Never Courted, Suddenly Wed Page 23

  She would be damned if she turned her pride over to his greedy, cruel hands.

  Sophie spun on her heel and fled.

  ***

  Christopher’s head whipped toward the door. “What was that?”

  His father waved his hand. “Probably some nosy servant. Forget them.”

  Christopher fisted his hands at his side. It was all he could do to keep from punching his father. He looked down his nose, hardly daring to believe that this man shared the same blood.

  For thirty years, Christopher had braved his father’s shame, abuse, and mockery. It had fueled Christopher, driven him to try and be more and earn his sire’s approval.

  Over the years, his father’s disapproval had stung. Christopher had craved some kind of affirmation that the marquess was proud of his son.

  Only now, staring down at his cold, calculating sire, Christopher confronted the staggering reality—nothing he did would ever be enough. His father would always be ashamed of him…

  …and Christopher no longer gave a damn about his father or his opinion.

  What he did care about was Sophie. Sophie filled his life with more joy, more laughter than he’d ever imagined possible.

  Christopher sucked in a breath. Christ. He loved her.

  His father’s brows dipped. “What?”

  He loved that she sang ribald ditties. He loved her propensity to find herself in scrape after scrape. Hell, he even loved that she loved her silly, troublesome pug. He loved her with a burning hunger that threatened to consume him. At some point, her happiness had come to mean more to him than even his own.

  “Did you hear what I said, Christopher?”

  His entire life, Christopher had only cared about his image for the ton, and earning his father’s approval. Well, they could all go hang.

  Christopher reached over the desk and jerked his father up by the front of his jacket, until they were eye to eye. “If you ever, and I mean, ever breathe one more foul word about my wife, by God, I’ll take you apart with my hands.”

  The color leeched from his father’s wizened cheeks. “P-put m-me down.”

  Christopher gave him a slight shake. “Only after you swear not to go anywhere near my wife.”

  “But this is my home.” Christopher shook him again. “Fine. F-fine,” his father cried out.

  Christopher released him.

  “Where are you going,” his father barked. “I wanted to discuss the use of your wife’s funds.”

  Christopher sailed out of the room. He’d wasted enough time with the marquess. He wanted to see his wife. It was time she heard the words he’d kept from her for too long.

  He made his way abovestairs, hoping to find Sophie naked in a hot, lemon-scented bath. He’d join her, make sweet love to her, and then tell her the words she deserved to hear.

  Christopher grinned, his heart beating fast in anticipation of seeing Sophie. Nothing mattered but her. Not his father. Not his struggle to read. Not Society’s opinion. None of it. He turned the handle and entered her chambers.

  He peered around. An ominous quiet blanketed the room. His smile dipped. “Phi?”

  Silence met his question.

  Christopher made to leave, when he spied her in the corner, over by the window. She’d pulled the curtain back and gazed down into the space below. “There you are, Phi.”

  He crossed over to her and rested his hands upon her shoulders.

  Sophie stiffened. She continued to stare outside.

  Christopher dropped his hands to his side. The first stirrings of alarm flared in his brain. He cleared his throat. “Are you all right, Phi?”

  Sophie released the curtain. The fabric fell back into place as she turned to face him. In spite of her diminutive frame, she somehow managed to peer down her nose at him. “Tell me something, Christopher. Has it been worth it?”

  “Worth it?” he repeated blankly.

  “Why, you sacrificed not only your good standing with the ton by marrying the Incorrigible Miss Winters but you also gave up the woman you love.”

  He blinked. What in the blazes was she talking about? “The woman I love?”

  Her eyes seemed to bleed agonized pain and outrage, all at the same time. “I heard you and your father.”

  Oh god, she knew. The sound outside his father’s office hadn’t been a prying servant, but his wife. His eyes slid closed and his heart plummeted somewhere in the vicinity of his toes. No!

  “Yes,” she hissed.

