Never Courted, Suddenly Wed (Scandalous Seasons #2)(76)

The declaration he’d come up to her chambers intending to make, withered upon his lips. To utter those words now, even if they were the truth would only be perceived as one more lie he’d told. Still, he needed her to know. “I love you.”

Sophie’s laugh came out as a near-hysterical cackle that spoke to the thin shred of control she had over her emotions. “Goodness, you must take me for a bloody fool if you think I’d ever believe that. Do you know what I believe you love?”

“What?” he said, past dry lips.

“My dowry. Tell me, how does the woman you love feel knowing you gave her up for my fortune? Was it twenty-thousand pounds? Thirty? Forty? More?” She asked, her high-pitched question, a testament of her shock.

He forced himself to look at her. “God, Sophie, I…”

“How much?” she cried.

“One-hundred thousand pounds.”

Her eyes widened to the size of half-moons in her face. Then, a smile twisted her lips up. “One-hundred thousand pounds? That is quite a sum. I see how you’d be willing to endure a life wed to even me for that amount.” She returned her attention to the window, presenting him with her rigid back.

Christopher dragged a hand through his hair. He felt Sophie slipping away from him. Gone was his spirited, mischievous, ever-smiling Phi. In her place was this cynical, hard-eyed, ice-princess. Nausea twisted in his gut with the realization that he’d wrought this tragic transformation on his sweet, loving Phi.

With a sick intuitiveness, Christopher realized if he didn’t find the right words, didn’t make her understand, that Sophie would be forever lost to him. “Will you hear me out?” he said, his voice hollow to his own ears.

Sophie shot a bored look over her shoulder.

But she didn’t say no, and Christopher had to find encouragement where he could.

“My father ordered me to court you.”

Her hands fisted the sea-foam blue fabric of her afternoon gown, the only tell-tale indication that she’d been affected by those words.

“How very clever you were.” She spoke the words, more to herself. “You appeared so honorable. Why, you even called on me, and confessed your father’s wishes for you to court me.” She laughed, the sound hollow. “I even commiserated with you. Oh, the laughter you and he must have had at my expense.”

“Never.” That one word wrenched from deep inside him. At her likening him to the marquess, his stomach churned. He wasn’t like his sire. “My father wanted me to ruin you.” He flinched, at the ugly truth—in the end, Christopher had done just that.

She shoved back the gold-damask curtains and gazed out the window.

Christopher rushed to have out every last sordid detail. “My father owed your father a significant debt. More than that, my father had made a series of disastrous business ventures. We are…were on the cusp of financial ruin. He insisted I wed you, Phi. I said no—until he threatened to have me carted off to Bedlam if I didn’t agree to his plans. I was going to do as he demanded, Phi. But I changed my mind in Lord Brackenridge’s library.”

Sophie pressed her forehead against the pane. Her visage, reflected back in the glass panel, contorted as if she were suffering physical pain, and he nearly doubled over from the agony of what he’d done. “Marriage to me was so abhorrent to you that you’d brave Bedlam?” she whispered.

Christopher cursed. He was bumbling his way through this. He reached for her, and then remembered she couldn’t see him. “I said no because I didn’t want my father to turn me into a fortune hunter.”

“Isn’t that what you are, Christopher?” That weary question belonged to a more aged, bitter woman than his Phi. “Do you have nothing else to say?”

He went on. “There was a woman.” She recoiled like he’d struck her. Christopher swiped his hand across his eyes. If he could take a dagger to himself and spare her this hurt, he would. “I didn’t truly know her, Phi. We’d met just once. She was a dream of a woman. A dream of freedom from my father’s rigid control. She made me forget all that was wrong with me.”

“She sounds like a paragon.” Her voice came out flat, devoid of any and all emotion.

“She didn’t know my flaws. Not like you, Phi. That day of the stable fires, you discovered my secret shame and I hated you for that,” he said, at last truthful with both himself, and her.

Sophie turned to face him.

His palms grew moist. He opened his mouth to admit his humiliating failings but the words wouldn’t come out. “I…struggle to read.”

She cocked her head. “What?”

He glanced away. His gaze wandered the room. “There is something wrong with me. I…I’ve always had the finest tutors but words on a page…they don’t make much sense to me. I was convinced early on that I was mad. My father thought I wasn’t dedicated enough to my studies. He beat me.” A memory of his father applying the birch rod to his back while he read from Shakespeare’s, King Lear, trickled to the surface. “It didn’t help,” he said. “You found me reading aloud that night. You laughed. In my frustration I accidentally upended the lantern you’d left behind. I thought you’d gathered all the truth about me. From then on, I…it was too hard to be around you, Phi. You reminded me of everything wrong with me.”