Untouched

“Yes.” How thrilled she’d been. She’d always wanted to see the world. See the world? What a laughable notion. She’d consigned herself to nine years of a prison barely less constricting than her present captivity. She stifled the caustic thought. “I’d always been my father’s favorite. He’d come round once he recognized Josiah’s great soul.”

“I doubt rich fathers care for poor men in any guise, even poor men with great souls,” Lord Sheene said dryly.

“I learned that with experience. Josiah and I married at Gretna, then returned for my family’s blessing. My father granted me five minutes to inform me I was no longer his daughter. Mamma and Philip were forbidden to say goodbye.”

“I’m so sorry, Grace,” he said softly.

“I deserved it,” she said in a thick voice. Then with a sudden burst of passionate self-hatred, “How could I hurt my family like that? Somehow Josiah made me believe his cause was more important than the people who loved me. I soon regretted what I’d done. But I’d made my bed and had to sleep in it.” She paused and drew in a shuddering breath. She wasn’t far from tears. That last rancorous interview with her father in the library at Marlow Hall still haunted her.

Lord Sheene helped her over a fallen branch. The touch of his hand was fleeting. Even so, it burned. To distract herself from the forbidden tingle in her blood, she pressed on with her story.

“For the next year, the only contact I had with my family was when my mother sent me money. That stopped then, I suppose because my father found out and forbade her to have anything more to do with me. Josiah wasn’t just an ineffective prophet. He wasn’t a particularly good bookseller either. Without my mother, we’d have starved.”

“You didn’t think to approach your father again?”

She shook her head, slowing to a stop. “I honestly think Josiah would have beaten me if I had. He hated my father. I didn’t dare tell him my family’s money paid for what we ate. It never occurred to Josiah that the pittance he gave me wouldn’t feed a mouse.”

“Still you tried to be a good wife.” He sounded so certain as he faced her. She returned from the wasteland of memory and looked at him fully. There was no contempt in the golden eyes. Compassion, sorrow, contained anger that she knew wasn’t aimed at her. But no contempt.

“I tried. I didn’t succeed.” Her lips stretched in a humorless smile. For a man who preached freedom for the masses, Josiah had taken a dim view of liberty for his wife. “I was always too argumentative, disobedient, rebellious.”

The marquess’s face contracted with outrage. “Dear God, he didn’t abuse you?”

“No. Oh, heavens no,” she said aghast. “Never.” She didn’t add that she might have preferred a beating to Josiah’s endless self-righteousness.

“So how did you end up on the farm?”

“The bookshop failed after three years. We bought a sheep run with what remained of my mother’s money.”

How furious Josiah had been. She believed he realized he hated her when she revealed her family’s secret support. It smacked too much of aristocratic patronage. Josiah had loathed the Marlows and everything they stood for.

“And did you prosper?” The marquess bent to pick up a stick. Her eyes fixed on the way his hands savagely ripped the twig into tiny pieces. Yes, he was definitely angry.

She gave a sour laugh. “Of course we didn’t. It was a catastrophe. Josiah was town-bred and hated the farm and hated me for trapping him there. Then he fell sick.”

She paused. The ghost of the grim, relentless, hopeless misery of her last months in Yorkshire grabbed her by the throat. She couldn’t talk about those days even to so empathetic a listener as the marquess. He was so compassionate—and she deserved his compassion so little. If Josiah had ruined her life, she had surely ruined his in return. And she knew in her heart, it wasn’t Josiah but her own willfulness and stupidity that she must blame for her wretched history.

“Wouldn’t neighbors help?” He scattered the last fragments of broken stick at his feet and looked up at her. The steadiness of his voice dispelled the choking miasma in her mind like a stiff breeze.

“Josiah’s temper drove even the most well-meaning away. Only the vicar’s wife came at the end and then just to help with the house. Josiah had waited his whole life to be tried and illness tried him to the limit.”

She lifted a shaking hand to swipe at the moisture that rushed unbidden to her eyes. Why was she crying? She’d long ago admitted she’d never loved Josiah. Yet his memory still filled her with a turbulent mixture of grief and guilt and regret.

For nine years, he’d been the center of her life. Perhaps not beloved but just…there. Then he was no more.

“And you lost your home.”

“Yes.” She inhaled audibly and stood straighter. If she dwelled further on her sorry history, she’d make an utter fool of herself. And she’d done that too many times already in front of the marquess. He had an uncanny ability to probe her vulnerabilities. “You’re a good listener, my lord.”

“Thank you,” he returned dryly. “It’s not something I’ve developed through practice.”

He now knew more about her than anyone she’d met in the last nine years. She felt at a loss, unsure if that altered their lethal dilemma or the attraction simmering between them.

Did her confession change things at all? Not in any concrete way, she guessed, although in her heart she felt differently.

“You’re sorry you asked.” She managed an awkward laugh.

He didn’t smile back. “No, never sorry.”