Her mouth flattened in dismal acknowledgment. “I am.”
That rancid feeling in his gut turned nastier than ever. She didn’t look like she was joking.
“Is it someone else?” To his shame, he sounded like he suffocated.
Jane’s eyes were like mirrors. The pause before her answer shredded his heart into ragged gobbets. Until this moment, he hadn’t really believed she’d taken a lover. Yet why the hell wouldn’t she? It was clear that her husband didn’t make her happy.
His raging bitterness almost made him miss her soft response. “I suppose it is.”
Garson’s world turned black as pitch, and the blood in his ears pounded like an angry ocean. “Jane?” he asked through the gathering storm.
He wasn’t even angry—yet—the hurt was too grievous. He started to rise on unsteady legs, but she made another of those keep off gestures, and he slumped back into his chair.
“Hugh, if I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?”
He felt disoriented, awaiting a disclosure, not this calm inquiry. Despite everything, he just couldn’t believe that she’d gone to another man’s bed. “I’ve always
been honest with you.”
He hoped to hell it was true.
Another of those bitter little twists of her lips. “Yes, you have.”
A longer pause that felt like the silence before an execution. When her question came, it was from such an unexpected direction, it left him at a loss.
“Are you still in love with Morwenna Nash?”
He lurched to his feet. “What in Hades…”
The temper that flashed in her eyes was the first sign that Jane wasn’t as self-possessed as she strove to appear. “Please answer me.”
His brows lowered, and he glared at her. “Has someone been talking? I warned you there would be gossip.”
Her gaze remained uncompromising. “Answer my question.”
Garson ground his teeth. He hated talking about Morwenna and his old engagement. To date, the greatest failure in his life. Although his marriage promised to become a fiasco on an even grander scale. “I told you when I asked you to marry me…”
Jane rose abruptly and stepped forward into the light. He bit back an appalled exclamation. She looked strained to the point of breaking, her features bleached white beneath the deep red banner of her piled-up hair. “Yes, you did. But a lot has happened since then. I wondered if you’d changed.”
“I don’t change,” he said flatly, even as with reluctance, he visited the shrine in his heart where a beautiful black-haired woman would always reign. Did he love Morwenna? Of course he did. “‘Loyalty unto death,’ remember?”
Jane’s expression didn’t alter. She still looked like she faced the gallows. But somehow he knew that a light inside her had flickered into darkness. She twined her hands together at her waist, so tightly that her knuckles turned bloodless. “That’s what I thought.”
Gradually he found his feet in this bizarre conversation, and his brain began to link the facts together. He should be relieved she wasn’t confessing to taking a lover—by God, he was. But he found no consolation otherwise. “What’s all this about, Jane?”
She lowered her shoulders and met his eyes. The misery he read there made him flinch. “I thought perhaps if you didn’t love Morwenna anymore, there might be a chance you could come to love me.”
He recoiled as if she’d cursed him. His foreboding, building over weeks, gathered into a great crashing wave of denial. He bloody well didn’t want to hear what came next, although he had a queasy feeling he already knew what that would be. “That’s damned—”
“Because I’ve gone and done a really stupid thing, Hugh.” She went on as if he hadn’t interrupted. Then she spoke the words that forever dissolved the fragile, spun sugar confection of their life together. “I’ve broken every promise I ever made. I’ve fallen in love with you.”
*
Chapter Thirty-Three
*
Jane observed Hugh’s appalled reaction to her stumbling confession without surprise. Which didn’t stop a great tattered rift splitting open across her heart. It was the nature of love to hope, even when nothing justified that hope. But she couldn’t mistake his horror at hearing of her feelings for him.