“Then you told me to get out of your sight.” Those words had rankled for months.
“It didn’t alter your commitment.” The inscrutable mask cracked and briefly she glimpsed his real emotions. He was angry. She’d known that from the first. He’d tried to hide it, but the muscle flickering in his cheek betrayed him. Worse than that, he was hurt. Hurt beyond bearing. Her belly twisted with remorse and regret and useless, agonizing love.
Shame kept her quiet, although there was little point concealing the truth. When he mentioned her promise, she knew the game was up. Blast Roberta for an interfering witch.
“So you still won’t tell me,” he said grimly. “What must I do to make you confess? Get out the thumbscrews?”
What use putting off the evil moment? She met his eyes, iron gray in the shadowy coach, and spoke with a defiance she hadn’t felt since she’d left him. “I’m pregnant.”
“I know.”
“I ask nothing of you.”
“That’s hardly the point. No child of mine will be born a bastard.”
“You don’t want to marry me.”
She wondered if he’d deny that. She almost wished he’d lie.
But of course, he didn’t lie. His jaw set in unforgiving lines. “No.”
She struggled to maintain an argument. It was difficult when she felt so weary and sick, and this meeting with Jonas reminded her of everything she’d lost. Shortly after their last acrimonious encounter, she’d discovered she carried his child. Most of the time since, she’d felt sick. Morning sickness seemed to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair. At least nausea stopped her stewing on how she’d botched her life. “I told you I’d never marry.”
“And you said if you conceived my child, you’d become my wife.”
She hadn’t. Not in so many words. But her actions had given tacit consent to his ultimatum. She couldn’t pretend he accosted her today under false pretenses.
“You can’t force me to marry you.” Her voice shook because right now the easiest decision seemed to be leaving all decisions to him. Then a nasty thought struck—her statement wasn’t entirely true. “You wouldn’t cut off Roberta’s allowance and the boys’ school fees, would you?”
Reading his mind in this if nothing else, she watched him consider claiming such intentions. Then he shook his head. “No, this is between us.” He paused. “Or rather between you and your honor. You more than anyone know the miseries of my childhood. Surely you won’t visit that torment on your son or daughter.”
“People needn’t find out I’m not married,” she mumbled, tugging the rug up to shield her against his remarks and the conscience that until now self-pity had silenced.
“People always find out,” he said uncompromisingly.
She had an unwelcome inkling he was right. One hand cradled her belly. She hardly showed yet, but in a few weeks, her secret would be a secret no more. By then she needed to be away from London, settled where nobody knew her. She needed to be able to travel more than a mile without casting up her accounts, too. The journey from Wiltshire to London had been bad enough. Right now, her stomach behaved, but of course, Jonas’s carriage was the first stare of comfort and hardly jolted at all.
Decisions she’d been too miserable and frightened to make screamed for attention. It was all very well to plan an incognito future as a widow with a child in some northern hamlet, but the prospect of living a lie until the day she died made her shudder. The pathetic loneliness of doing everything alone without the man she loved was too cruel to contemplate. When Jonas mentioned his boyhood sufferings, he cut straight to her dilemma. She didn’t want her baby to be a fatherless waif. She wanted her child to grow up with two loving parents.
Once she’d almost accepted Jonas’s proposal. Then she’d trusted his regard. Could she bear to marry him knowing he was furious with her? Perhaps one day, he might forgive her for sacrificing him in favor of Roberta. Nor did she mistake that he viewed
the secrecy about her pregnancy as another betrayal.
Because they both knew it was a betrayal.
The very air vibrated with his repressed emotion. How she wished she’d kept her head in the park. She’d rather conduct this conversation in the open. The carriage, for all its luxury, seemed suffocatingly cramped when so much lay unspoken between its occupants.
“Sidonie, we have to marry.” He sounded sad but determined.
She blinked back tears. This was a million miles from the proposal she wanted. Of course there was that sweet moment at Castle Craven when he’d asked her to be his wife, but later memories tainted that recollection.
“You’re such a bully,” she burst out as the jaws of her fate snapped shut. Her hands fisted in the rug.
His sigh was unutterably weary. “Think what you wish. No child of mine will suffer abuse because of our sins. Get used to it.”
“I don’t have to like it.” She winced at how childish she sounded.
To her surprise, he gave her a cold smile. Until she realized she’d conceded victory. “Good.”