  He was unaware he’d spoken aloud. “You don’t understand, Phi.” She couldn’t possibly understand because he’d never been wholly truthful with her and as a result, she believed all the worst about him and his intentions. Could he blame her? His mind raced and he tried to recall every vile, reprehensible word spoken by his father. “It is not how it sounded.”

  Sophie arched a golden eyebrow. “Oh, so you didn’t marry me for my dowry?”

  “No.” The word exploded from his chest. He drew in a steadying breath. “I can certainly see how it might appear that way.”

  “Come, Christopher,” she said. “Would you have me believe you married me for love?”

  The declaration he’d come up to her chambers intending to make, withered upon his lips. To utter those words now, even if they were the truth would only be perceived as one more lie he’d told. Still, he needed her to know. “I love you.”

  Sophie’s laugh came out as a near-hysterical cackle that spoke to the thin shred of control she had over her emotions. “Goodness, you must take me for a bloody fool if you think I’d ever believe that. Do you know what I believe you love?”

  “What?” he said, past dry lips.

  “My dowry. Tell me, how does the woman you love feel knowing you gave her up for my fortune? Was it twenty-thousand pounds? Thirty? Forty? More?” She asked, her high-pitched question, a testament of her shock.

  He forced himself to look at her. “God, Sophie, I…”

  “How much?” she cried.

  “One-hundred thousand pounds.”

  Her eyes widened to the size of half-moons in her face. Then, a smile twisted her lips up. “One-hundred thousand pounds? That is quite a sum. I see how you’d be willing to endure a life wed to even me for that amount.” She returned her attention to the window, presenting him with her rigid back.

  Christopher dragged a hand through his hair. He felt Sophie slipping away from him. Gone was his spirited, mischievous, ever-smiling Phi. In her place was this cynical, hard-eyed, ice-princess. Nausea twisted in his gut with the realization that he’d wrought this tragic transformation on his sweet, loving Phi.

  With a sick intuitiveness, Christopher realized if he didn’t find the right words, didn’t make her understand, that Sophie would be forever lost to him. “Will you hear me out?” he said, his voice hollow to his own ears.

  Sophie shot a bored look over her shoulder.

  But she didn’t say no, and Christopher had to find encouragement where he could.

  “My father ordered me to court you.”

  Her hands fisted the sea-foam blue fabric of her afternoon gown, the only tell-tale indication that she’d been affected by those words.

  “How very clever you were.” She spoke the words, more to herself. “You appeared so honorable. Why, you even called on me, and confessed your father’s wishes for you to court me.” She laughed, the sound hollow. “I even commiserated with you. Oh, the laughter you and he must have had at my expense.”

  “Never.” That one word wrenched from deep inside him. At her likening him to the marquess, his stomach churned. He wasn’t like his sire. “My father wanted me to ruin you.” He flinched, at the ugly truth—in the end, Christopher had done just that.

  She shoved back the gold-damask curtains and gazed out the window.

  Christopher rushed to have out every last sordid detail. “My father owed your father a significant debt. More than that, my father had made a series of disastrous business ventures. We are…were on the cusp of
financial ruin. He insisted I wed you, Phi. I said no—until he threatened to have me carted off to Bedlam if I didn’t agree to his plans. I was going to do as he demanded, Phi. But I changed my mind in Lord Brackenridge’s library.”

  Sophie pressed her forehead against the pane. Her visage, reflected back in the glass panel, contorted as if she were suffering physical pain, and he nearly doubled over from the agony of what he’d done. “Marriage to me was so abhorrent to you that you’d brave Bedlam?” she whispered.

  Christopher cursed. He was bumbling his way through this. He reached for her, and then remembered she couldn’t see him. “I said no because I didn’t want my father to turn me into a fortune hunter.”

  “Isn’t that what you are, Christopher?” That weary question belonged to a more aged, bitter woman than his Phi. “Do you have nothing else to say?”

  He went on. “There was a woman.” She recoiled like he’d struck her. Christopher swiped his hand across his eyes. If he could take a dagger to himself and spare her this hurt, he would. “I didn’t truly know her, Phi. We’d met just once. She was a dream of a woman. A dream of freedom from my father’s rigid control. She made me forget all that was wrong with me.”

