“Don’t you dare try to turn this around on me.” Her voice caught slightly and she shook with the effort of trying to keep the tears that shone in her eyes from spilling over to her flushed cheeks. “You have no idea what it is like to read those things from another woman about your husband. It’s not as if I thought you were a virgin, but to have your intimacies so blatantly spelled out before me . . . ”
“Phoebe, what more can I do?” he pleaded, hating to see her like this, but knowing not what else to say beyond what he had already said.
“Sell it.”
He blinked at her. “Sell what?”
“The house!” she screamed at him. “Evict her from it and sell it!”
“Phoebe,” he said, trying to keep his tone calm in light of her irrational behavior. “It is an investment property, and as soon as Lillian finds another protector, I will rent it to someone else.”
“What do you need with investment properties, Benjamin? You’re richer than Midas, for heaven’s sake.”
“I will not continue to have this conversation.” He was truly angry now. Why the hell would she not see reason? “That is my property and those were my letters, and you cannot march into this house, demanding what I do with them!”
“Why can I not have input where it concerns me?” she yelled back.
“Because these things do not concern you—”
“Of course they concern me! I am your wife!”
“Listen, wife, when I want something to concern you, I will tell you. Otherwise, you are to stay out of my business.”
“You sound just like my father!”
“Well, then it’s a good thing I shot him!”
Silence, heavy and charged with shock, hung in the air between them. Their eyes locked, but neither of them said a word. Benjamin’s heart raced so quickly he was sure he would have a coronary. Had the words actually escaped his mouth?
Dear God. What had he done?
Chapter 16
“What did you say?” Phoebe stared at Benjamin, certain she must have heard him wrong.
She loved him. She had married him. She had trusted him with her life, with her heart, with . . . everything. Surely, he hadn’t actually meant what he said, for if it were true, it would mean that in a few short hours, everything she knew and believed in turned out to be a lie.
He didn’t answer right away, and Phoebe felt an anger so wild and raw race up her body at his silence, until she finally screamed, “Answer me!”
“I killed him!” he yelled back, his words coming over the top of hers. He looked almost as distraught as Phoebe felt. What in the world was he talking about?
She shook her head back and forth. “That’s not possible. My father died of a fever, Benjamin—”
“A fever that I caused.” His voice was resigned and low; his body language reflected sheer and utter dejection.
Phoebe said nothing but waited for him to continue on his own. She watched as he collapsed into a chair and leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees. He buried his face behind his hands as he began to speak.
“I didn’t know, Phoebe.” His voice cracked with emotion when he said her name. “When I met you at the Stapleton Ball, I had no idea who you were. I knew your father as Gambling Grimsby—even your own cousin called him that.”
Phoebe was well aware of the moniker that had followed her father around the ton. She would have wagered that few associated her and her mother with him. At the rare social occasions he had accompanied them to, he’d found his way quickly to the gaming rooms and usually left early, without them, to make his way to his favorite hells. But that explained very little.
The silence seemed to stretch into eternity before he finally spoke again.
“I had every intention of calling on you that next afternoon, with flowers that would surely have dwarfed Mr. Potter’s. But I planned to call on the widow Grimsby first. I didn’t realize I was knocking on Number Twelve, Berkeley Square at first, and I continued to grasp for answers until I was in your parlor. Until I saw the miniature of him. That of Gambling Grimsby.”
“That is why you asked so many questions about him that day, isn’t it? I found it strange at the time, but, Benjamin, this isn’t making any sense. Why do you think you killed my father?”
He blew out a long breath, as if he was hoping they would never have to get to that part of the story. But she wouldn’t let him distract her with other stories about how they had met a few weeks earlier. She’d been present for those.
“Your father cheated my brother Andrew in a game one night. I wasn’t playing, but I was watching. And I was close enough to see the secret hand he tried to switch his own with . . . I called him out.”
Phoebe wasn’t sure what to say to that. Of course, it was wrong of her father to have done that, and Benjamin probably did what any other gentleman would have done. It was a shame Benjamin had been the one to see it.
“What happened?” she asked, maintaining her distance in the middle of the room.
“We agreed upon first blood. Your father’s was first. I shot him in the shoulder, but apparently he developed a fever as a result of the wound. I swear to you, Phoebe, I never meant to kill him.”
She believed him, of course. Benjamin wasn’t a violent man, of that much she was certain. However, she was certain of very little else in her life just then.
“You lied to me,” she said quietly, unable to keep the pain from her voice. The gut-twisting pain of betrayal.
“Because I wanted you . . . I needed you to be my wife, Phoebe.”
Why? This was the question that bounced about in her head, over and over, with no answer in sight. Did he want her so that his father could die at peace, knowing his son had settled with a nice girl, worthy of being the next Marchioness of Eastleigh? Did he need her so that his guilt might be assuaged in the matter of her father? Perhaps he felt that marrying her, rescuing her from destitution, would relieve him of the remorse he carried over the matter.
