Startled, he sat up straight. "The devil you did."
"The devil I did." At last, those lush lips twisted in a wry smile. "It caught me unawares, too."
"After your father died, I couldn’t do anything right." The memory of those difficult days was still painful. "It was obvious I was driving you utterly mad. When you told me to go away, it seemed the only thing I could do to save your sanity."
Regret turned her hazel eyes deep green. "I was so sad, I wasn’t in my right mind. It wasn’t you in particular."
"I’m sure you were relieved when I went," he said somberly.
"Perhaps I was." The stark honesty in her gaze made his heart clench. "Although believe me, I didn’t mean to exile you all the way to Scotland. And the relief didn’t last."
"I’m sorry. I hoped my absence would help."
She bit her lip. He could see she found this confession difficult. She didn’t like to leave herself vulnerable. Nor did he. Mutual defensiveness had contributed to their thorny relationship.
"Without Papa to care for, without you to fight with, the house seemed appallingly empty." Her lips turned down, and he saw that revisiting that time made her wretched, too. "The hours hung so heavy on my hands. I had too much leisure to stare into space and miss Papa."
"And regret your decisions," he said with a hint of grimness.
"I regretted some of them."
"Marrying me being the principal target, I’ll wager."
To his surprise, she shook her head. "You might think that’s true, but it isn’t."
Another shock. More powerful than the one he’d felt when she admitted missing him. And perhaps just a tiny glimmer of hope. "It isn’t?"
Her gesture expressed her confusion. "Oh, I regretted the way we married. Coming to terms with that was never going to be easy. But once you left, I found myself thinking that you weren’t nearly the nightmare to live with that I imagined."
"Thanks very much," he said with an edge.
Another reluctant smile. "Tact has never been my specialty either. So you know I’m being sincere when I say I looked back on our short time together and found myself remembering how kind you’d been, both to me and to Papa. I remembered how you tried to make my new life as smooth as you could. I remembered how you took so much strain off my shoulders, and in a way that I hardly noticed until you’d gone and it was too late to thank you." She paused. "I remembered how you kept your word about not sharing my bed."
Damn it, that wasn’t a subject he was ready to broach. He was trying not to get too excited about the thought of possessing his bride. She said she wanted a real marriage, but she hadn’t said that meant taking him as her lover. If he let himself hope too hard and then she insisted he kept his promise, the disappointment would be too much to endure.
Surely she must want him to keep his promise.
"No decent man would behave differently," he said.
Approval tinged her smile. The expression was so unfamiliar, it took him a few seconds to identify it. "That’s the crux of it – it turned out I married a decent man, when I feared I was taking on a selfish, temperamental child in a man’s body."
He shifted uncomfortably under all this praise. "I can be a difficult sod when the mood takes me."
"Yes, you can, but at heart, you’re a good man. And I treated you so shabbily."
He was unaccustomed to Emily saying nice things about him. Most of the time, she looked like she wanted to pitch a vase at his head, the bigger the better. "You were worried sick about your father."
"He’d always been the center of my world. More so, after he became ill."
"So you found yourself at a loss, once he was gone."
"That’s true." She paused. "I was also a wife without a husband. Even during my mourning period, that made life difficult. There were nasty remarks and a string of questions about your whereabouts. Things got much worse once I was out and about again. I couldn’t appear in public without meeting prurient curiosity. I almost think I’d rather be scorned as a scarlet woman than derided as an object of pity. But everyone knew that I hadn’t managed to keep my husband with me for more than a few weeks."
"It isn’t unusual for me to visit Scotland."
"It is when you left so soon after our wedding and my father’s funeral." She sounded sad rather than angry. "It is when you didn’t come back."
Guilt pricked at him. Perhaps he should have stayed. "I’m sorry, Emily. I guessed there would be talk, but I came to the conclusion that you’d prefer the gossip to my company."