Chapter Twenty Four #2
“I have had only weeks to acclimate myself to the truth of my circumstances,” he said.
“But the circumstances of my birth were never ideal.” He dealt a fresh hand, striving to conceal the wince that wanted to creep across his face.
“I’ve known my parents’ marriage began in scandal since I was very young,” he said.
“It was still fresh, then. I grew up brawling with boys my own age who disparaged me and my mother for it. Mostly, they disparaged my mother, and I—I hated that. But more than that, I hated myself. For causing her such shame. For being the reason society shamed her.”
Grace capably took a third win and collected the deck again. “I think your mother would disagree with you,” she said.
“Yes; so I have recently learned,” he said as she shuffled.
“But for so many years, I thought she must be ashamed of me. That I was a living symbol of the scandal she’d weathered.
” A low sigh as he examined his new hand.
He raked his good hand through his hair in frustration.
“I knew it had not been easy for my parents,” he said.
“In the eyes of society, my father married well beneath him. But neither of them thought so, and they were so happy together, and I thought—if not for me, for my very existence, their lives would have been…so much easier.”
“Did they ever say they were ashamed of you?” Grace asked as she dealt him the single card he signaled for. Which, once again, would not be quite enough to win.
“No,” he said. “To be clear, I never doubted they loved me. But they spoke, occasionally, of the mistakes they had made which could not be undone. And I thought myself to be one of them. All my life, I have been ashamed of what I had cost them. And so I committed myself to avoiding those same mistakes. To being the perfect son…as a sort of penance, I suppose.” He collected the deck once again, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
Four losses for him already. Their game would be over in seven hands.
Grace settled her palms upon the table, waiting for her new hand. He was warming to the task, managing the cards smoothly even though she was certain it must pain his ruined knuckles. Still, it would not enable him to outwit her. “How unfortunate, then, that you made the same mistake.”
His eyes lifted to hers, bright and intense.
“You were never the mistake,” he said. “The mistake was in placing you in the same position as my father had once placed my mother.” With one hand, he tugged at his cravat.
She watched him palm a king with the other, and felt…
almost proud. Even if she had caught him at it, it had been ably done.
Had he managed to deal himself an ace, besides?
She revealed her hand, made up of a few other cards she’d collected earlier in the game. “Twenty,” she said.
Henry blinked in surprise and turned over his own hand. “Twenty-one.”
Another tiny flicker of pride in her chest. “That was well done of you, palming the king.”
Disappointment flashed across his face. “You saw that?”
“Of course I saw. I was betting on you not having the ace.” Still, he’d managed to eke out a single win.
As she dealt a fresh hand, he said, “I was a virgin, too.”
Her hands froze on the cards. “What?” she asked with an odd little laugh.
“You were not. You couldn’t have been. How could you have—have—” Done what he’d done.
How he’d done it. And he was thirty, for God’s sake!
How many men had not had at least one lover by his age?
What man of his station hadn’t taken at least one mistress?
“If you think I hadn’t imagined exactly that with you a hundred times before, you’re out of your mind,” he said. “I wasn’t ignorant. But I wasn’t willing to place a woman—any woman—in the same position my mother had once occupied. So I abstained.”
Until he hadn’t. Until he’d surrendered to a need he’d denied the whole of his life.
Until he’d wanted her badly enough to ignore his principles, to forget the rigid strictures by which he’d lived his life?
For the first time in memory, her fingers shuffled the cards with something less than perfect control.
“Instead, I placed you in my mother’s position,” he said. “And all I could think was that I might have given you the same shame she had suffered. That you might have to endure the same slings and arrows lobbed at you. And perhaps there would be another little boy—”
“Or girl,” she interjected as she studied her cards.
“Or girl,” he conceded easily as he signaled for another card. “A child who would grow up brawling, just as I had. Who would grow up feeling less than for circumstances beyond their control, only because I had failed to control myself. I admit I panicked—”
Grace made a scathing sound in her throat.
“But it wasn’t for the reasons you imagined.
It was because I wanted to marry you. Only I’d made it a necessity instead, and I knew—I knew it would reflect upon you the same way it had upon my mother.
That there would be whispers and speculation, and if there had turned out to be a child, then people would be counting the days since our marriage in an effort to paint you as some sort of wanton creature. I didn’t want that for you.”
“Henry,” she said softly. “You can’t control what people say.”
“No,” he said, and his eyes dropped to his cards. “But I didn’t want to be the cause of such slander against you. I didn’t want you to suffer for my actions.” A low sigh as he surveyed his hand. “Another card,” he said, dispiritedly.
Of course, he had to take another card on thirteen points. He could hardly expect to win otherwise. Probably, she thought, he didn’t expect to win at all.
She slid a card across the table to him.
His brows pinched as he flipped the card, revealing an eight. “Twenty-one,” he said in bewilderment. “A draw?”
Grace turned her own cards. “I’ve only got twenty.”
A long moment of silence drew out, taut and thrumming with tension. “You let me win,” he accused at last. “Why?”
