She stared at it, stunned.
She enjoyed one merciful instant of numbness before humiliation poured through her body in acidic torrents.
Like a ghost, she returned to her room, on legs she couldn’t feel. Later she couldn’t remember getting there at all.
Gabriel slid to the floor and pressed his back against the door.
“Holy Mother of GOD...” he breathed.
Whatthe bloody hell had just happened?
How had he not anticipated this?
He stared, stunned, into the shadowy depths of his room. Reeling as if he’d taken a fist to the jaw.
You mad bastard, his body howled.You mad, idiot bastard.She’d been rightthere, within reach. He’d seen the curve of her breast beneath her night rail outlined in candlelight and shadow, and he could, right now, have been peeling that night rail over her head and touching his tongue to her nipple. Sliding his hands over her satiny skin.Why are you surprised? Wasn’t this always the game plan? Why are you not exulting?
He’d barked “GO” at her instead.
It had been pure instinct, a reflex, originating someplace more primal than desire. A survival instinct.
Who, exactly, was he protecting?
And if it was her... why was he shaking?
At first, Ginny wished she could wad herself up into the smallest imaginable ball like a handkerchief, tuck herself into some dark, hidden corner, and quietly finish expiring from shame.
It was almost gruesomely funny that this was not an option, as the rules of the Grand Palace on the Thames required her to join the other guests at dinner and in the sitting room. She might have offered herself up to be ravished in exchange for money and been rejected, but she still played spillikins. She had even offered a suggestion for the name of one of Dot’s knights.
“You can call him Judas,” she said. “Because he betrayed the queen. And now she wants to destroy his entire army.”
“Ooooh!” Dot approved, while Mr. Delacorte made an incoherent sound of near frustration.
Her passage home was booked a few days hence on the mail coach.
Maybe she could saddle up Hogarth’s donkey and leave for Sussex now, and contemplate her utter failure to resolve anything at all during the entire, slow journey home.
The worst part was the sense of betrayal she felt.
What if everything she thought she knew about Marchand,what if every memory she’d collected precisely the way she collected stone hearts—every look and word exchanged, the expression on his face in the churchyard as he gazed across at her, the way he held her, the way he kissed her—had been a lie? A strategy?
Had this been his objective, after all?
Because shehadfallen into his hand like a ripe plum.
Perhaps he thought he’dwon, and he had nothing left to prove now.
And perhaps that was the reason he felt he didn’t need to expend any effort making love to her. She scarcely knew a thing about all of that, after all. Ropes and spanking notwithstanding.
She refused to meet his eyes in the sitting room or at the breakfast or dinner table, but he scarcely took them off her. She knew because she couldfeelhis gaze, for the same reason she knew she would be able to feel him present anywhere, in a crowd or if she was blindfolded in a dark room. If he’d addressed her directly, she would have taken great pleasure in aggressively shunning him and letting everyone in the room wonder why.
She could barely eat. She put a few things in her mouth at each meal and didn’t taste them. Misery blunted every one of her senses, as if her whole being had donned mourning.
Marchand told himself:It’s better if she hates me now. It will ultimately be so much easier for both of us.
But every time he saw her at the dinner table or in the sitting room, he felt freshly destroyed. Unlike him, she had not developed a useful, hard shield between herself and the world. Her suffering was palpable. He could hardly breathe for witnessing it. She wasfurious, that much was clear. No doubt she felt humiliated. She probably felt betrayed. She was entitled to feel all of it.
Perhaps she was gravely disappointed he had not taken her to bed.