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And she had gone off and married another, because she wanted riches instead of love.

“I wasn’t much a prospect to her,” he said roughly. “Poor that I was, and dependent on my uncle. Truly, no one would blame her for running away.”

Her face heated. “Are you certain she was the one who ran away?” She took a step closer to him, her hands curling into fists in her long kid gloves, the fan she held shaking. “Did she know you would be there for her? Did she know you offered her a way out? If she had come to you with her full lament, would you have taken up her burden? Truly?”

Resentment smoldered within him, because he could not unequivocably say yes. He had loved her, true. He had always assumed she was for him, since the first day he found a persimmon-haired maiden sitting on the riverbank, drowning in her own tears, and recognized a soul that knew and understood his own.

But at eighteen, he had wanted university. He had wanted his Grand Tour. He had wanted a way out of Hungerford and his uncle’s disdain and the eyes of a town that looked on him with nothing but pity and growing exasperation. He might have married her, but he would have left her in Standen—if her uncle would have taken her—and gone on to Oxford anyway, bragging to his mates that on holidays he returned home to a pretty wife.

Or, worse, he’d have married her and left her in Foxleigh with her father, and the Felthams would have hounded them both without mercy.

He’d had no notion, then, of what it would mean to knit his life to another’s. Not in marriage.

Sophronia had. She’d auctioned herself off as if she didn’t understand she wasn’t her own property to dispose of, but wholly his.

“I would have found some way,” he said, his voice rough. The rock in his chest had been cleaved open. “I would have managed to care for her. Somehow.”

But that was a lie, and they both knew it.

And suddenly, without that wrong to perch upon, Rowden felt he stood on the hangman’s platform, the trap door falling away, the noose tightening around his neck.

Could he offer her anything more now? Money, a home, he now had those things. But was he any better a man than the eighteen-year-old she’d known?

Was he a man who could protect her? A man she could trust?

A man she could find worthy of her love?

Lady Payne looked back and forth between them, as if she could read the messages passing without words. She tilted her head to one side, and her voice was soft. “I think the question is, Mr. Rowden, can you ever forgive the betrayal?”

Rowden looked at her, knowing what this woman had endured made his own complaints look petty. She had not been dignified with the title of a wife, as he understood it, yet she had done the work of one, and her only choice had been to make the best she could of an unendurable situation until she reached English soil and was free.

“That is the sting of it,” he said. “I might forgive, but I don’t know that I could ever forget. Mrs. Hinton is bent on arranging a marriage for me, did you know? But I don’t know if I should allow it.” He turned to look Sophronia in the eye. “I don’t know that I might not be waiting, ever and always, for the woman I love to leave me again.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He was waiting for her when she came down to ride the next morning.

Sophronia had been both hoping and dreading he would be there. There was a reckoning to be had between them, and she knew it was her part to begin it.

She had still not recovered from the sight of Rowden’s face in the exhibition rooms yesterday, however. Angry, hurt, resentful, and—bleak.

She’d told herself that he had not really been offering to save her that day in the parlor. He had not offered her marriage, not truly. She had described the next steps of her life to him, her life now that she must stop being a carefree girl, put up her hair, put aside her romping ways, and become a marriageable young lady. A married young lady, who could keep her mother’s family from taking away her father’s home.

He had in turn described the next steps of his life for her, a life of freedom and self-sovereignty that she envied. She would like to attend university and study ancient languages and the natural sciences, attend clubs and dinners and debates. She would like to take a Grand Tour and spend years among the art and customs of places that had been building temples of stone while the inhabitants of the British Isles had been living in wattle and daub huts. She would have liked to go to London and learn a trade, painting or stay-making or cobbling shoes, something useful and clever.

But those were the avenues open to men, and to her had fallen the woman’s lot: marry, keep house for a husband, oversee his table and the household accounts, entertain his friends, turn herself out well so she would win his friends’ approval, and be his comfort, his ornament, and an amusing companion on the nights he chose to spend at his own fireside.

She had done those things, and done them well, and now her time of duty was over. She had an income of her own—if that grasping, flint-hearted Bint would release her funds to her—and she had, God willing, decades of her life before her. She didn’t quite yet know what to do with them.

But she had sacrificed her closest friend to marry, and she wanted her friend back.

As she watched him stalk toward her, an easy grace in his big frame and his face unreadable, she wondered if such a thing were even possible.

Could he ever forgive her? She had assumed he had been, all this time, too distracted with his own busy and amusing life, and that was why he never wrote her, never called. That was why he was short with her on the few times they had crossed paths during her marriage—holidays at Standen Park, dinners she hosted at Foxleigh, the occasional ball or fête at a fashionable neighbor’s.

She had not thought she had cut out his heart as mercilessly, as bloodily, as she had torn apart and trampled her own.

His boots gleamed, his riding coat was brushed to a velvet shine, and his face was a forbidding glower as he came into the street leading Hercules, Nate behind him with her sweet Dulcinea. Sophronia felt the unaccountable urge to place her hands on his cheeks and kiss him until the stone façade melted and he was human, her warm, mocking Rowden again.