Page 28 of Sir Hugo Seeks a Wife (Cinderellas of Mayfair #1)

“She’s always been a faithful friend. I owe her my life several times over.”

“Sylvie shouldn’t have been saving you. George should.”

That evoked a hiss of contempt. “George couldn’t even save himself. I got back to the slum we lived in to discover it ransacked and George dead in his bed.”

“Athene…”

That terrible flatness resumed. “I couldn’t mourn him.”

“Neither you should.”

“I stood there staring down at him and I didn’t shed a single tear.

Yet for this man, I’d thrown away my future and shamed my family.

I think his fever did for him, not the beating.

If you want a debt repaid, you don’t kill the man who owes you money.

Or perhaps the thugs were too rough with a sick man. I’ll never know.”

“Thank the Lord you weren’t there when they came.” Or else they’d likely have forced her into prostitution to pay off the debt.

“Yes, thank the Lord,” she said on a thread of sound and he realized that she’d always understood just how close she’d come to sexual slavery.

He ran his free hand through his hair, battling to comprehend the torments that she’d endured. “You must have been so afraid. Alone and unprotected in a war-torn city. No money. No friends.”

She turned a blank gaze on him. “It was winter, too. All the cliches. There I was in that horrid hovel with my dead lover and not one idea of how to proceed.”

“You could have gone home.”

A splutter of grim laughter. “No, I couldn’t.”

He frowned again. “Surely at such a time, your pride didn’t count.”

A sour smile distorted her lips. “You overestimate me. I’d given up most of my pride by then.”

He doubted it. Knowing this woman as he did, he suspected by that stage, pride alone kept her going. “Your family wouldn’t want you dead.”

“Wouldn’t they just?” Her grip on his hand tensed.

“Dead, I was no threat to their reputation. Dead, I could do nothing else to bring scandal down on their heads. There was no going back. My father is the most unforgiving man I know and I’d well and truly burned my bridges. I knew it when I left with George.”

“And no other relation would take you in?” Hugo belonged to a large, loving clan. Whatever sins he’d committed, his family would never cast him out. Home was always home. That was one of the mainstays of love, in his mind.

“Papa held the purse strings. He was ruthless if anyone defied him.”

Hugo couldn’t let this go. “Are you sure that nobody would help?”

Athene raised her chin as if facing an unbearable truth. “Absolutely.”

“You could have asked.”

“No, I couldn’t. In fact, Papa told me so. Through his connections, he found out where I was and wrote to me.” Her barbed tone made his skin itch. “He said that I was forever dead to him. He’d rather I sold myself on the streets than crawl back to beg for forgiveness.”

“Your father was a bastard, too,” Hugo snapped.

“I’d disgraced the family name.” Her unemotional tone betrayed just how that letter had hurt her. “Papa wiped me out of his life like mud off his shoe.”

His poor darling. However futile the wish, he’d give his right arm to sweep away all her wretchedness.

This heart-wrenching account went a long way toward satisfying his questions about Athene, even if it left his soul in tatters.

As it was, he was sure that she’d skated over the dangers and deprivations of a city under occupation.

He was painfully aware that he had more to discover.

Reliving this distressing history left her drained.

For tonight, it was enough. He could wait to find out the rest. “You have to forgive yourself, Athene,” he said softly.

“This self-hatred is too heavy a burden. You must know that. Just as you must know that you’re more than the sum of your girlhood mistakes. ”

“Am I?” she asked in that dull voice he hated.

“Yes, so much more.” He battled the urge to tell her that she was the most admirable woman he’d ever met.

Strong. Clever. Principled. Brave. Too much heart for her own good.

But if he told her all that, he’d have to tell her that he loved her.

And while she’d shifted a long way in his direction during the last days, he knew that if he confessed his feelings, she’d leave.

“Thank you.”

With a frustrated snarl, he released her hand and surged to his feet.

“Damn it, I don’t want meaningless gratitude.

I want you to see yourself as I do. There’s no reason to be ashamed of the woman you are.

There’s no reason to deny yourself the things other women have. Friends. Security. A family. Marriage.”

