“What do you mean?”
“I know you aren’t happy with this marriage I forced on you.”
“You didn’t force that, Papa.”
“Of course I did. I ordered you to marry Locke. I made sure everyone expected it to happen.”
She gave him a sad smile. “When did I ever follow your orders without scheming to do just the opposite? It was my temper that pushed Rafe into dragging us to the altar. It was nothing you did.”
He cleared his throat with a slightly raised brow. “Be that as it may, you don’t need to remain in this marriage. Your husband hasn’t exactly behaved as a husband should, so I don’t believe you’ll have any difficulty in getting it annulled with my help.”
She was amazed. “You’d give up a dukedom in the family without a fight?”
“Pheli, I’ve come to the realization that I want you to be happy. The title wasn’t just for me, you know. Your mother and I do talk about you without arguing occasionally. I know that you aspired to be like her but on a higher level, that you hoped to be the grandest hostess in all of London. The loftier title would have helped you in that goal.”
She sighed. How little importance that held for her now. Right now, all she wanted was for poached fish to still make her nauseous.
She could feel those tears coming on again and fought to keep them back. “You’re probably right. Rafe and I just weren’t meant to be. He won’t fight an annulment. But—” She started to say she wasn’t sure if one was possible now. That would tell her father that she and Rafe had been intimate, and she’d rather not do that when she would know soon enough whether she was still with child. In fact, if she’d miscarried, the doctor might already have told her parents and they were just protecting her from the sad truth.
She sighed, adding, “Thank you for making the offer. Let me think about it before we decide.”
“Of course. Recover first. When you’re feeling up to scratch will be soon enough to give it some thought.”
He hugged her before he left. A real hug. Gently, afraid she might break, but a real hug.
She cried the moment the door closed behind him. After all these years, to feel reconciled with her father, to feel as if she finally had a father, a real one, one who cared. That was going to take some getting used to.
But then the poached fish arrived and she cried much, much harder because she didn’t feel nauseous. There really would be nothing to prevent her from putting Rafe out of her life with an annulment. Oh, God, the scars she would have to live with were nothing in comparison to losing her baby—and Rafe with it.
Chapter Fifty-four
“O NLY A LITTLE DENTED,” THE doctor said as he held Ophelia’s chin and studied her face with all the bandages removed from it. Her immediate blanch had him quickly amending, “Good God, girl, I was joking.” Then he sighed. “My wife nags me constantly about my bedside manner. I should listen to her. You’re going to be just fine. The scars will fade. Before you know it, you won’t even notice them.”
He was being kind. He was a nice man. They should have found him sooner to serve as their family doctor, not that anyone in the family got sick very often. And having upset her, he said they should wait a few more days before they removed the bandages from the rest of her body.
Mary, who was standing on the other side of her bed, assured her, “The doctor is right, you know. We were so worried about that crushed cheekbone, but it’s such a little imperfection, barely noticeable. When I think how much worse it could have been…but goodness, your dimples are deeper!”
Her mother wasn’t helping. Dimples didn’t sit at the top of a cheekbone. “Adds character if you ask me,” Sadie remarked from the foot of the bed. “You’re still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, so don’t give it another thought, dear.”
They continued to try to cheer her up. But nothing could. Her perfect face was no longer perfect.
She left her bed to dress as soon as Mary escorted the doctor out of the room. “He didn’t say you could get up and gallivant about,” Sadie objected.
“He didn’t say I couldn’t either. But I’m not leaving the room, I’m just leaving the damned bed. A robe will do.”
Her wounds didn’t hurt as long as she didn’t stretch the skin around them. The pain was inside her now, and all she’d been doing in that bed was crying. She’d had enough of that.
Sadie left her alone with a few more admonishments to continue resting. She stood for a long while in front of her fireplace, just staring at the fire. The bed really had nothing to do with her tears. She could still feel them just below the surface, ready to well up on her if she even got close to thinking about the things that were tearing at her heart. So she tried not to think of anything. She really tried…
“Got tired of lazing about in bed, did you?”
She swung about—and winced. She couldn’t move quickly like that yet. Rafe stood in her open doorway, leaning against the frame, his hands in his pockets. Her eyes devoured him. God, it was good to see him. But then she remembered her face and quickly turned back toward the fire. And winced again.
“Who let you in?”
“The chap who usually opens the door.” He sounded too jaunty for her present mood.
“Why are you here? I don’t want to fight with you anymore. Go away.”
