“Alexandra...” He paused, seeming to consider what he was about to ask. This hesitance struck her as unusual; she’d known him as a man who bluntly came out with things. “Are you afraid of me?”
She went still. The question surprised her.
She regarded him warily.
How to answer?
Five hours after they had spoken their marriage vows, two hours after she had broken those vows in a way she had neither planned nor anticipated, he had demonstrated to her why his enemies found him terrifying. He’d done it without raising his voice.
Before that time, he had never been anything other than solicitous and gentle with her.
The clearheaded, ruthless, cold efficiency with which he had outlined the nonnegotiable terms of her fate—and therefore, his fate—as a consequence of her actions had shocked her, then numbed her, then settled on her soul like a killing frost. Until her heart felt like a rattling black husk in her chest.
It was how it had felt ever since.
That was, until today. Her heart had gone through a lot of things today.
She had trembled throughout that whole horrible conversation that night. But she hadn’t groveled or lied or sobbed or hidden her face.
She had never planned to wrong him.
But she uncontrovertibly had.
Her own stubborn, inconvenient integrity refused to allow her to do anything like dodge away from the truth, or attempt to rationalize the choice she’d made. As far as he was concerned, she’d sealed her own fate that night.
“Why do you ask?” she finally asked.
She saw his features darken and tighten as if her words had entered him like a dart.
It was a long moment before he spoke.
“I would never harm you.” He sounded tired. He landed tautly on “never.”
She merely nodded, humoring him. Men said a lot of things they didn’t mean.
His eyebrows dove. “Has any other man ever harmed you?”
She stared at him, stunned. Her cheeks went warm.
Any other man.She was unprepared for the almost dispassionate acknowledgment that in the five years they’d lived apart she might have taken a lover or two, any one of whom might have knocked her around a bit. For his apparently cold acceptance of their very unorthodox, yet not uncommon among the aristocracy for all of that, arrangement.
Doubtless he’d had lovers in the interim. He was a man.
She felt this possibility now like a weight on her chest.
It had been so easy not to think about it when she was occupied. Which is why she’d made certain she was always occupied.
Which was part of how she’d ended up in a Newgate cell. Trying so very hard to remain occupied.
“No,” she answered quietly. “No other men have harmed me.” She wasn’t going to expound. It was true. She paused. “What would you do ifthey had?” She made the question sound casual. It emerged slightly defiant.
She found she was genuinely curious.
He studied her. But the faint smile lifting the corners of his mouth did not light his eyes, and it made the little hairs prickle at the back of her neck.
“Make them rue the day they were born,” he explained with great patience.
Long before she’d ever met him, her father had told her an anecdote about Colonel Brightwall: the mail coach upon which he’d been traveling one night had been waylaid by a pair of highwaymen, who had forced the passengers to disembark at musket point. Brightwall had at once put himself between the other gentlemen and the two lady passengers. Quick as a snake he’d lashed out and snatched the musket from the grasp of the nearest robber and swung it like a cricket bat at the man’s skull. The man had gone down like a ninepin. Then Brightwall had pivoted and rammed the musket stock into the other robber’s chest, sending the man’s shot—aimed right at Brightwall—well wide of the mark. That rogue had crumpled, too. Over in seconds, the whole thing. As efficient as if he’d practiced doing all of that at Manton’s.