Chapter 26
Linnie had awakened from a contented slumber to find her husband gone, the spot beside hers cold, and herself living in a waking nightmare where nothing made sense.
The teasing, tender husband whom she’d spent day after day with curled up on his sofa, on his lap, had made love with, was gone, and in his place stood the coolly indifferent stranger whom she’d stumbled upon at Lord Rutland’s.
Of all the things he’d said and done, this look Jeremy now gave Linnie hurt the worst. It contained so much pity and condescension she wanted to curl up inside herself.
Linnie hugged herself again and rubbed at her arms.
He was trying to hurt her. A person didn’t just go from achingly sweet and devoted to this remote, biting figure before her.
Linnie’s gaze slipped to his stark white ditty bag, to the crystal decanter, to the glasses of never drunk brandy, and then back to Jeremy’s hardened features. She let her arms fall.
“Why are you behaving this way?” she asked again, this time beggingly.
Jeremy brought his shoulders up in a shrug. “This is who I am.”
The avowal he’d whispered at their wedding altar surfaced like fog around her brain. I’m a blackguard in every way, and you will discover it, and you will hate me.
Linnie battered back the stirrings of doubt in him.
“This isn’t you,” she scoffed. Linnie collected the makeshift necklace she’d had made of a gold chain and his sailor’s knot and held the cherished gift up for him to see.
“This is who you are.” She let it go, and with those same fingers, she touched the lone curl shorter than all her other ones from where he’d snipped the lock. “This is who you are.”
Jeremy’s jaw rippled. “That’s who I wanted you to think I was.”
Who I wanted you to think I was . . . think I was . . . think I was . . .
Linnie wanted to clamp her hands over her ears to shut out the repeating assertion. It rolled and roiled and tangled with the words another man had spoken on her wedding day.
Has Tremaine told you he loves you? If the honorable Lord Tremaine cares for you so greatly, then why not give you those words, Linnie?
Lord Culross’s voice continued to rise, louder and clearer, above the full-scale pandemonium in her mind.
The irony of it all, Linnie? You’ll give your allegiance to a man who betrayed you in the worst way.
No! She’d not betray her husband by not believing in him.
Linnie took in a ragged breath. With a courage she didn’t know she possessed, she asked the question that would kill her if he answered wrong.
“A-and your promise of fidelity, Jeremy? Your insistence that you want me and only me, and will remain faithful both when we are apart and together. Was that also what you wanted me to think?” The walls of her chest were going to collapse.
One corner of his mouth quirked up in a smug rogue’s grin. “Fear not, Linnie,” he purred. “Your sweet body is the only one I hunger for, your bed the only one I’ll visit.”
She’d imagined his avowal would have ushered in a heady lightness and not more of this debilitating disconsolation.
Why? Why was he doing this?
Linnie stilled.
He is trying to hurt me.
Then it all made sense!
“You want to push me away.” Linnie didn’t let him get a word in edgewise to deny it. “It is because you are leaving? You believe it’ll be easier for me when you go, and that I can be happy with you gone if I hate you, but I can’t hate you.”
Not so much as a muscle moved in his face. “You have all the ideas formed in your pretty head, along with the actual answers. Find whichever one you prefer in there.”
Fueled by anger and hurt, she stormed over to him; her skirts whipped around them.
Tipping her head back, she glared at him.
“No. I want you to tell me what you are thinking, what is going on.” She glared at him.
“But something tells me you’re too scared to tell me how you really feel about me, and so you’re running away. ”
His mouth, that same beautiful mouth that’d brought her such pleasure, twisted in an ugly, macabre rendering of a smile. “What is the sole reason for my being? What do I love before all else?”
She pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling.
Jeremy leaned close, and her eyes slid shut in anticipation of his kiss, which she needed now more than she ever had.
She felt the sough of his breath brush her cheek. “No answer? Tell me, which one of us is really afraid of the truth?”
Linnie scrabbled with the skin of her cheek, tearing the flesh up with her teeth. “Th-the s-sea.” A single drop trailed down her cheek; unlike every tear she’d shed before in front of him, this one Jeremy let fall, and unchecked by his tender care, others followed suit.
He nodded. “That is right. The sea. I never lied to you about that.”
Two words out of all those twelve stood out.
“D-did you lie to me about . . . ?” God help me, I can’t ask. Not this.
Jeremy stared pointedly at her.
