“So you hid it.” No question; he had, extremely effectively. She studied him, feeling as if she was seeing him properly for the first time. “I never suspected, not even a little bit.”
He grimaced and squeezed her fingers apologetically. “I know. I made sure that, from the first, you saw only what I wanted you to see and that you felt totally confident that you knew exactly what our marriage was based on. I was over the moon and so very grateful when I realized you loved me. It seemed that even Fate had decided to support my plans.”
Gently, she reminded him, “I never said the words.”
“I did everything I could not to let you—I didn’t dare risk it. I feared that if you ever did say those three little words, something in me wouldn’t be able to resist saying them back to you.”
She studied him, sensing something of what, through the years, he’d battled to hold back, to rein in, and admitted, “I put the recent changes between us down to a maturing of our relationship.” She tipped her head, her eyes steady on his. “That wasn’t entirely wrong, was it? I just hadn’t correctly seen the point we’d started out from.”
His lips twisted in a faint grimace, and he nodded. “You thought I was coming to love you, when in fact I’ve loved you all along.”
After a moment, he shook his head. “Where was I? Oh yes. From the beginning and through the early years of our marriage, I worked diligently to plant in your mind and nurture and establish the fiction I wanted you and everyone else to believe.” He pulled a face. “And trust me when I say that my success in doing so has haunted me over the past months, ever since I realized that I would never be truly happy—that we both would never be as happy as we could be—until I made you understand what the actual reality of our marriage was and that I loved you in exactly the same way that you loved me. Only after I convinced you of that truth would we be able to claim the sort of marriage that, five years ago, I’d so stupidly turned my back on.”
Her heart was giddily dancing, yet she remained utterly fascinated by his revelations. “What changed your mind?”
He looked at her with fond resignation. “Need you ask? Cynsters.”
When her expression conveyed her bewilderment, he explained, “Your cousins and connections and their marriages. We’ve attended so many weddings and family events, and I saw—there, enacted in front of me—the reality of what love-matches could and should be. How strong and joyous and supportive such marriages are.” He paused, then more quietly went on, “I felt such a coward for what I’d done to us, to our marriage. All of them had had the courage to embrace love, with all the joys and potential sorrows it can bring, but I…I’d hidden my love and refused the challenge. And that also meant that I’d kept you from having what you deserved.”
Her heart somersaulted, but before she could respond, he continued, “I can’t remember exactly when it happened, when the compulsion to rescript our marriage took unrelenting hold. It was before Christopher and Ellen’s wedding, certainly, although that proved the last straw.”
“That was why you made that strange comment at the wedding breakfast.”
He looked sheepish again. “I didn’t mean to say that—to blurt out those particular words. I…” He shrugged, looked down, then admitted, “Through these past weeks, while I’ve been trying to forge a path to my—our—new goal, sometimes, it’s been as if some power inside me got impatient and, when an opening occurred, pushed me to simply speak and tell you, but another part of me kept getting in the way, and instead of being clear, I’d be…”
“Obfuscating, oblique, elliptical?”
He grimaced. “Yes. All that.”
Truly puzzled, she shook her head at him. “Why didn’t you simply tell me?”
He raised his gaze from their hands and met her eyes. “Would you have believed me? Or would you have thought I was up to something in trying to make you believe in a scenario that you were convinced beyond question wasn’t true?”
She blinked at him. He waited. He’d been blatantly honest; she had to be, too. “I…don’t know.” After a moment, she grimaced and acknowledged, “Probably not.”
He nodded. “And if you didn’t believe me, there wouldn’t have been any easy way to win back the trust I would have lost by trying.” He drew breath and went on, “So reasoning that actions spoke louder and more convincingly than words, I set out to show you that I loved you.” He arched a brow at her. “Did I succeed? Before my declaration of yesterday morning?”
The events of the past weeks flowed through her mind, and she smiled. “Yes. Before you told me you loved me, I certainly suspected something had changed in the way you thought of me.”
“Thank heaven I got that right, at least.”
She smiled slightly, but the events of yesterday and all the powerful, turbulent emotions that had rushed through her had jerked open a mental door she’d firmly shut more than a decade ago. His revelations, his honesty in making them, his push to change the acknowledged foundation of their marriage to reflect what she now accepted was their true reality…all that demanded that she face her own demons.
He was studying her face, no doubt worrying over what she was thinking; when she forced herself to meet his eyes, he was frowning slightly. She drew breath and said, “As confessions seem to be the order of our day, it wasn’t only you pretending to something that wasn’t true—it wasn’t only you keeping up a false façade.”
Shaken by what she now understood of herself, for a second, she closed her eyes, then she opened them and, clinging to his gaze and the anchor of his touch, said, “Long ago—long before we met—after the end of my second Season, I made up my mind what my marriage would be like. And it wasn’t a typical Cynster love-match. By then, I was absolutely convinced that would never come my way. I knew, by then, how others, but particularly the male of the species, saw me. I was too bossy, too determined, too willful, too strong-willed. Too so many things that it was clear that no gentleman would ever love me—not as I wished to be loved.”
While she’d spoken, he’d shifted closer. Now his eyes flared in protest, and raising her hand, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles, but before he could speak, she rushed on, “Like you, I harbored an entrenched belief. With all the evidence around me, I had to accept that the adage that all Cynsters marry for love was true, but I’d never heard it said that we had to be loved in return, only that we would love. So”—she drew in a breath and forged on—“I quartered the ton, searching for the man I could and would love, and found you.” She smiled rather ruefully at him. “In oh so many ways, you were exactly as I’d imagined you would be.”
His eyes, locked with hers, widened in understanding. “My tack in pretending not to love you while you loved me fitted the prescription you’d created for your husband.”
She nodded. “You were perfect in every way. So, you see, like you, I, too, turned my back on love—on the love-match we could have had—and happily accepted you as you pretended to be. I told myself I would be content with that and that such a one-sided love-match was all—” Her voice broke, but she swallowed and forced herself to go on, “All I deserved.”