“We’re not fighting. And I’m not leaving.” He shut the door behind him, loudly, to reinforce that statement.
She didn’t want to deal with him yet. She could feel a panic coming on. If she cried in front of him, she’d never forgive herself. And she couldn’t bear for him to see her disfigured face.
“What are you doing here?” she repeated, her tone rising.
“Where else would I be but at my wife’s bedside in her hour of need.”
“What rubbish.”
“No, really. I’ve been here quite often, you know. Every day actually. Your father was quite rude not to offer me a room, I spent so much time here.”
She didn’t believe a word of it. And the panic was getting worse. She kept her face averted from him. If she detected even a little pity…
She couldn’t face him without knowing what he would see when he looked at her. She went over to her vanity and yanked the cover off the mirror, then stared in surprise. The mirror wasn’t there, just the empty frame that had held it. The dent on her face was that bad then? Enough to remove the mirror from her room?
“I was in a rage because I couldn’t do anything to help you,” Rafe said from across the room. “I broke your bloody mirror. Sorry. I just didn’t want you to catch sight of yourself looking like a mummy, they had you so wrapped up. The sight frightened me enough, I knew it would surely terrify you.”
She could hear the smile in his voice. Making a joke about her condition? That was so unkind.
Then softly, right behind her: “Does it still hurt?”
God, yes, it hurt, deep inside it hurt, and all she wanted to do was turn into his arms and cry her heart out. But she couldn’t do that. He might be her husband, but he wasn’t hers. She claimed no part of his heart as he did hers. But he wasn’t going to know. She wasn’t going to saddle him with a deformed wife. Her father had given her the means to see to that. And she should make it easy for him to accept that and be glad of such an easy solution. She could do that by continuing the charade.
“I’ll be fine. You probably feel this is just desserts, the ice queen brought down to earth. But don’t think for a moment that I won’t overcome this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My deformed face!”
He suddenly grabbed her arm, pulled her out of her room and down the corridor, where he stopped to poke his head into every room he passed until he found a mirror. And he shoved her in front of it. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear it.
But he was persistent. “You see? The top layer of skin was scraped off your cheek a bit on top of the bruise, but you lose that much skin yourself after a few face sc
rubbings. The redness will be gone in another week, the bruise probably before that. And I have a feeling the little dent that will be left behind is going to enhance your beauty. Leave it to you to figure out a way to make yourself even more pretty.”
The teasing in his tone…her eyes flew open to stare at her face. He wasn’t lying. There was a red patch there, which alarmed her at first glance, but it wasn’t even deep enough to form a scab. An ugly bruise still covered most of her cheek. And under it all, high on her cheekbone, was an indentation. She leaned closer to the mirror to inspect the damage. It was an obvious imperfection, she acknowledged as she swallowed back tears, but it wasn’t nearly as deep as she’d feared. People would notice it, but it was a small price to pay for coming away from that accident alive.
“Scars were mentioned,” she said. “Where are they?”
“You didn’t see for yourself, even without a mirror?”
“No, I don’t make a habit of looking at my naked body.”
“You should. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
She turned about to face him. “That isn’t funny.”
He cupped her face in his hands. “Phelia, I was here when you were sewn up. You’ll have a small scar on your shoulder, another on your side, and one on your hip, all of which will fade in time. By the grace of God, not a single bone was broken, just a severe amount of bruises that are almost gone. The only wound that worried us was the one to your head, but that’s mending as well, I’m told.”
It took her a moment to assimilate it all. Half of her tears had been for nothing? But not the other half.
She pushed away from him and headed back to her room. He followed her. He even closed the door again. Why didn’t he go away? She should tell him about the annulment. That would send him away—happy.
She tried to formulate the words in her mind, but he was too much of a distraction. Gazing at her tenderly. Oh, God!
“It wasn’t really a bet that I accepted, it was the challenge,” he began.
“Don’t!”
“You’re going to hear this if I have to tie you down. Duncan was positive you’d never change. I disagreed with that notion. Anyone can change, even you, was my contention. And you did. Beautifully. And since you obviously weren’t a very happy woman—happy women don’t stir up trouble everywhere they go—I wanted to change that too. I didn’t collect on that wager. Helping you was a sincere effort to help you.”
“Your motives were a lie!”
“No, they weren’t, I just failed to mention what started them.”
“Ah, yes, you’re good at failing to mention something and thinking that isn’t lying, aren’t you?”
