Epilogue
London, England
Less than a Year Later
Where his wife was concerned, Tremaine had told too many lies.
There’d been so many goddamned lies.
Too many to count. All of which had started the day they’d been reunited in Lord and Lady Rutland’s library and callously continued when he’d been on his quest for revenge.
There’d been one lie greater, more terrific, more terrible than any of the fucking rest.
He’d hurt her before, but that day aboard the Painted Dragon, when he’d come perilously close to losing her to the sea, he’d vowed he’d never again hurt her.
He’d bloody promised her.
In the end, his greed, his selfishness, his hungering had been his downfall.
Linnie’s anguished sob cut across the other side of the ornate, gilded paneling and all the way through Tremaine’s miserable heart.
Pacing the newly installed, white-carpet corridor of their main suites, Tremaine raked his hands through unkempt hair. The oval beveled mirror at the opposite end of the hall told him precisely what he looked like, and also what the army of grim-faced McQuoid-Smiths filling the corridor saw.
They hated him.
As they should.
They couldn’t despise Tremaine more than he abhorred himself.
Another one of Linnie’s cries rang out.
Unable to swallow the groan torn from his chest, he whipped back around, heading in the direction of his chambers. No, their bedchambers. For the past ten months, they’d occupied these rooms together, until this day, when he’d been ordered out.
How had a mere twelve hours passed? And how had Tremaine failed to appreciate that a half of one day was, in fact, a goddamned eternity.
Time meant nothing anymore.
She let out another anguished wail, and Tremaine wanted to stick a dagger in his miserable heart to escape the horror of what he’d done to her.
But he didn’t deserve surcease, not when she suffered so.
He’d been asked to let her alone.
He’d promised he would because it was what she’d said she wanted.
He should have fought her.
He should have dropped to his knees, kissed her feet all over again, and no matter how much she’d urged him to go, stayed with her.
“Whyyyy!” Linnie sobbed.
The same quake that’d started within him became an uncontrollable tremble. Tremaine’s teeth clinked together. Sweat fell from his brow and down his heavily stubbled cheeks.
She’d asked him to leave.
He’d done so because he could deny Linnie nothing, especially following the epic pain he’d brought her.
But once again, he proved selfish where she was concerned.
With a harsh rasp, Tremaine stopped in his tracks and took a step toward his and Linnie’s rooms.
A tall, slender gentleman stepped into his path. Crazed, Tremaine curled his hands into claws to drag the one figure standing between him and his wife to the floor.
“Tremaine,” the man said urgently.
Tremaine stared blankly at the vaguely familiar fellow’s tired face.
“Tremaine,” he repeated.
Tremaine snarled. “Out of my fucking way.”
Tremaine blinked frantically, and then his vision cleared, and the gentleman’s features came into clear, sharp focus.
“Campbell,” he said, his voice ragged and hollow. His brother-in-law, Linnie’s brother, looked entirely too composed, and sympathetic.
Why? How?
And why isn’t he beating me to death as I deserve? As I want him to.
His brother-in-law gave a wan smile, then clasped a hand on Tremaine’s shoulder. “I feel inclined to point out, all of this is a very normal occurrence. Women have babes every day. Isn’t that right, Winfield?”
Together, they looked to Winfield and Aragon.
Each gentleman’s features were set in grim lines that defied the assurances that swiftly flew from Campbell’s lips.
When Winfield didn’t lie for the other man’s benefit, Campbell appealed to Aragon.
“Ara—” Campbell stopped himself before he completed that question and paled even more. “My apologies.”
For one couldn’t speak to the duke about “normal occurrences.” Not when Aragon had lost his first wife in a bloody carriage accident.
“Is that how you felt when your wife delivered you a son?” Tremaine hissed.
Campbell’s features spasmed.
Upon closer inspection, the white, taut lines at the edges of his brother-in-law’s mouth and his troubled gaze told an altogether different tale than that of the calm he tried to project for Tremaine’s benefit.
Tremaine’s heart knocked painfully against his rib cage.
The sight of Lord Abington roused within Tremaine an even greater dread.
For instead of being buried behind a newspaper, as he’d always been for as long as Tremaine had known him, the older gentleman looked haggard as Tremaine had never seen him.
The earl stared worriedly at the room from which Linnie’s cries and moans erupted while she labored.
“What of you?” Tremaine demanded of Winfield.