  “She sounds like a paragon.” Her voice came out flat, devoid of any and all emotion.

  “She didn’t know my flaws. Not like you, Phi. That day of the stable fires, you discovered my secret shame and I hated you for that,” he said, at last truthful with both himself, and her.

  Sophie turned to face him.

  His palms grew moist. He opened his mouth to admit his humiliating failings but the words wouldn’t come out. “I…struggle to read.”

  She cocked her head. “What?”

  He glanced away. His gaze wandered the room. “There is something wrong with me. I…I’ve always had the finest tutors but words on a page…they don’t make much sense to me. I was convinced early on that I was mad. My father thought I wasn’t dedicated enough to my studies. He beat me.” A memory of his father applying the birch rod to his back while he read from Shakespeare’s, King Lear, trickled to the surface. “It didn’t help,” he said. “You found me reading aloud that night. You laughed. In my frustration I accidentally upended the lantern you’d left behind. I thought you’d gathered all the truth about me. From then on, I…it was too hard to be around you, Phi. You reminded me of everything wrong with me.”

  Emotion flooded her cornflower blue eyes.

  “I don’t want your pity, Phi. I just need you to know why I didn’t want to wed you. That all changed when I spent time with you.”

  “What about Mallen?” Her question, the faintest whisper, cut into his words.

  Christopher momentarily covered his face with his hands and pressed the tips of his fingers against the corners of his eye. “I knew Redbrooke and your mother were both enamored of his title.” His lips twisted. “Who would settle for an earl when they could have a duke?”

  Her sad eyes ran a path over his face. “You thought it all out, didn’t you?”

  He took a step toward her. “I thought I did, Phi. I didn’t consider that I’d fall hopelessly in love with you.”

  “Don’t,” she rasped. “Please, don’t.”

  “But I love you,” he said, taking another step closer.

  Sophie stalked across the room, eyes blazing. Her hair whipped about her like she was some kind of warrior princess. “You are nothing but a liar, Christopher. You can’t possibly expect I should believe anything you would ever say.” A cold, near-hysterical laugh bubbled past her lips. “What a fool I was.”

  He shook his head. “No, Phi…”

  “I fell in love with you against my better judgment. Even as you courted me, I was suspicious. I only have myself to blame. I should have turned you away when you came to call. And I certainly should never have followed you from the ballroom at Lady Brackenridge’s. I would have been better with a ruined reputation than you as a husband.”

  Christopher swallowed, and nearly choking on the lump of anguish that clogged his throat, he touched his hand to his chest to be sure his heart still beat.

  “Leave, Christopher,” she said, her voice tired.

  “No.”

  “Leave!” The order climbed in volume.

  He held firm. If he left her wounded and angry as she was, he suspected he might never attain her forgiveness.

  The plump mounds of her breasts heaved up and down with the extent of her emotion. “Very well, I’ll leave,” she cried, and stormed toward the door.

  Duke, sensing his mistress’ upset sprinted toward Sophie, and cut in front of her.

  Sophie cried out and stumbled over the fawn-pug.

  Christopher’s long strides ate up the space between them. “Are you hurt?” The moment transported him eerily back to their first exchange in Hyde Park when Duke had run out in front of his horse and nearly unseated him. It was as though he and Sophie had moved in a full circle, with Sophie leery of his motives and wanting him gone.

  He fell to his knee and reached for her ankle.

  As though the fight had drained from her body, Sophie laid on her back and stared with emotion-deadened eyes up at the ceiling. “I’m fine, Christopher.”

  Christopher’s heart squeezed painfully. He turned his attention to her ankles, removing first one satin silver slipper, and then the next. He rolled down her stockings. “Allow me to check for a sprain.”

  Sophie draped her arm across her eyes. “There is no sprain,” she said, tiredly.

