“No joy?”
Surprised, her vision filled with Silas, naked and virile beside her, instead of the ghosts of her lonely past. Perhaps he might understand after all. “Not one scrap of joy. Whereas what we did was—”
“Alight with joy.”
“Yes.”
“And now you regret all the wasted years.”
“Of course I do.” She freed her hand and sat up against the pillows, pulling the sheet over her breasts with belated self-consciousness. “I regret that in ten years of marriage, I experienced no satisfaction with my husband.”
“I’m sorry. You’re made for pleasure. It wasn’t your fault.”
Her mouth flattened, even as his description soothed her. “Some of it was. I was an unloving wife and Freddie knew it. Although the outside world would have looked at our match and wondered what I had to complain about. After all, however oblivious he was to anything beyond the estate boundaries, Freddie was kind and faithful and steadfast. It could have been worse.”
“And every day, your spirit died a little more.” Silas moved up on the pillows to brush back a strand of hair clinging to her damp cheek. “Don’t discount the truth of your unhappiness. That only makes it worse. Hell is two incompatible people glued together for life.”
“The definition of marriage,” she said bitterly.
“The definition of an unhappy marriage.” He leaned over her, his splendid shoulders creating their own horizon. His gaze was searching. “Who are you in love with, Caroline?”
She shrank away, would have run if he hadn’t caught her wrist. “Don’t ask me.”
“I have to,” he said gently, turning his grip into a caress as he stroked her, making her wayward pulse hop and skip under his dancing fingers. “Who, Caro?”
Her eyes narrowed on him as she struggled to summon the exasperation his prying would once have sparked. “Naturally you think I’m in love with you.”
The promise of another smile creased the corners of his eyes. “You know I love you.”
She made a despairing gesture. “I don’t want you to love me.”
Self-derision lit his eyes. “Believe me, I didn’t want to love you either.”
Startled she surveyed him. It hadn’t occurred to her that Silas, too, might have struggled against falling in love. “You didn’t?”
His laugh was short. “Good God, no. I had the perfect life, diverting, self-indulgent, hedonistic. Then one day I met a widowed friend of my sister’s, and that was the end of all my
gallivanting.”
“I want to do some gallivanting before I’m old,” she said in a subdued voice, telling her heart it would not dissolve into a pool of mush at his declaration.
His face filled with such tenderness that her heart dissolved anyway. “You could gallivant with me.”
He stroked her jaw with more of that melting tenderness. Dear heaven above, she was in terrible trouble here. She’d cried not just because she finally knew what Freddie’s discontented wife had missed. She’d cried because Silas’s possession had owned her so completely that she feared she’d never be free again.
And for over eleven years, freedom had been her goal, her only hope of happiness.
“Stop tempting me, Silas,” she said thickly.
“Never. Tell me who you love.”
“You know,” she mumbled, avoiding those keen eyes that saw too much.
“I hope.” His gentleness was more powerful than an army.
She sighed and looked directly at him. His dear, intriguing face was grave. “Oh, devil take you, you awful man. Of course I’m in love with you.”
***