The Marquess Tames His Bride

She pulled back from him and planted her hands on her hips. ‘Have you thought about the other side of the coin? How I would feel, knowing you had let a man get away with murder, simply because he is my brother?’

‘Murder? You know about that? How?’

‘Two and two,’ she said cryptically. ‘It was Miss Hutton who helped me piece it all together.’

‘Who the deuce,’ said Rawcliffe, running his hands through his hair and wondering at what point he’d lost his hat, again, ‘is Miss Hutton?’

‘Colonel Hutton’s granddaughter. The one he sent to fetch you to discuss the drowning of Mr Kellet.’

‘Oh. She told you that was why he sent for me?’

‘In a roundabout way, yes. And then I worked out that must have been why you were so amenable about signing that slimy Mr Jeavons’s silly visitors’ book. That it must have been a way of letting the local magistrate, who’d dealt with Mr Kellet’s drowning, know that you were in the area, so that he would come looking for you, rather than for you to have to go and visit him, which would have told everyone exactly what you were really doing down here.’

‘Clare,’ he said, taking her by both arms and wishing that she wasn’t quite so intelligent, ‘you are correct, but—’

‘No, let me finish. You’ve done enough to confuse and distract me to this point, but I…I can’t take anymore.’

There were tears in her eyes. Because he’d hurt her so badly.

And yet she’d kissed him. Grabbed him and kissed him, even though she said she thought she’d worked out what he was up to.

‘If I tell you the truth…’

‘You have got to tell me the truth,’ she said, flinging up her chin. ‘It is high time you stopped…distracting me by being…kind one moment, then cruel the next. Confusing me. Keeping me off balance. Because that is what you have been doing, isn’t it? I didn’t realise that was the method you were employing with me until Clement did pretty much the same thing. When he cast doubt on the legality of our marriage and came up with so many contradictory theories which were so ludicrous that I got too angry to think straight. Just the way you did. Time and time again.

‘Why? No, don’t answer that. I know why,’ she said, slapping her hands on her hips. ‘Because marrying me was a brilliant excuse to come down to this neck of the woods, under the pretext of letting me visit my brother, when all the time you were really trying to find out who’d killed Mr Kellet. Even the way we met in the inn was no coincidence, was it? Let alone the way you provoked me to throw that punch and made sure it landed on your nose, so that there was just sufficient blood to make me feel guilty enough to try to mend matters and flustered enough to let you lure me into that coffee room where you—’

‘No. I won’t have you thinking I engineered that meeting, or married you under any other pretext than the real one. It was a coincidence that I happened into the inn at the very moment you were walking along that corridor. And…’ He shifted from one foot to the other. He had to tell her the truth. All of it, no matter what light it threw on his nature. ‘And I didn’t deliberately make sure that punch you threw landed on my nose, rather than my jaw.’

‘Oh?’ She searched his face keenly, as though looking into the depths of his soul. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. I was—’ he took a deep breath ‘—I was moving in for a kiss.’

‘A kiss?’

‘Yes. And as for provoking you deliberately, you know that I didn’t really know how hurtful my comments must have been. What I said about your father being inconsistent, it arose from seeing you looking so…threadbare. Because I would never, ever have allowed you to end up in such a state, if he’d permitted me to marry you. And all his words about my morality and exposing no child of his to my blighting influence came roaring back into my mind, when he’d neglected and used you for so long, well, that was what I meant. Though I never would have said any of it if I’d known he’d only just died.’

‘Oh,’ she said again. And continued to look at him expectantly. Waiting for him to make a full confession.