Lady Lovett's Little Dilemma

Snatching away her hand, she challenged him for the first time in their married life, her voice thick with emotion, her heart pounding so hard she could barely hear her own words. “I saw you with Madame Zirelli. Did my eyes deceive me as to the—” she choked down the painful swelling in her throat—“familiarity of her greeting?”

Justin dropped his hand. “Madame Zirelli is an old friend.” He spoke carefully. Was that because he was afraid of incriminating himself? “It could not have escaped your notice, Cressida, that she is also at least ten years older than you.”

So it had come to this? Oblivious of everything around her, Cressida stared at Justin for the first time as if he were not her husband. The eyes that generally regarded her with genial warmth were wary. Surely that must suggest—she nearly choked on her grief—guilt? The lean, handsome jaw was clenched as if he hung on her response, and his whole stance was as tense as if he were about to spring.

This was not the Justin she knew. She wanted her loving husband back. She wanted this whole nightmare to go away so she could wake up in Justin’s arms feeling warm and safe like she’d done almost every morning until…

She hung her head as she finished the thought.

…until ten months ago when she’d withdrawn, physically, from him.

“Do you deny she is your mistress?” she whispered, even though to hear him confirm it would be like a lance through her heart.

“I don’t know what made you think it, but Madame Zirelli is not my mistress.”

Catherine cocked her head. “Then why were you at Mrs Plumb’s with her?”

“I heard she was your mistress before you married me,” Cressida whispered.

“Yes,” he said, carefully, “before I married you, she was my mistress.”

“Then you admit you lied to me just now!” Cressida clapped her hand to her mouth. “Why not just tell me I forced you away? That I pushed you into the arms of this woman who could be relied upon to…give you the comfort I couldn’t—”

“Good Lord, Cressy, you are overwrought!” Seizing her shoulders, he drew her up, tilting her chin with his forefinger as he forced her to meet his eyes. “That is not what happened at all. I have not been unfaithful in mind or body for the entire eight years we’ve been married.”

“Then tell me what were you were doing at Mrs Plumb’s?” begged Cressida. “Last week, when I saw you there for the first time, you were in her sitting room, clearly not expecting me. Yet when a…widow in need of manly attention came knocking you—”

“Do you think I don’t know my own wife?”

Cressida shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.” Miserably she sank down into the cushions beside Catherine. “I didn’t know what to think but I wanted you back, Justin.” She stared at her feet. “And then when I saw you with…that other woman…I realised I knew nothing.”

“Cressy, I want to explain everything to you. Like who she is and what she is to me. But—” he glanced at Catherine, “I want to explain when we are alone.”

Catherine patted Cressida’s shoulder. “All fixed,” she said brightly. “You were entirely mistaken, my dear, and I’m so pleased this drama is on such shaky foundations. However, if it really is nothing more than a snowflake in a snowstorm, surely I can be privy to Justin’s simple explanation as to what he was doing at Mrs Plumb’s with his apparently former mistress?”

“I’m sorry, Catherine, but I’m taking Cressida home to continue this conversation…in private.”

His hand on Cressida’s wrist was enough to send the blood rushing to her head, demonstrating yet again that she had no resistance against him.

“If you have no secrets, I wonder why you won’t reveal why you were at Mrs Plumb’s at all?” Catherine asked sweetly.

Justin stared down at them, his face an inscrutable mask. No hesitation as to what he was about to do, or regret as to what he had done, crossed his handsome, normally mobile features.

With a curt nod at Catherine, he muttered, “You are a dangerous woman, Catherine, but sadly you have not a care for the hurt you cause your cousin.”

Cressida was half on her feet but her obvious wavering was too much for him. Before she had a chance to make her decision Justin bowed, then turned on his heel and left.

Chapter Nine

For two hours, Catherine had ranted on about a husband’s inability to remain faithful to his wife and about a wife’s duty for the sake of womanhood to punish him for his failings.

For more than twenty years she’d bullied Cressida, making her cousin feel small and insignificant. Cressida was too small of stature to command the respect the tall—now gaunt-looking—Catherine received as her due. Cressida’s nose was too small for her little face, though the long shadows cast by the dim firelight tonight turned Catherine’s into a hawk-like proboscis wedged between the hard angles of her cheeks.

Catherine had implied that by extraordinary good fortune Cressida had snared a jaded noble on the rebound, although in the happy years that had followed their marriage Cressida had been able to dismiss Catherine’s jibes.

Yet here Cressida now was, cowering on the Egyptian sofa beside her bullying cousin having just dismissed her ever-patient, ever-loving husband when any decent wife would have heard him out and any loving wife would have perhaps gone further than that. Instead, Cressida had allowed Catherine to hold her hostage in her drawing room in an attempt to poison her mind against Justin.

How had she allowed Catherine to assume her former pre-marriage position of such power over her? Cressida wondered as the clock in the passage struck three. What kind of wife did it make her if she couldn’t even give her husband an honest hearing?