That haunted gaze rested on his face as she stood more slowly to face him. “Marriage to you?”

“Why not?” An emphatic hand sliced the air. “Nothing you’ve told me has changed my mind about making you my wife.”

She was waxen and as close to despair as he’d ever seen her.

His declarations, however well meant, made her flinch.

He braced for her to argue as she’d argued before.

Instead she spoke in a pensive tone that filled him with dread, even before he knew what she meant to say.

“You know, Hugo, I’ve missed Yorkshire every day I’ve been away.

It turns out that while I thought I wanted to see the world, the world I really wanted was the one I grew up in. ”

Odd. This didn’t seem to follow on from what they’d been talking about. “I’ll take you back to Yorkshire, lass. Doesn’t that tempt you, even if I don’t?”

She glared at him. “You know you tempt me, Hugo,” she said bluntly. “False modesty doesn’t become you.”

He hid a wince at the way she called out his self-pitying question. But damn it, he did feel sorry for himself. He was a man of healthy ego, and her persistent rejection stung. Not just his vanity but his heart. “Then come back to Yorkshire with me.”

She surveyed him in the flickering golden light. Her gaze remained steady. And joyless. “You need to establish me somewhere as your mistress. Why not Yorkshire? It worked for your last affair. I can’t see why it won’t work for me. It means you can see me while you run your estate.”

“See you as my mistress,” he said in a tone just as deflated as his heart felt right now. He loved her, but by Jupiter, she tried his patience. “I want to marry you.”

“Even after everything I’ve said?”

Hugo caught her upper arms to keep her near, even if she showed no sign of running away. “Don’t you understand, Athene? I’d be proud to call you my wife.”

She looked so weary, he felt like the worst bully. “But Yorkshire makes it all impossible.”

Baffled, he scowled at her. “What the bloody hell has Yorkshire got to do with it?”

Her long-suffering sigh didn’t make him any less displeased with her.

He adored her, and he wanted to shake some sense into her.

“Hugo, I told you – my family is prominent in the county. Very prominent. You can’t marry me without everyone knowing I’m the brainless little hussy who ran off with George Foster. ”

He had a name for his rival at last. A name to conjure with in the north, to his regret.

“I don’t give a rat’s arse. Hell, Athene, I’ve never met a woman so ready to lift her chin and consign any presumptuous bugger to perdition.

By God, that’s what you did when we met.

You’re brave enough to face down a bit of gossip. ”

“Hugo, you’re a wonderful man.” The praise would mean more, if her expression wasn’t so disconsolate. “I’ll always appreciate the way you’ve treated me.”

“What? As someone worthy of respect? Don’t be a nitwit. You’re finer than anyone I know, finer by far than anyone who scorns you out of spite.”

“Thank you.” She looked ready to shatter. “But you’re a proud man. You won’t like the locals sniggering about my shady past and how you were fool enough to marry me. I won’t be invited anywhere respectable. I won’t be able to play my part in society as your wife. And what if we have children?”

“You say you’re barren,” he bit back, fighting to resist everything she said. Fighting against surrendering to the unyielding truths behind her words.

“I might be. You seem to doubt it. If I’m not, our sons and daughters will forever be tarred with their mother’s blighted name.

Whispered about. Shunned. Treated as tainted.

It will be bad enough for the boys. It will be worse for the girls.

As they grow up, every self-righteous prig north of Wolverhampton will wait for our daughters to prove they’re just like their mother.

It’s cruel to inflict that on any child.

And all the time, mere miles away, my family will continue to refuse to acknowledge my existence. And the world will know.”

Hugo’s grip on her arms tightened and he stared into her eyes, willing her to relent.

For the first time since he’d met her, he feared that he mightn’t prevail.

That the combined weight of his beloved’s will and society’s disapproval might keep him from making a life with this one woman he wanted.

“Athene, we can rise above it all. You can rise above it all, if you really want to. We’ll still have each other.

We can be together, despite the world’s judgments. ”

She settled a lightless gaze on him. The complete absence of hope made him furious and hideously afraid. “No, we can’t, Hugo. I can never be your wife. Don’t ask me again.”