and said with the stillness that comes after storm, "In the years between our marriage and our meeting in London, I despised you, and had no desire to see you ever again." Then, with utter conviction, "But vengeance I left to God."

He shook his head, able to believe her anger but not her conclusion. "Finally, the ugly truth that lies at the bottom of the well, the rage you had hidden even from yourself. You should thank me for helping you discover it. You hated me and sought revenge. And you achieved it beyond your wildest dreams."

"You are wrong, Gervase." She brushed her hair back wearily. "Yes, there was anger—only now do I see how much—but that is only part of the truth. Though I hated you in the beginning, that passed. I swear before God that I never truly wished to harm you in any way. I wanted you to be sorry, to regret what had happened, but that is far from the viciousness you think me capable of."

"You can't have it both ways, Diana. How could I fully comprehend the injury I did to you and
not
suffer from the knowledge? You have sown the seeds of your hatred, and I will be reaping the harvest as long as I live." He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, their gray depths transparent in the candlelight. "You wanted your pound of flesh, and you got it. It was just bloodier than you expected."

The truth of his words struck her. Indeed, she could not have it both ways. A just man like Gervase could not turn aside from the consequences of his actions. Because he was strong and honorable, his torment at betraying his fundamental values was all the more acute.