“You’ve got only two wins,” she said. “There are still plenty of hands left. If I so choose, I can still make it a resounding defeat for you.”
“If you so choose,” he echoed in a murmur. Slowly he collected the cards, tapping them to reform the deck. “And if you don’t choose?”
“I’m not promising that.” But she supposed she was…considering it. At least enough to make it worth having lost two hands. At least enough to prolong a game she might have won handily, and could have made go much faster.
“I see,” he said, chewing at his lower lip. “Suppose I lay my cards on the table.”
“First you have got to deal them.”
A low chuckle. “I’m getting to that,” he said.
Another shuffle; not a false one. Probably he’d throw one in there eventually, but he’d distract her with a few honest ones first. “I love you,” he said frankly.
“It feels like I have for ages. And you were never a mistake. You are clever and beautiful and witty and kind. Charming, when you wish to be. Generous, even to people who don’t deserve it of you.
I do want to marry you, and not because it is expected or necessary.
Only because I want to, because I can’t imagine my life without you in it. ”
Her heart performed an obnoxious little leap in her chest. “You do realize,” she said, watching the fluid shuffle of the cards in his hand, “that I am not remotely suitable. You will never find the perfection you’ve been searching for in me.”
“You’re the only woman who could ever suit me,” he said.
He seemed to have forgotten he was meant to be dealing the cards; still they moved through his fingers in perfect, rhythmic shuffles—cards beating like a heart—as if the repetitive gesture was soothing to his frazzled nerves.
“In the interest of honesty, I am a bad bargain at present. I won’t be an earl much longer.
But I won’t be destitute. At least, not entirely. ”
Grace folded her arms across the table. She really ought to tell him otherwise. But curiosity made her say only, “Oh?”
“I’ve had quite a lot of meetings of late with my solicitor.
Both to ensure that the tenants and staff whom Uncle Nigel is likely to neglect are as insulated from his indifference as I can manage, and to review the terms of my father’s will,” he said.
“It wasn’t necessary to review it quite so thoroughly when I was his only heir, but now—” He gave an awkward shrug.
“Most everything is entailed, and will naturally fall to Uncle Nigel. But there is a small estate in Hampshire for which I was the named inheritor. So we will have a home. It’s not overlarge, but there is room enough for us.
For my mother and sister, and Aunt Alicia as well, if she does not fancy being Uncle Nigel’s countess.
And for children, eventually. It produces a modest income, but—it would be enough, I think, to support us. If we are frugal.”
“Henry,” she said patiently, pursing her lips to restrain the smile that wanted to emerge. “I have got a dowry of twenty thousand pounds.”
“Oh.” He paused in his shuffling just briefly, as if it had slipped his mind.
And Grace found that she rather liked that. That even when he thought himself so substantially reduced, her dowry had not been a consideration. That he wanted her more than anything else.
He stared down at the deck of cards in his hand, considering them as if they held his entire future within them.
“The mistake my parents spoke of wasn’t me,” he said slowly.
“It wasn’t even how their relationship had begun.
It was in letting the important things go unspoken for too long.
It was in the consequences of not being perfectly honest with one another to begin with.
It was in waiting past the point of reason in silence.
And because I assumed differently, I made the same mistake.
I should have told you I loved you well before now.
So I am telling you now, and hoping it isn’t too late for me.
For us.” He drew a steadying breath, tapped the well-shuffled cards back into order.
“I’m changing the terms of our game,” he said. “One last hand. Winner takes all.”
“Henry,” Grace protested as he dealt the cards. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I really do,” he said resolutely. “Fair warning. I’ve dealt myself twenty points.”
Why would he tell her that? To give her a fighting chance to win?
She didn’t need it; she could always cheat.
She glanced down at the cards he’d dealt her, still face down upon the table, and experienced a small shock as she realized—they weren’t from the same deck.
The artwork printed upon the backs was different.
Somehow, he’d palmed a card and she hadn’t noticed. He’d dealt her not just a card he’d switched out for another, but a card from a completely different deck, and she hadn’t seen him do it.
A nagging suspicion settled in her stomach. “That was…very clever of you,” she said. “I didn’t see the switch at all.”
“I have been practicing,” he said. “Probably I’ll never be half so good as you—”
“No one is half so good as me.”
“—But I wanted to make you proud. To show you that your efforts on my behalf were not wasted.” He inclined his head toward the cards she still hadn’t picked up. “The one I slipped in,” he said, “I’ve had it on me for quite some time, now.”
Oh. The queen of hearts. The one he’d had tucked up his sleeve when he’d left after the first time he’d called upon her. That nagging suspicion grew, and with fingers that trembled, she lifted the cards from the table.
He’d dealt her a natural twenty-one. He hadn’t told her what he held in his hand to inform her of what she would have to beat; he’d known full well that he’d dealt her the winning hand. He’d told her only so that she would know what score to come in beneath—if she cared to do so.
And he’d left the choice quite literally in her hands.