Page 44

“So did you.” His voice was low, yet filled the space.

She rubbed her arms, moving her inspection to a set of small portraits that stood atop a cabinet. She paused, arrested. She didn’t remember Rowden’s parents, though they were spoken well of in the town of Hungerford.

Thaddeus Rowden had been large, handsome, and well-liked, quick to jest but sturdy as a stone in his loyalties and allegiances, so everyone said. He’d played to the hilt his role of roguishly charming younger brother, spare to the Denford title and estate and foil to his more dour and difficult sibling. Rowden had his father’s big, rangy frame and rugged features, but his warm brown eyes and peculiar, searching gaze came from his mother.

Susanna’s many perfections, combining beauty, a merry spirit, a mien that mingled the dashing with the demure, and a family that boasted of lands, lineage, and wealth altogether had earned her distinction as the Maid of Marlborough, a title she retained even during her marriage. The gracious young matron and her dashing husband had been much admired in Hungerford and its environs, and the widespread grief after they died of malaria during a summer in Rome was both a tragedy that memorialized them as near saints in the town’s history and a confirmation to all homebound folk about the dangers of foreign lands.

Rowden never spoke of his parents. All the times he had fought with and intended to run away from his ill-tempered uncle, upon whose questionable mercies he had been thrown, Rowden had never raged at the fate that left him bereft. Sophronia had wondered, sometimes, if he simply never thought of them, for in all the times she spoke of missing her mother, Rowden had not shared his own sense of loss.

Yet he kept their portraits in his office, a silent indication of attachment, even if he never said the words. She turned to face him, emotion clogging her throat, and found him standing just behind her shoulder, a towering wall of heat.

Swiftly he reached around her to place another framed picture face-down before she could turn her attention there. A glimpse of black teased her eye, and she would have said, from the briefest glimpse, that the paired images were two silhouettes she had made, back when she was honing her skill. But Rowden wouldn’t keep her childish art on display in his office, and certainly not the paired set she had made of the two of them, facing one another like a prince and his princess, a playful jest and a promise for them both that the world held more than difficulty for two partial orphans.

“Henry was not fond of travel,” she said around the lump in her throat. If she spoke of his parents, she would weep. “He disliked the inconvenience. He preferred having his comforts arranged just as he wished, and dependably delivered.”

“But you could still have traveled. Unless he forbid it?”

She shrugged. “He disliked for me to be very far from him. He hated it when I left him in London to tend to my father, who was often ill.”

“Sophronia.”

Rowden’s gentle tone belied the piercing stare he turned on her. The candle he held cast flickering shadows over his face, teasing her with glimpses of the boy she once knew and this man who was a fathomless mystery.

“Were you happy in your marriage?”

She turned her head away, blinking against the sudden veil of tears that blurred her vision. “Whoever is happy in their marriage? I made a bargain, and I kept my end of it. I maintained my dignity. I can take a certain pride in that.”

“Did you—love him?”

She stilled, her gaze fixed, unseeing, on the far wall. “Why do you ask this now?”

He moved so he stood within her line of sight, undeniably present. “Humphrey said you married Hinton for his money. I thought the same at the time, though I hoped it was not true.”

He had heard more of their conversation than she’d thought. How had he been close enough to eavesdrop, and she had not known? She was very aware of him now.

“Why should you care what my reasons were?” she said with sudden spirit. “Will you condemn me, too, for being calculating, when women have been calculating about their marriages from the dawn of time?”

“Because I find that motive contemptible.” He set the candlestick on the cabinet, where it illuminated his father’s easy smirk, his mother’s small smile. “Better if you had betrayed all the people who cared for you for love, or at least affection.”

“You are a fine one to talk!” She wrapped her arms around her middle, as if she might hold herself steady. “When you have the liberty to go where you wish. When you knew you could escape to university, and then your Grand Tour, and then your uncle would find some place for you.” She dashed away the tears, feeling the moisture soak into her gloved fingertips. “I had no such security.” She had not, at the time, told him the whole of it, because he left without ever asking her reasons. She would not describe the sordid family history for him now.

“But why him?” Rowden’s tone was full of wrath and an anguish she didn’t understand. “Why not—” He bit off the words and turned away from her suddenly. His shoulders shuddered as he drew a breath. “Was there no one else you would consider?”

“Who?” she wanted to know. “Papa could not afford to send me to London. Aunt Edmons could have taken me to have a season in Marlborough, I suppose, and parade me through the Assembly Rooms, but it seemed pointless since Henry was already offering. His family had been acquainted with mine, and as far as Henry was concerned, I met his requirements for a wife. It was efficient for us both for me to accept his suit.”

“You could,” he said, turning suddenly and towering over her, a pillar of wrath and beauty, “have accepted me.”

She blinked away the tears, fighting to keep them from falling and betraying her weakness. It took her a moment to catch her breath.

“You were not offering,” she said, breathless anyways.

“I offered that afternoon I found you in the parlor being painted!” His voice was a lash falling on her skin, drawing out memories, wounds she had long thought healed, or at least forgotten. “You told me you needed to marry, and I told you I would do it.”

“You told me I had to wait ten years for you,” she cried. “I needed a remedy sooner than that.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me to marry you then?”

She blinked again. “Because you weren’t prepared to marry. And you didn’t have any money.”