  “Still…” His words died on his lips. He stared, his gaze transfixed upon a very familiar heart-shaped birthmark along the inner portion of her trim, dainty ankle. He blinked.

  It couldn’t be.

  It wasn’t possible

  He touched a finger to the marking that had haunted his dreams after he’d met his mystery Athena.

  Christopher released her ankle and sat back on his haunches.

  The irony of this moment was not lost on him. He’d initially avoided marriage to Phi for the sake of some nameless nymph he’d met in Lord Thomas’s library during the masquerade.

  In the end, Sophie was the mystery woman he’d longed for.

  She was his Athena.

  How had he not seen it before now?

  Sophie took advantage of his distractedness. She grabbed her slippers and stockings and pointed to the door. “Get out, Christopher.”

  He held his palms up. She needed to know. “I have to tell you…”

  “With the exception of good-bye, there is nothing else I care to hear from you.”

  “But you need to know…”

  She slapped him with such ferocity, his head snapped back under the force of the blow. The sharp crack echoed around his tortured mind.

  He accepted that pain; embraced it because it was no less than he deserved for lying to her.

  Sophie recoiled, as though in touching him, she’d been sullied.

  “Just go,” she whispered. Tears flooded her eyes, threatening to spill over. “If you care for me at all, you’ll leave.”

  And because he’d rather sever his own arm than inflict any pain upon her, Christopher rose. He sketched a bow. “This isn’t done,” he said, when he’d reached the doorway.

  A fat teardrop streaked a path down her cheek. Then another. And another.

  He reached for her.

  “Please, go,” she pleaded.

  Christopher nodded jerkily.

  He would do as she asked. For now.

  Lady Ackerly’s Tattle Sheet

  While taking part in a Frost Fair chair-pushing event with Lady E.F., Miss S.W.’s chair slid into a number of ice-skaters on the Thames River. There were no real injuries. Just outraged ice-skaters

  ~23~

  “Enter,” the Marquess of Milford thundered from within his office.

  Sophie took a deep breath, and turned the handle.

  She stepped inside his lair.

  The marquess didn’t pick up his head from the ledger
in front of him. She used his distraction as an opportunity to study him. Somewhere in his sixtieth year, with stark white hair, and a hard-angular face, she imagined there’d been a time when he’d been very handsome. Sophie tried to imagine Christopher’s mother.

  Had the woman loved the cruel, condescending man? Or had theirs merely been an arranged match between two suitable individuals.

  He finally looked up. His gaze narrowed. “You.”

  All the earlier resolve that had driven her down, was restored at the chilled reception. She arched a brow. “Me.”

  His mouth went slack, and she suspected that he’d expected her to flee his office, with a quivering lip and terror in her heart. Not for the first time she wondered if he delighted in kicking small pups and gave thanks Duke was tucked away in her chambers. “Do you know, my lord, not for the first time, I wonder that my father ever claimed you as a friend.” Her father had possessed a pure heart whereas the marquess seemed to possess no heart. What an odd pairing of men.

  She wandered deeper into his lair. “There is something I want to say to you.”

  “Oh?” His bored tone fueled her ire.

  “You are a horrific human-being, and an even worse father. I’m sorry that Christopher grew up in such a household.”

  “So you’ve come to insult me,” he drawled.

  “I’ve come to tell the truth,” she said. She dusted her palms along the front of her gown. “It pains me to know the abuse Christopher endured at your hands. Hopefully, at some point, in these late years of your life, you reconcile the harm you did to your son…and search for peace, because if not, I’m certain there is a dark place in hell reserved for the soulless cowards like yourself.” She nodded. “That is what I came to say.”

  With a flounce of her curls, Sophie walked out as casually as she’d entered, closing the door softly behind her.

  In the early hours of the morning, when the black night sky still reigned, Sophie left.

  Lady Ackerly’s Tattle Sheet

  In spite of the well-lit walkways at Vauxhall Gardens, somehow Miss S.W. stumbled upon a trysting couple and pitched forward into the colorful fountains. Her emerald satin gown was ruined beyond repair.