And then it occurred to her.
He could not possibly have come here with the intention of telling her that his sister needed an invitation to a ton ball and that therefore she must marry him. It was just too absurd.
It was altogether possible that he would look back upon this scene and the words he had spoken and cringe. She guessed that if he had rehearsed what he would say, the whole speech had fled from his mind as soon as she stepped into the room. It was altogether possible that his stiff military bearing and hard-set jaw and scowl were hiding embarrassment and insecurity.
It had, she supposed, taken some courage to come here to Newbury.
She could be entirely wrong, of course.
“Lord Trentham,” she asked the door panel in front of her face, “was your sister your only reason for coming here?”
She thought he was not going to answer. She closed her eyes, and her right hand began to turn the knob of the door. The rain pelted against the library window with a particularly vicious burst.
“No,” he said, and she relaxed her hold on the doorknob, opened her eyes, drew a slow breath, and turned.
He looked the same as before. If anything, his scowl was even more fierce. He looked dangerous—but she knew he was not. He was not a dangerous man, though there must be hundreds of men, both living and dead, who would disagree with her if they could.
“I had sex with you,” he said.
He had said that before, and then they had got distracted by a discussion of whether she had found it pleasant or more than pleasant.
“And that means you ought to marry me?” she said.
“Yes.” He gazed steadily at her.
“Is this your middle-class morality speaking?” she asked him. “But you have had other women. You admitted as much to me at Penderris. Did you feel obliged to offer them marriage too?”
“That was different,” he said.
“How?”
“Sex with them was a business arrangement,” he said. “I paid, they provided.”
Oh, goodness. Gwen felt dizzy for a moment. Her brother and her male cousins would have forty fits apiece if they were listening now.
“If you had paid me,” she said, “you would not be obliged to offer me marriage?”
“That’s daft,” he said.
Gwen sighed and looked toward the fireplace. There was a fire burning, but it needed more coal. She shivered slightly. She ought to have asked Lily for a shawl to wrap about her shoulders.
“You are cold,” Lord Trentham said, and he too looked at the fireplace before striding over to the hearth and bending to the coal scuttle.
Gwen moved across the room while he was busy and sat on the edge of a leather chair close to the blaze. She held her hands out to it. Lord Trentham stood slightly to one side of the fire, his back to it, and looked down at her.
“I never felt any strong urge to marry,” he said. “I felt it even less after my years at Penderris. I wanted—I needed to be alone. It is only during the past year that I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that I ought to marry—someone of my own kind, someone who can satisfy my basic needs, someone who can manage my home and help in some way with the farm and garden, someone who can help me with Constance until she is properly settled. Someone to fit in, not to intrude. Someone on whose private life I would not intrude. A comfortable companion.”
“But a lusty bed partner,” she said. She glanced up at him before returning her gaze to the fire.
“And that too,” he agreed. “All men need a vigorous and satisfying sex life. I do not apologize for wanting it within a marriage rather than outside it.”
Gwen raised her eyebrows. Well, she had started it.
“When I met you,” he said, “I wanted to bed you almost from the beginning even though you irritated me no end with your haughty pride and your insistence upon being put down when I was carrying you up from the beach. And I expected to despise you after you told me about that ride with your husband and its consequences. But we all do things in our lives that are against our better judgment and that we regret bitterly forever after. We all suffer. I wanted you, and I had you down in that cove. But there was never any question of marriage. We were both agreed upon that. I could never fit in with your life, and you could never fit in with mine.”
“But you changed your mind,” she said. “You came here.”
“I somehow expected,” he said, “that you were with child. Or if I did not exactly expect it, I did at least shape my mind in that direction so that I would be prepared. And when I did not hear from you, I thought that perhaps you would withhold the truth from me and bear a bastard child I would never know anything about. It gnawed at me. I wouldn’t have come even then, though. If you were so much against marrying me that you would even hide a bastard child from me, then coming here and asking was not going to make any difference. And then Constance told me about her dreams. Youthful dreams are precious things. They ought not to be dashed as foolish and unrealistic just because they are young dreams. Innocence ought not to be destroyed from any callous conviction that a realistic sort of cynicism is better.”
Is that what happened to you?
She did not ask the question aloud.
“A wife from the middle classes would not be able to help me,” he said.
“But I would?”
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is not your only reason for wishing to marry me, though?” she asked.
He hesitated again.
“No,” he said. “I had sex with you. I put you in danger of conceiving out of wedlock. There is no one else I want to marry—not at present, anyway. There would be passion in our marriage bed. On both our parts.”
“And it does not matter that we would be incompatible in every other way?” she said.
Again the hesitation.
“I thought we might give it a try,” he said.
She looked up again and met his gaze.
“Oh, Hugo,” she said. “One gives painting a try when one has never held a brush in one’s hand before. Or climbing a steep cliff face when one is afraid of heights or eating an unfamiliar food when one does not really like the look of it. If one likes it, whatever it is, one can keep going. If one does not, one can stop and try something else. One cannot try marriage. Once one is in, there is no way out.”
“You would know,” he said. “You have tried it already. I will take my leave, then, ma’am. I hope you will not take a chill from your soaking and from standing in here in a dress designed for summer rather than early spring.”
He bowed stiffly.
He was calling her ma’am; she was calling him Hugo.
“And one tries courtship,” she said and looked down again. She closed her eyes. This was foolish. More than foolish. But perhaps he would continue on his way out of her life.
He did not. He straightened up and stayed where he was. There was a silence in which Gwen could hear that there had been no abatement in the force of the rain.
“Courtship?” he said.
“I could indeed help your sister,” she said, opening her eyes and examining the backs of her hands as they lay in her lap. “If she is pretty and has genteel manners, as I daresay she does, and is wealthy, then she will take well enough with the ton even if not with the very highest echelon. She would take well, that is, if I were to sponsor her.”
“You would be willing to do that,” he asked her, “when you have not even met her?”
“I would have to meet her first, of course,” she said.
Silence descended once more.
“I daresay that if we like each other I will sponsor her,” she said, looking at him again. “But it will quickly become known who Miss Emes is, who her brother is. You will probably be surprised to find yourself quite famous, Lord Trentham. Not many military officers, especially those who are not born into the upper classes, are rewarded for military service with titles. And when people learn who Miss Emes is and who you are and who is sponsoring her, it will not be long before word will spread of our meeting in Cornwall earlier this year. Tongues will wag even if there is nothing for them to wag about.”