She could leave. They couldn’t force her to remain. Not really. But the exchange would eventually have to happen, and she was eager to have it done.
Making a slow march over to the cognac-colored swivel library chair vacant next to her mother, Gillian made herself sit.
She directed her eyes over the top of her father’s balding pate to the painting just behind him. A girl in enormous frothy pink and white skirts sailed high in her swing, her toes kicked out and her slipper flying through the air. It was a piece she’d never understood. Not because of its beauty—there could be no doubting that—but rather, that lightness and joyfulness so at odds with the emotionally deadened man who’d sired her. A man who, when he’d discovered Gillian in a near identical replication of that scene he’d hung so near to him, had boxed her ears for doing something as uncouth as playing upon a swing.
Her father broke the silence. “Well, do you have nothing to say?”
Gillian made herself tear her gaze from the heeled slipper upon the canvas and looked in her father’s general direction.
He’d asked the same question in the same tone when she’d first made friends with Honoria and Phoebe. Scandalous women, the lot of them, her parents frequently said. They also blamed them for her lack of serious suitors. And also years earlier, when you befriended… Colin Lockhart.
Colin, a friend so loyal and devoted he’d fought the village bullies beside her and—
“She’s not saying anything.” The marchioness looked from her husband to her daughter and then back again. “Why isn’t she saying anything?”
Eager to have this concluded—her secret was at last exposed, so she might come right out and reject Lord Barber’s request—she arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps you might be so good as to educate me as to what my latest sin is, Mother?”
“Oh, you know,” her mother whispered. “You knowww.”
Her heart slipped into her stomach and sent it roiling with nausea. Oh, God. How much had he revealed? She’d not allowed herself to consider that when his carriage had rolled up… because if he were to reveal all the details of her shame that night, then he’d also be laying himself bare to a like shame. She’d still not accepted that dastards weren’t capable of feeling shame.
Her father clapped his hands. “You may speak now.”
He’d taken her silence as an indication of obedience. A panicky laugh built in her chest. “Oh, I’d raaather not.” Nor would she play at this fishing expedition for information they might or might not be partaking in.
Her mother sat upright. “I’ll begin, then. Lord Barber paid a visit.”
“And what does that have to do with me?” she hedged, buying whatever time she might.
Her mother pounced, springing forward in her seat and hissing like a cat. “What were you thinking going to that… that… ball?”
Her gut churned all the more.
And there it was. Confirmation of what she’d known they’d likely discovered, but had hoped they hadn’t. “It wasn’t really a ball.” Not really. Not in any traditional, or even remotely traditional, sense. “More a masquerade?”
Couples had been kissing and caressing in the middle of the ballroom floor and then trading over to different, equally amorous dance partners. Even now, bile built at what she’d witnessed that night.
What had she been thinking indeed? Believing that scandalous affair would be adventurous and fun. Ironically, her memories of that night, following that sweet-tasting champagne, remained… blank. She recalled only shadows of moments beyond a sloppy kiss that she could not make out more of.
“Did you lie with him?”
Oh, God.
This… was too much.
What did a woman say when she knew what had transpired, but yet had no recollection of it either? She glanced past her mother’s shoulder. How to say—to her or anyone—that, yes, but she’d no remembrance of the act. That the only reason she knew what happened was because of the sting of pain the following morn when she’d awakened in an unfamiliar parlor… with her skirts up and…
Her mind screeched to a stop.
“Say something!” her mother raged.
I cannot do this… I cannot think these things, let alone speak them, to my mother. “What is there to say?” Gillian managed, her voice weak. There was a scoundrel with whom she’d spent one night. The semantics of that, however, wouldn’t save her. Whether it had been one time or one hundred times, the result had been the same.
At her silence, the marchioness looked over to her husband before looking once more to Gillian. “Deny it.” Rage filled her mother’s order. “Deny it,” she said a second time, this time pleadingly.
Except… Gillian couldn’t. And she wanted to throw up all over again, for reasons that had nothing to do with regret over the forgotten night she’d spent with Lord Barber.
Her mother tried once more. “Please, Gillian.”
Refusing to give in to the swell of panic, especially here, before her parents, she continued to again concentrate on the jubilant lady on the swing. “I cannot do that,” she finally said.
Silence marched on, marked by the incessant ticking of the clock, and as it did, her mother’s skin went through a plethora of grays and whites, more shades than Gillian had known existed.
“Oh, my God,” her mother whispered. “It is true.” The marchioness wilted in her seat. For the first time in Gillian’s life, the marchioness did that which she’d never before done—at least not in front of Gillian—she burst into tears.
Great, big, noisy, blubbering ones.
Tears she’d not even shed when Genevieve had lost her first babe.
Her father exploded from his chair. “He offered to do the right thing by you. Did he not?”
It was nothing personal. I just need your dowry.
She’d been a mark for a fortune hunter that night. “What is the right thing, really? Bed me, then wed me for nothing more than the money I bring?”
Her mother’s gasp filled the room.
The marquess’s fat lips moved, but there weren’t any immediate words forthcoming.
In a world where men took mistresses and dallied nightly with different ladies and courtesans, women should be held to altogether different standards. They were shamed and ridiculed and disdained. And what was different? The men didn’t have to worry about the consequences of those rendezvous.
The same could not, however, be said for women.
It was that indignation, safer and solidifying, that gave her strength to at last admit the secret that they would have ultimately discovered anyway.
“I’ll not marry him.” Oddly, there was something freeing in not having to hold on to that decision anymore. For weeks since that disastrous night, she’d lived with his specter following her. Telling him no, she’d not wed him, in every way. “I don’t care what he said to you. I don’t care what you think, or about the consequences.” Of which there were many. “But I’ll not tie myself to one such as him.” It was as she’d said to Colin all those years ago: She’d never marry a damned nobleman—and certainly not a cad who’d sought to trap her.
Her parents gasped, two perfectly synchronous intakes of air.