It was the most erotic thing she’d ever seen. Not that she’d seen much. Or anything, really.
Mia fell back a step, and then another. She had to get away.
“Do you believe that I want you?” he inquired.
“What I believe,” she said, blurting out the truth, “is that you’re one of those men who desires any woman within reach. You think that I will remain faithful to you for the whole of our lives.”
Something savage and primitive crossed his eyes. “You damn well better.”
“But you will go around London and bed whomever you wish, is that right? I merely wish to understand the arrangement clearly. You may take lovers and do whatever you please.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “If I feel so inclined.”
“While I spend my entire life with someone who finds me fat and mousy.” She made herself meet his eyes. “Maybe if I were really in love with you, I would count myself grateful. Or if I had any ambition to be a duchess. But do you know, Vander? I don’t feel grateful. I don’t feel fortunate.”
His mouth tightened.
“I think there might be someone out there who doesn’t think those things about me. My fiancé, Edward, liked me.”
A big sob rose up, but she forced it back down.
“But now I will never find someone who will love me for myself, because you’re so angry that you want to punish me.”
He began to speak, but she shook her head. “Don’t bother to deny it. You’re happy to be punishing me; I can see it in your face. But I don’t deserve this . . . I don’t.”
“I am not punishing you,” he said impatiently. “Bloody hell, I’d think you had ample evidence that I desire you. Are you always this dramatic?”
“No,” she said shakily. “Only when I find myself being punished for the sins of my father.”
His face froze.
Mia didn’t even feel triumphant at the evidence she was right. “You can see to it that I never have a chance to fall in love,” she cried. “You can take that from me. But you will never know whether I am unfaithful to you. Never!”
Vander’s response was blasphemous.
“You’d better enjoy those four nights with your mousy duchess while you still have me,” she added, “because one day I will find a man who—who respects me.”
“Respects you?” His eyes raked her body. “Does that mean that you’ll never tell him why I married you and how we married? Because he won’t respect you after he knows that, Duchess.”
The sob pressed so hard that Mia could no longer suppress it. He was right. “I’m going to my room,” she managed, running for the door, blinded by tears.
He caught her just as she reached it, spun her around.
“No!” she said with a little scream. “Get away from me.”
“I respect you,” he said in a grim voice. “You did what you had to for your nephew, and any decent person would respect that.”
“Get away,” she gasped. “Let me go.” Tears were pouring down her face, and it wasn’t decorous weeping. It was the kind of sobbing that tears a woman apart. The kind that comes after she’s reminded that she’s not beautiful, and not loved, and not even respected.
She shoved him again, and this time he backed away, a helpless look on his face, the same look that her father got every time she had a female problem. For example, when her father had ruined her debut year by sharing her poem.
Without another word, Mia wrenched open the door and ran up the stairs, ignoring Vander’s butler. Tears were salty in her mouth and she needed a handkerchief . . . ten handkerchiefs.
A moment later she was on her bed, two pillows over her head, sobbing as hard as she had when her brother and father died. Since she’d learned the terms of that bloody will.