“Do you think you’re the only person who’s ever lost anyone?”
“That’s not it at all!” he shouted. “I’m ashamed of myself, and all I wanted was for her not to know. I just wanted to go back and be that other man. The man I was meant to be. But there’s no going back, and no hiding the truth, and she will not have me now.”
“Did she say that?” Marissa asked calmly.
“Of course she said that. What else could she say?”
“Perhaps she will change her mind.”
“But she will know, and I can never take that away. Everywhere we go, every woman we meet, she will have to wonder, won’t she? Every sly word or cunning smile . . . She will suspect, and sometimes she will be right. Could you live with that? Would Jude ask you to?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose I have asked him to. Perhaps he is the one to advise you.”
That brought him up short and pulled him from his selfish world. “That’s not how it was with you, Marissa.”
She shrugged again and dropped into her chair. “Not quite, no, but I was hardly pure, and every man wants a pure wife, doesn’t he? But I am the woman he fell in love with, and so he accepts it.”
“But it’s different for Jude. He had his own life. He wasn’t forced to live in misery while you ‘spread yourself thin’ as you said.”
Marissa’s face finally so
ftened into sympathy. She took Aidan’s hand, and pulled him to sit beside her. “Is that what happened to her, Aidan?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I thought she was happily married. She implied that she’d been content. But then . . . she said things. I don’t know what happened to her, and that hurts worse than I could imagine.”
His sister squeezed his hand and laid her head on his shoulder. “Give her time. Go see her in a month or two. If she loves you, she’ll forgive you.”
He shook his head. “She deserves better.”
Marissa sighed and wrapped both her hands around his. “You loved her so completely, Aidan. There is nothing better than that.”
They sat in silence for a long while before Marissa kissed his cheek and rose. “I’ll leave you to your brooding, then. For now.”
“Pest.”
She blew him another kiss and hurried out. He did not like this writhing hope she’d left with him. It was an awful thing and he wanted it gone. It reminded him too much of what Kate had said. That she’d waited for him. That she’d thought he would come for her.
What had been done to her?
Thoughts and fears wrestled inside his head. He wanted to scream, to rage, to injure. His imagination raced to provide him with fuel for his turmoil, filling his mind with things he could never wish to see. My God, she’d been so young and sweet and everything good in his life. What had been done to her?
Perhaps she did not need a divorce. Perhaps Aidan could rid the world of her husband. Hunt him down and kill him.
I was not a horse to be broken to another rider. A chill spread beneath his skin. He’d thought that he resented her love for another man, but he would take that back in an instant now. He’d give her the perfect husband to have loved for those ten years. Anything not to know that she had been broken.
“Ah, God,” he groaned, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes.
“Well, don’t weep like a mewling child,” a voice rasped from across the room.
Aidan sprang to his feet, twisting toward the sound. “What the devil?”
No, not the devil, only that sneaky old Aunt Ophelia pushing up from her chair hidden in the arch of the window. Again.
“Blast it,” he muttered, stepping toward her automatically to help her rise. “I knew you were eavesdropping before, weren’t you?”
“What?” she cried. “Speak up!”
Aidan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. She’d heard nothing. Thank God.