He turned slowly. “You follow me, even into my bedchamber, where I should have privacy if I wish it?”
“Climb down from your hobbyhorse, you ass. I remember the dream about Jeremy.”
“You have had time to make something up, Meggie.”
She ran straight across the room, right at him, and grabbed his dressing gown lapels. She stood on her tiptoes and said right into his face, “I haven’t made up a single thing. Listen to me. I dreamed about him right after he sent me Mr. Cork. Naturally he was on my mind, but not in the way you think. I dreamed about a cat race.”
“Ha.”
“Shut your trap, curse you. I dreamed that Mr. Cork was running, he was way ahead of the other racing cats. Then he began changing—he turned black, his eyes were bright orange, and then, he was suddenly fat, his belly nearly hanging to the ground. I just couldn’t believe it. And then Jeremy was saying that he would have to rewhittle him, make me a whole new statue and it would take him more time than he had, but he had to so he could be faithful to the real Mr. Cork. And I was begging him not to. I wanted my own Mr. Cork back, not this monstrous thing.”
“Do you honestly want me to believe that, Meggie?” He spoke very quietly.
She backed away from him, a good two steps. She said slowly, “Have I ever lied to you?”
“You lied by omission.”
“Ah, that’s a grand sin, isn’t it? Will you chew on that until your jaw locks? No, that was rhetorical. Have I ever lied to you, Thomas?”
He was silent. She opened her mouth, but he raised his hand. “No, be quiet. I’m thinking. We were together a goodly amount of time before we married. I’m trying to remember if you lied to me.”
Now it was Meggie who began pacing that dismal gloomy room. It was filled with shadows and every step she took sent her into deeper gloom. She hated gloom, she knew too well how it felt inside her. He turned to look out the window again, at the beautiful moon that glistened over the water.
It was magic, a night like this.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t remember you ever lying to me.”
“Well, good,” she said, nearly at a loss for words since she’d fully expected him to come up with something. She was only human, after all. “Then may we please try to begin again, Thomas?”
“Meggie,” he said, staying where he was, which was very far away from her indeed, “what if I loved another woman and couldn’t have her, then I married you, all without telling you a thing about her?”
Meggie stopped cold. She was shaking her head, then she stopped that too. She stared across the gloom at him. “Oh dear,” she whispered. “Oh dear.”
“Yes,” he said. “There is that, isn’t there?”
“I would throttle you if I found out. I would stomp you into the mud. I would shave your head and blacken your eyes, both of them. Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of the shoe on the other foot.”
He was pleased, but he wasn’t about to let her see it. “What I did to you was bad enough—forcing you on our wedding night.”
“No, what was worse was the last time when you just went away from me and didn’t say a single thing. That is horrid, Thomas. Please, don’t do that again. If you want to stomp me, I will allow it.”
She’d walked into the moonlight again, and that peach thing she was wearing shimmered all the way from her breasts to the floor. He could see too much of her.
“If I slam out of this room, I will be in the White Room again, your room.”
“Please don’t leave me,” she said and came up to him. She didn’t touch him, just stopped an inch short and looked up at him. “Thomas, why did you marry me?”
“Because I love you, you twit, because I believed you loved me as well.”
“But you never said anything about love to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He said very slowly, “Because there was just something about you, Meggie, something that made me understand how very young you were, how very innocent, untouched. You weren’t ready for that.”