“I could say the same thing about you. Or are you going to still try and maintain you started those rumors about us, when I know now that you didn’t.”
“I would have!”
He laughed. “No, you wouldn’t have, Phelia. Give it up. You know you’re not that woman anymore. And you should be grateful for that bet, not mad about it. It helped us to find each other.”
She went very still. Was he implying what it sounded like? It couldn’t be, and yet, the look in his eyes, filled with such warmth, confirmed it.
Her breathless silence gave him the opportunity to pull her close to him. “There’s something else I failed to mention that I should have, long before now.”
She was almost afraid to ask. “What?”
“I love you,” he said with poignant tenderness. “I love every part of you. I’m even fond of your temper, so don’t feel you have to hide that from me—all the time. I love how you look. I love how you feel. I love how you’ve found the courage to be you.”
Telling her every single thing she wanted to hear. God, she wasn’t still dreaming, was she? Making this up in her mind because it’s what she’d wanted so badly?
“You didn’t want to marry. I forced your hand with my damn temper.”
He was shaking his head at her. “Do you really think you could goad me into something like that if I didn’t want to marry you?”
“Then why did you bring me back to my parents’ home that night?”
“Because I was angry. You know how to pull my strings very well.”
He was smiling as he said it. She only blushed a little.
“That’s why you wasted money on a home for me? It was just your anger?”
“And yours. It seemed like a good, temporary measure. But buying property is never a waste. It’s actually a large house, bigger than mine. And it has a ballroom.”
He remembered her old goal? That was so sweet, but those old goals seemed so trivial now when she was filled with such joy. She needed nothing other than his love to complete her.
“Mainly,” he continued, “it was because I know how much you wanted to be out from under your father’s thumb, and since you weren’t ready to live with me yet—”
“I get the idea,” she cut in softly.
“Do you? Are you sure we don’t have anything else to fight about?”
She grinned. “I don’t think so.”
“Then I’m taking you home, where I should have taken you to begin with. My home, where you belong.”
Epilogue
“Y OUR FIRST BALL CAN’T BE too grand. If you’re going to be the premier hostess every Season, you don’t want to start at the top because how will you be able to work your way up from there? You’d be leaving yourself no room for improvement.”
Ophelia glanced at her husband. They were snuggled on a sofa, his arm around her shoulders, she curled against his side. He was such an affectionate man. He couldn’t be near her without touching her somewhere or kissing her or just hugging her. She loved that about him, that and, well, she didn’t think there was anything she didn’t love about this man.
“A ball, eh?” she asked.
“One per Season. I draw the line at more’n that.”
“I hate to disappoint you, love, but I think I’m going to be too busy raising our daughter to even think about giving balls for a while.”
“She is a handful, isn’t she?”
The golden-haired child was sitting on a fluffy blanket on the floor in front of them, examining the toys around her, unable to make up her mind which one to pounce on. She’d discovered how to crawl only a few weeks ago and quite excelled at it already, and, oh, my, it was amazing that she was sitting still for even a few minutes.
Ophelia hadn’t lost her child as she’d thought. Her relief and joy, when that nasty nausea returned and lasted for several bloody months, had been tremendous. The trauma of the accident had merely given her a brief reprieve from it.
Rafe had been delighted when she’d told him. He didn’t want too many children. Just a handful, he’d told her! But she was in complete agreement. Having borne her first, and being in awe of this child, she was quite ready for more.
They had settled down in London and had moved into the bigger house that Rafe had bought for Ophelia. Slowly, she had redecorated it. She entertained, but not often. There had been one grand party though, to belatedly celebrate their marriage. It had been Rafe’s idea, and he’d asked her mother to arrange it. Even Mavis had been invited, but then it hadn’t taken long for the two old friends to become close again—closer than ever. Jealousies had no place in Ophelia’s life now.
Rafe kissed the top of her brow, then her imperfect cheek. She moved a little so he could reach her lips. He didn’t need more of an invitation than that. It was a tender kiss, filled with all the love they shared. If they had been in any other room in the house, that kiss would quite quickly have progressed to something else. But not in the nursery!
The squeal drew their eyes back to their daughter, who was crawling toward them for her share of attention, a big grin on her cherubic face. She wasn’t going to be the most beautiful girl ever to grace a London Season. Oh, no. She was going to be the most beautiful girl in the world, the smartest girl in the world, and the sweetest girl in the world. Her doting parents had no doubt.
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Johanna Lindsey, The Devil Who Tamed Her
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