“I would like to be alone right now,” Iris said.
Richard was quiet for a moment before saying, “If that is your wish.” But he didn’t leave. He wanted just one more moment with her, even in silence.
She looked up at him as if to say, what now?
He cleared his throat. “May I escort you to a bench?”
“No thank you.”
“I would—”
“Stop!” She lurched back, holding her hand out as if to ward off an evil spirit. “Stop being nice. What you did was reprehensible.”
“I’m not a monster,” he stated.
“You are,” she cried. “You have to be.”
“Iris, I—”
“Don’t you understand?” she demanded. “I don’t want to like you.”
Richard felt a glimmer of hope. “I’m your husband,” he said. She was supposed to like him. She was supposed to feel so much more than that.
“If you are my husband, it is only because you tricked me,” she said in a low voice.
“It wasn’t like that,” he protested, even though it was exactly like that. But the thing was, it had felt different, at least a little. “You have to understand,” he tried, “the whole time . . . In London, when I was courting you . . . All the things about you that made you seem a good choice were the things I liked so well about you.”
“Really?” she said, and she didn’t sound snide, just disbelieving. “You liked me for my desperation?”
“No!” God above, what was she talking about?
“I know why you married me,” she said hotly. “You needed someone who would need you even more. Someone who could overlook a suspiciously hasty proposal and be desperate enough to thank you for your hand.”
Richard recoiled. He hated that those very thoughts had once sounded in his head. He could not remember thinking them specifically about Iris, but he had certainly thought them before he met her. They were the reason he’d gone to the musicale that first fateful evening.
He’d heard about the Smythe-Smiths. And desperate was the very word he’d heard.
Desperate was what had drawn him in.
“You needed someone,” Iris said with devastating quiet, “who would not have to choose between you and another gentleman. You needed someone who would choose between you and loneliness.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not—”
“But it was!” she cried. “You can’t tell me that—”
“Maybe at the beginning,” he cut in. “Maybe that’s what I thought I was looking for—No, I’ll be honest, that’s what I was looking for. But can you blame me? I had to—”
“Yes!” she cried. “Yes, I blame you. I was perfectly happy before I met you.”
“Were you?” he said roughly. “Were you really?”
“Happy enough. I had my family, and I had my friends. And I had the possibility that I might someday find someone who—” Her words shattered, and she turned away.
“Once I met you,” he said quietly, “I thought differently.”
“I don’t believe you.” Her voice was small, but her words were tight and perfectly enunciated.
He held himself still. If he moved, if he so much as extended a finger in her direction, he did not know that he would be able to contain himself. He wanted to touch her. He wanted it with a fervor that should have terrified him.
He waited for her to turn around. She did not.
“It is difficult to have a conversation with your back.”
Her shoulders tensed. She turned to face him with slow intensity, her eyes gleaming with fury. She wanted to hate him, he could see that. She was clinging to it. But for how long? A few months? A lifetime?
“You chose me because you pitied me,” she said in a low voice.
He tried not to flinch. “That’s not how it was.”
“Then how was it?” Her voice rose in anger, and her eyes somehow darkened. “When you asked me to marry you, when you just had to kiss me—”
“That’s exactly it!” he cried. “I wasn’t even going to ask you. I never thought I might find someone I could ask in such a short time.”
“Oh, thank you,” she choked, clearly insulted by his words.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said impatiently. “I assumed I would have to find the right woman and put her in a compromising position.”
Iris looked at him with such disappointment it was almost too much to bear. But he kept talking. Because he had to keep talking. It was the only way he might get her to understand.
“I’m not proud of that,” he said, “but it was what I thought I had to do to save my sister. And before you think the worst of me, I would never have seduced you before marriage.”
“Of course not,” she said with a bitter laugh. “You couldn’t very well have your wife and sister pregnant at the same time.”
“Yes . . . No! I mean, yes, obviously, but that wasn’t what was going through my head. God!” He raked his hand through his hair. “Do you really think I would take advantage of an innocent after what had happened to my own sister?”
He saw her throat work. He saw her fighting her own words. “No,” she finally said. “No. I know you wouldn’t.”
“Thank you for that,” he said stiffly.
She turned away again, hugging her arms to her body. “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”