Page 78 of Seducing a Stranger

“Because you don’t trust me,” she told the fountain, unable to look at him. “I’m sorry but you can’t imagine how frustrating that is.”

“Please,” he beseeched her. “Try to understand, Prudence. I want you. I…am fond of you. Christ, you’re the mother of my child and I believe we’re building something of a life here. But in my line of work, it matters not what you believe. It matters what you can prove. The feelings I have for you would already influence the outcome of any investigation, and that’s a liability I’ve decided to live with.”

“How altruistic of you.” With his every word, the wound in her heart began to stitch together. Not with a balming comfort, but with glacial sort of frigidity. She’d begun to erect her own fortifications, it seemed, so she didn’t bleed out entirely right here in the middle of the midday meal.

And still he went on. “Try to appreciate the chance I took becoming your spouse. A woman I’d met only once in a reckless encounter. One with a knife in her hand and the blood of her would-be husband soaking her. Had we never met before. Had we not…” He trailed away with a brutal noise. “I have to look at the evidence, Prudence, and when it’s all laid out in front of me, there is only one conclusion to be drawn from it.”

“That I’m a murderer.” She spun on him, her fists clenched at her sides. “Is that why you don’t sleep in my bed? Why you lock the door to your rooms and to the nursery? To keep yourself safe from me, your mad, murderer of a wife?”

He made a helpless gesture as his eyes darted away. “Come now, that isn’t fair. I can’t rightly say…”

“Then wrongly say!” she spat. “You’re afraid I might, what, sneak into your rooms and murder you in your sleep?”

“Not afraid, per se. I just felt it necessary to maintain a certain amount of distance.”

“Ugh!” Picking up her skirts, she fled around the fountain, hurtling herself toward the door. It was all too much. The scandal, his revelations, confessions, hypocrisy, and concessions. Every emotion she’d ever named swirled within her until she felt as though she might detonate into a million plumes of volcanic ash. “I can’t look at you.”

His footsteps followed her. “Where do you think you are going?”

“To Trenwyth’s.”

“Wait.” He seized her wrist, his grip careful but firm. “It’s not safe. I thought we’d agreed you weren’t—”

“You agreed!” She whirled on him, turning the full force of a mounting rage against him. “You’ve done nothing but make decisions for me since the beginning. And I’ve been so solicitous, haven’t I? Because I needed to be grateful. Because I needed you to trust me. To help me. To save me. Because something awoke in me the night we met, and I fell a little in love with you then. The very moment I landed in your arms.” She swiped at angry new tears as she twisted her wrist out of his grasp.

“But you’ve taught me that love is not possible without trust, and trust is not possible without proof, so…” She made a frustrated gesture before returning her hands to clench at her sides. “Here we are. I’m leaving now so you can be about your work. Go, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley, go find my measure.”

“Prudence—” He lifted his hands, but she swept away from his reach.

“Don’t,” was all she said as she retreated through the door to escape in a hansom.

He didn’t.