“I saw you for a man with a heart too generous to turn anyone away based on something as frivolous as reputation or rank. A man who loves his daughter so much that he pulled her back from death. A man who honored his wife’s memory by not having careless affaires, though doubtless many were offered him.” Her voice wavered and she steadied it. “A man who loved me.”
He turned around. “Your husband didn’t love you, did he?”
“Oh yes, he did.”
“But not enough.”
“Not as much as he loved chess. He was always honest about that. And you—you are honest too. It seems I have a genius for finding men who care more for a game than for myself.”
“I’m certain that you will find someone of your rank,” he heard himself say. The flash in her eyes could have been agony—or dislike, so he opened the door.
He wasn’t walking away, because she had left him, really.
He wasn’t good enough for her. And she didn’t even know the whole of it. His mouth twisted. His valet took one look at him and practically threw his clothing toward him.
Then he was away: pounding down the road, down the slick road, hating her, hating himself, his heart bleeding for Eugenia. How would he explain to her? Harriet didn’t love us enough? What do you tell a little girl who thinks—
Actually, what did Eugenia think?
She knew that Harriet was a woman. But she’d never said much other than that. He hadn’t told her that he meant to marry Harriet.
Although he always meant to marry her, he realized with another sickening lurch of his stomach. Almost unconsciously, he had decided long ago that he was going to do Harriet a favor by marrying her and rescuing her from her boring little backwater of a farm. Bring her to a life of luxury. He kicked his horse and they went faster, until the wind screamed in his ears.
A life of luxury, he was offering. In a tawdry house full of strangers and primero games. While she probably lived in a castle.
If he cried, which he never did, his tears would have turned to icicles on his cheeks.
Chapter Thirty-seven
To Be Better Than a Game
March 18, 1784 Berrow House Country Seat of the Duke of Berrow
H arriet got home, all the way home, by two days later. Villiers’s man, Finchley, gathered up her clothes, and Harriet gathered up the shards of her self-esteem and her love, and took it all home in the carriage with her.
She didn’t even cry until her spaniel, Mrs. Custard, ran to meet her. And then she dropped right down on her knee in the dirt and hugged him. His tail wagged furiously.
“He checked the front door for you every day, Your Grace,” her butler, Wilson, said from somewhere above her right shoulder.
Harriet bit her lip hard. She couldn’t cry in front of the servants. She never cried in front of the servants, not when Benjamin died, not when…
When had anything worse than that happened?
Besides having her heart ripped out and rejected, thrown back in the dirt at her feet.
You’d think she’d be used to it. Benjamin didn’t really love her; neither did Jem. They both loved their games better—the game of chess, with all its intricacies and power struggles, the game of—of being Lord Strange. With all its odd generosity, male camaraderie, celebration, and the game of primero, with all its intricacies, power struggles, and bets.
A tear dropped into Mrs. Custard’s graying fur.
Once, for once, she wished that someone would love her more than a game. The way she loved him.
“The servants await you, Your Grace,” her butler said. He meant they would be all lined up inside the front door, waiting to curtsy.