“Look at your frown, silly thing. Won’t you let me have you? Because I want you very much, Ophelia. You’re mine, you know, no matter how you resist.” He caressed her cheek. “I like that you belong to me.”
She reeled back from him, edging toward the headboard. “I don’t belong to you. I’m not ‘yours,’ Wescott. I am my own person, and I don’t like being played with and tossed about like a doll.”
She knew she would anger him with such talk, but her own anger had been bubbling all evening, trapped beneath the pretty smile she’d put on for his visitors.
“How do you think I feel when you paw at me and brag about your ‘ownership,’ as if I’m a plaything for you to grope at your whim? It’s not gentlemanly.”
“Gentlemanly?” His antagonistic tone matched hers. “You’re my wife. Men touch their wives.”
“Yes, in polite, respectful ways, but I don’t think you know anything about that. Do you think I enjoy being thrown over your lap to have my bottom ‘inspected’? Do you think I’m happy that I’ve been sitting uncomfortably all evening because you caned me?”
He sat up, his green eyes glinting in the dim light. “Here, now. What is this attack about? If you were not such an ornery grump, you wouldn’t have been caned in the first place.”
“And if you were not such a perverted lecher, you would not have taken my virginity that night at the inn, and I wouldn’t be here in this room with you being ornery and grumpy. I’d still be the person I used to be.”
“The person you used to be? The actress? The stage performer?” He snorted. “What a great lady you were then.”
Oh, he made her livid. “I was a great lady,” she cried. “I was talented. I tried hard, and it wasn’t all from God. It was my work, too.” She backed away from him until she was trapped, her spine against the tall headboard. “I wanted to do things in the world, and see things, and then you ruined everything because of your base urges.” She knew she ought to stop, but she seemed to have lost control of her temper. “Do you understand how much I despise this life and this marriage, and this miserable pile of rocks you’ve brought me to? I don’t care if you’re a duke’s son, or that other ladies wanted you. I don’t want you.”
“Lower your voice,” he said. “It’s bad enough that you scream at me so, but if my friends hear—”
“I don’t care what your friends hear, just as you don’t care about me.”
“Ophelia—”
“You think of me as some possession because we’ve married, but you care nothing for my feelings, nothing at all for what I’ve lost.”
“What you’ve lost?” He raised his voice now, just moments after he’d told her to speak more softly. “What about what I’ve lost, you shrieking child? Do you think I wanted to marry you? Because I didn’t, not at all.” He grasped her forearm when she tried to avoid his fierce gaze. “You were dead last on my list of marriage prospects, because until that damned night, I didn’t know you existed. I married you out of duty, when I could have had a dozen ladies, prettier, richer, and better situated than you.”
“I wish you had had any of them,” she yelled back. “Any of them but me.”
“I wish it too, by God, every hour of every day, every time you throw your sadness and regrets in my face, as if all of this is my fault.”
“It is your fault. You shouldn’t have touched me! You shouldn’t have made me do the things I did that night.”
“That night.” He groaned, releasing her arm. “That night, that night. It will always be that night, and you condemning me in your goddamned righteous tone, like you didn’t beg me every moment to keep going with your sensuous movements, and your breathless moans.”
She shook her head, jumping off the bed. “I didn’t do anything sensual. I wouldn’t have. I did not moan.”
“You did,” he said coldly. “I remember it. I hear it in my head every time you recoil from me now, and it reminds me that you’re just as guilty as me. It sounded like this.”
He made a soft, high, womanly moan, so real to what she might have sounded like that she brought her hands to her ears to block it out. “I didn’t mean to act that way,” she said. “If I did, it’s because you made me.”
“You may tell that lie to yourself as often as you like, but we both know it’s not true. As for your loss, your sadness, know this, Lady Wescott. If I could go back in time by some magic, I would have left you where you stood in your damned wig and dress and given you up to that fire.”