Ask him, Linnie . . . Ask him if he ever would have even looked at you were it not for his plans to stop an alliance between me and the McQuoids. Ask whether if I hadn’t wanted you as my own, he would have ever offered you marriage.
Linnie shook her head frantically. She wouldn’t ask that.
And why is that, my darling? If you are so confident in his faithfulness now that you are married, he needn’t lie anymore. Ask him. Get the truth from your husband.
Perhaps she was the biggest fool because she did still believe in Jeremy. Whatever this was, it had nothing to do with why he’d married her.
“D-did you lie to me about”—Linnie struggled to get the rest out—“other things?” Her whisper came so stark and faint, she herself barely heard the question.
And maybe that was because she really didn’t want his answer. Maybe she didn’t want the truth because, as Jeremy said, deep inside Linnie already knew.
“What other things?”
“Us!” she cried.
The smile he gave her was sad. “You’ve been a lovely distraction, Linnie. I’ve enjoyed my time with you more than I ever thought I would. But none of this was real, and you know it. You just continue to deny that which is as plain as the lovely nose on your face.”
Dazed, she shook her head.
None of this was real . . .
“That wasn’t an answer,” she whispered.
He stood mutely.
And then, like a plug in a sinking ship gave way, all past memories and exchanges with Jeremy came pouring through, flooding her mind and memory, overwhelming her, pulling Linnie under their fast-rising depths.
There’s nothing I need or crave from a woman other than sex, and as I said, especially not a McQuoid woman.
I might have overlooked my enmity for all your rotten family to get between your legs, Linnie-Lou. Might have. You see, I’ll bed any grand beauty. That is, as long as she isn’t a McQuoid . . .
You and yours are a treacherous lot who put your desires before all. As such, I don’t expect you to know a bloody thing about that sentiment.
Such abhorrence not just for Arran but for all the McQuoid family—of which she was a part.
That horror is only first to the nightmarish prospect of being discovered with an unmarried McQuoid lady, Miss Smith.
Linnie’s breath grew labored. Each intake of air she managed was an agonizing task for her lungs.
He’d hurled so many hateful words.
I barely recognize you. You’ve become repulsive, Jeremy.
I always was, Miss Smith. You just never knew the real me. I’m the worst rake. The man you thought you knew to be a gentleman only treated you and your family with respect out of loyalty.
Linnie bit her lower lip hard and tasted the metallic tinge of blood. She shook her head, not believing the truth even as it stared directly back, stark and unbending.
She couldn’t believe she’d been so wrong about him and that all they’d shared would collapse and fade and flicker out like a dying star into nothing.
His shadowed eyes were tortured, haunted.
No, wait. They merely reflected Linnie’s fevered anguish.
Linnie spun away and found herself walking in a circle, only to return to the same place where she’d started: across from her husband. “Say it,” she whispered.
Jeremy said nothing.
“Say it,” she repeated.
At his grim, emotionless silence, Linnie cried out.
“Say it,” she cried, hammering his hard chest with her fists, her ire rising at his stillness.
“Say it,” she rasped and then whaled on him.
“Tell me the only reason you pursued me . . . the only reason you made me fall in love with you is because you wanted to hurt Arran and prevent an alliance between myself and Lord Culross.” Linnie pounded his chest harder.
He made no attempt to stop her, and she sobbed, “Say it. Say it!”
“Linnie,” he croaked in the first crack in his ice-cold composure.
But he didn’t deny it.
“Say it!” she screamed.
As quick as there’d been a slip in his merciless veneer, his features became a frozen mask of indifference. “You wedding Culross could have never occurred for a host of reasons . . . some of which changed the further it all went.”
“It?” she repeated dumbly. “The further what went?”
“My deception. I was always going to marry you, Linnie. You were too valuable.”
Linnie’s head jerked sideways; his confession landed like a slap.
Valuable. Not: special. Not: His life was empty without her in it. Not even: You were too valuable to me.
Linnie staggered, feeling as drunk as at her family’s dinner party, but this time there was none of the warmth and lightness and happiness inside.
“Oh, my God.” Linnie gripped her hair and pulled hard. How had she been so wrong?
“Linnie,” he said hoarsely.
More battered than had he pummeled Linnie with fists, she had to fight to get her head up enough to face him.
He took a step toward her.
Her heart pounding, Linnie tripped over her hems in a bid to outrace him. She needn’t have bothered. He didn’t pursue her. He made no attempt to take her in his arms. And what weakness existed in Linnie that she yearned to have the one who’d hurt her most hold her?