“Our first was a daughter,” the marquess murmured. “And no, I was scared out of my everlasting mind, and that went for our son, afterward. It’s how I’ll feel when she gives birth to our third child this winter,” Lord Winfield reluctantly added.
That announcement took the McQuoid-Smiths and Tremaines by surprise. Reserved congratulations rolled around the assembly of gentlemen.
Tremaine could only shake his head. How in blazes had the other gentleman put his wife through this twice? And she’d have to do it a third time?
Tremaine grew even queasier, and he tried to imagine Linnie enduring another childbirth.
Another shudder racked his frame.
Never. Never. Ever. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He would rather castrate himself than witness her suffering.
You are not witnessing her suffering, the devil in Tremaine’s mind jeered. You are out here, hiding.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
The McQuoid-Smiths and Tremaines had fallen quiet, which only further heightened the sounds of Linnie’s cries—cries that, over the past three hours, had grown weaker and weaker.
Several moments passed. The McQuoid-Smiths resumed speaking with one another, their voices low and hushed and their words undiscernible.
Tremaine groaned, and resting his back against the wall, he knocked his head along the newly papered paneling.
Lord Winfield slid into the place beside him.
Tremaine, his vision blurred, his eyes tired, and bone weary from dread, could only turn his head to face the other man.
“I only felt it appropriate for me to share about the marchioness,” Winfield quietly explained, “because I know what’s going on in your head right now, Tremaine. It is hell. Absolute hell.” He nudged his chin. “Aragon knows it.”
Tremaine followed that gesture to the duke.
The other husband nodded in commiseration.
“Crichton knows it,” Winfield said. “He’s attempting to put on a good face for your benefit. Hell, I’d venture everyone, except Campbell and Arran—” The marquess cut himself off. “My apologies,” he said swiftly.
“It’s fine,” Tremaine said, and he meant it. They looked down the length of the hall. Some two to three Romance paces away, Linnie’s cousin stood apart from the rest of the family.
Too beset with worry for his wife, Tremaine didn’t have an ounce of energy for the enmity that still existed between him and the man whom he’d called friend.
Mindful of a need for peace in and with Linnie’s family, Tremaine allowed Arran to join the ritual of waiting with the father-to-be and the rest of the McQuoid-Smith men, only on account of his wife.
As if he felt himself the focus of conversation, Arran, who’d aged a dozen years in the last ten to eleven months, glanced at them.
His former friend reflected an anguish and terror that matched Tremaine’s own. That Arran felt that depth of love and affection for Linnie was the only reason Tremaine could bring himself to incline his head.
Tremaine looked back at Winfield. “Did you wait outside while your wife delivered your first babe?”
“Truthfully?” the other captain asked.
Tremaine nodded.
“You’re aware of the McQuoid-Smiths and their traditions.”
“Very much so,” Tremaine muttered. He mustered a weak smile for the other captain’s benefit.
“Cassia insisted the McQuoid-Smith kin and father-to-be wait outside, while all female family members of age to be present are,” Lord Winfield shared.
Aye, it was another custom Tremaine knew of from his earlier days as a member of the clan, but one he’d neither taken part in nor even put in any real time thinking about—until he found himself married to a McQuoid and waiting in this hellish hall.
“During the marchioness’s first delivery, I made it as long as you have here, Tremaine.”
Another one of Linnie’s agonized screams split the quiet.
Tremaine gritted his teeth.
He’d fucking had enough.
He bolted for his and Linnie’s chambers.
Campbell stepped in to block him. “Tremaine, you know what Linnie asked,” his brother-in-law reminded, no doubt on Linnie’s behalf.
Aye, she had. That and that alone was the sole reason Tremaine had fought this long against storming through their bedchamber doors and going to Linnie’s side, what she “asked for” be damned.
“I don’t give two shites about any bloody McQuoid tradition,” Tremaine growled.
This time, as he swept past Linnie’s uncle, brothers, and cousins, no one stopped him.
Tremaine threw the doors open swiftly, and they bounced with such force, they nearly knocked into the maids rushing from the room with basins of water.
His pulse hammering, he ignored the young women as they curtsied and bustled from the room. His gaze remained locked on Linnie.
Oh, God.
She’d been positioned on the four-poster bed at the edge of the mattress. On either side of her sat her cousins Cassia and Myrtle. Both women held her up, because she was too weak to do so herself.
Tremaine swallowed convulsively.
His brave, bold, strong wife was limp as he’d never seen her. Her legs hung, one draped over the Countess of Abington’s shoulder, and the other over Tremaine’s mother-in-law.