"Ten thousand pounds?"
"Had you planned it all along, Elizabeth?" he asked. "Or was it just the momentary temptation to which you succumbed?"
"Oh, Robert," she whispered, feeling the blood draining from her head and fighting waves of faintness, "what are you talking about?"
His expression changed. A kind of wild fear was in his face. He grabbed her by the upper arms. "Are you ill?" he asked harshly, and when she did not reply, he pulled her to her feet and folded her in his arms. She sagged against him, dizzy with faintness.
"Oh, God, Elizabeth," he said against her hair, his voice heavy with pain, "tell me you did not plan it. Tell me that you were merely tempted, that it was a decision you made on the spur of the moment. Tell me you loved me when you married me, that those days and nights in Devon were not just an empty sham. Please, darling, give me that much consolation at least."
Elizabeth fought the buzzing in her ears and the coldness in her head. "Tell me what you are talking about," she said.
His hand came beneath her chin and lifted her pale face. "Ah, don't lie to me," he said. "Believe me, I want to understand, I want to forgive. When I see you and when I hold you, I cannot believe that you are capable of the villainy that I have accepted all these years. I want you, Elizabeth."
His mouth was on hers with a passion and an urgency that she could not have denied even had she wished to. As it was, in her semiconscious state, the embrace seemed like one of the many she had dreamed of in the previous years, only more delightful. She pressed herself to the warmth of him and allowed his demanding lips to tilt her head back and part her own. Her mouth relaxed beneath his so that his tongue plunged an easy entrance and set her afire. His one hand had somehow dealt with the row of buttons down the back of her gown and was caressing the naked flesh of her back beneath her chemise. His other hand fondled one breast and then dropped behind her hips and brought her hard against him. She gasped and regained some of the consciousness that had been slipping from her. He was looking at her with passion-heavy eyes and then stooped down and swung her up into his arms.
"Tell me the way to your room," he said, beginning to move around the sofa.
Elizabeth was fully conscious again. "Put me down, Robert," she said distinctly.
"I shall carry you, love," he said, looking down into her eyes. "You always were the merest feather."
"Put me down, Robert," she said again, willing her voice to steadiness.
The passion was gone from his face instantly as he set her feet back on the floor. "You are a tease, ma'am," he said, "and I fell for it again."
"Enough!" she yelled, her control snapping altogether. "I am sick, Robert, sick of hearing your accusations. I am heartless, I am a tease, I am mercenary. I know myself as none of these things. You have accused me of accepting ten thousand pounds for something. I know nothing of ten thousand pounds. I have never even seen so much money. Now, if you care to explain what you have hinted at, please do so. If not, if your purpose here is merely to insult and accuse me, you may leave, my lord. You are not master here, and in the absence of the Rowes, I command. Now, which is it to be?"
She sat down straight-backed on the nearest chair. He too sank onto the sofa that she had occupied earlier. He looked at her narrowly for a long while, and Elizabeth almost lost her nerve. She set her chin and glared back.
"I refer, of course, to the ten thousand pounds that you accepted from my uncle," he said tonelessly.
"From your uncle?" she asked, a frown creasing her brow.
Hetherington got restlessly to his feet and paced the room. "My uncle was opposed to our marriage from the start," he said. "You told me that yourself. What you did not tell me was that he had offered you money even then to break off with me. Two thousand pounds, I believe. You laughed at him and told him it would take a lot more than that paltry sum to buy you off."
Elizabeth had whitened again. "The details are not quite as I remember them," she said, "but yes, he did talk of money."
His penetrating look again almost unnerved her.
"After we were married, he might have let us alone," he continued, "though you probably thought you could push up his price. Circumstances certainly played into your hands, my dear. How you must have cheered when you realized that I was the new marquess. You must have waited in great glee for my uncle to contact you."
Not a muscle moved in Elizabeth's face. "Go on," she said.
"My uncle responded like a puppet on a string, of course," he said. "When he came to offer you eight thousand pounds, you forced him to pay out ten. You were foolish, my dear. He would have paid double the sum to rid the family of such an unsuitable connection."
"Yes, I imagine he would," she commented.
"I was furious with him when I learned what he had done," Hetherington said, his eyes blazing again, "until I had had time to think, of course. Then I realized that it was probably as well to know the truth about you so early. It was a tragic irony for you, was it not, Elizabeth, that my grandmother died just a year later and left me all her wealth? You might have had the title and a great deal more money than ten thousand pounds, my love."
"Have you finished?" she asked. He made her an ironic bow. "I know nothing of ten thousand pounds," she repeated, "and I have not set eyes on your uncle since that night when he asked me to name my price for leaving you alone. All I do know, my lord, is that I waited for a whole week at my father's house after writing to tell you where I was. I excused you in my mind, knowing that you would be contending with shock as well as the business attending on the funerals and their aftermath. But I longed for a letter, just a little note, from you. At the end of that week, I began to write to you, every day, pleading with you to let me come to you; or to write to me at least. For two whole weeks, Robert. Do you have any conception how long a time that seems to a bride who has just been separated from her husband and who cannot understand the reason why?
"And then finally you wrote." Elizabeth glared at him in angry scorn. "But not to me, my lord. Never to me. Could you find the courage to write only to my father? He was never a particularly loving man, but even he felt pity enough not to show me those letters. He tried to soften the blow by telling me himself that you did not want to see me, did not want to be burdened with my letters. I tried to convince myself that you loved me, that you would become yourself again when the shock of your brother's and your father's deaths had worn off. It took John, brought home from Oxford by my worried father, to convince me that you really did wish to be rid of me. Someone of my social standing suited you well enough when you were plain Robert Denning with no expectations. But as the wife of the Marquess of Hetherington I was merely an embarrassment. You must divorce me as speedily and as quietly as possible."
"But I did not," he pointed out quietly.
"No," she agreed, "because I very meekly gave up the struggle. It might have caused some scandal had a whisper of what was happening reached the ears of the ton. It was safer to leave matters as they stood, was it not?"
They stared at each other, worlds apart.
"How can I disbelieve my uncle?" Hetherington said finally. "He is my own flesh and blood. He has always devoted himself to my family. He even came to live with me in the months following the accident, to help me adjust. What he did, though wrong, was done for love of me."
"But you will disbelieve your wife?" she cried, leaping to her feet. "You have made your choice, Robert. There is nothing more for you and me to say to each other."
Again they regarded each other across the room. Finally Hetherington withdrew his eyes and, without a word, strode from the room.