He still had not said he loved her, and he’d been given plenty of opportunities in the last three weeks . . . even this evening. But he’d taken none of them. So it must have been for one of the other, less appealing reasons that he had taken her as his bride.
It hurt. It cut as deeply as if a knife were truly being driven into her heart. But she wasn’t sure how to reconcile the man she had married—the man she’d fallen in love with—with this man before her, who kept a mistress and who had apparently killed her father. Not a day of their relationship had been without lies. Or, at the very least, omissions of the truth, which, to Phoebe, was every bit as abhorrent.
She suddenly grew very weary. Her body shook with the effort of simply staying upright. And she didn’t want to be there anymore. She didn’t want to talk, let alone argue. So, quietly, and without explanation, she turned to go.
“Phoebe, please,” she heard him whisper behind her, and her heart nearly broke in two.
In that moment, she wondered if he even understood why she was leaving, why she was turning her back on him and walking away. More than likely, he thought it was because he’d killed her father, for that alone would cause a great rift for most people. However, Phoebe knew all too well that her father had been a dishonest person at times. Though she’d loved him, she had not had any misconceptions regarding his character. No, if Benjamin had not called him out that night, someone else would have eventually. That particular transgression was actually easy to forgive.
If only he had known that when they first met—or, at least, when he first realized who she was—things might have been different. As it was, too many lies stood between them now, and Phoebe wasn’t sure what to do with all she had learned that evening.
She needed to be alone, to think. And so she kept going, ignoring his whispered plea, and shut the door to his bedchamber behind her.
***
Benjamin watched her leave, heard the click of the latch on the door, but he couldn’t quite believe she had just wal
ked out of their room. He had expected fury just as raw as it had been over Lillian and the townhouse, but there was nothing.
Nothing except disappointment, and that, to Benjamin, was worse than anger. He liked it far better when she was screaming at him and accusing him. This—the silence—was unbearable.
He sat there, staring at the fire for hours. He replayed the night in his mind, over and over, until the sting of her words, and the weight of his own shame that he had carried for more than a year now, drove him to tears.
It wasn’t until the very first light of the morning began to creep onto the horizon that his tears dried up and he made a decision. There was no way he would be able to face his family, let alone his wife, like this, so it was best he remove himself from the premises all together.
There was work he could do in London, and his steward could continue to look after the tenants at the estate. The man had been doing it for the last six or so months on his own, anyway; what was another few weeks?
Benjamin woke his valet and informed him of their imminent departure. Collins wasn’t all that thrilled about being rushed to pack his master’s things, but Benjamin wasn’t taking any chances. They needed to be gone before the others were up and about.
It was nearly seven when they finally made it to the stone courtyard of the castle, where a crested black carriage awaited them. He stared unblinking at the Eastleigh crest as the footmen loaded his trunks. Vincit veritas: Truth conquers. Hah! Apparently, whichever great grandfather had coined that particular motto had never killed his wife’s father.
With the trunks loaded, Ben, with his blackened mood, moved to mount the carriage himself when a voice stopped him.
“It’s awfully early to be setting out, isn’t it?”
Mother.
“I didn’t know anyone else was up,” he said, turning to face her.
She had aged no less than ten years in the last three weeks. Her black hair had grown many more silver strands. Her eyes were red-rimmed with great black circles beneath them. And she wasn’t eating well, if at all. Good Lord, he’d been so absorbed in his new marriage and his new responsibilities that he hadn’t even noticed his mother was wasting away in her grief.
“I don’t sleep anymore,” she finally admitted. “I doze here and there, but I’ve not slept two consecutive hours since . . . ” She gave him a sad smile and then changed the subject. “Where are you going?”
“London,” he told her, squinting against the rising sun that filtered into the archway of the courtyard.
“Phoebe is not accompanying you?” She raised a questioning, but not accusatory, eyebrow.
He shook his head. After all the lies, he wished he could simply tell the truth about why he was leaving, but he couldn’t, of course. “I have some things to attend to, but I shouldn’t be more than a few days. Phoebe will be better off here.”
It was true, was it not? She would be better off here, without him, without his lies, without having to face the man she now knew had killed her father.
His mother merely nodded, and quietly stepped forward to kiss him goodbye. Impulsively, he drew her into a hug and tried to keep his tears at bay. When he pulled back, he didn’t look at her. He knew that if he did, he would break down again. So he turned quickly and started to walk to the carriage.
“Benjamin,” she said, halting him midstride. There was a long pause, and he wondered if she had anything to say at all, or if she had just stopped him, knowing something was wrong. Finally, she said, “We’ll take care of her for you.”
His heart twisted so painfully that it was his instinct to double over, to crumple to the ground with the agony of not knowing when he would see her next and the probability that things would never be the same again.
Instead, he simply nodded once and then mounted the carriage.
***
Phoebe woke with a pit in her stomach and a pounding in her head far worse than when she’d drunk half a bottle of apple brandy. She had stayed up most of the night and finally cried herself to sleep near dawn. It was after eleven when she made her way down to the breakfast room.
She wasn’t sure how it would be when she saw Benjamin, but one thing was certain: she wanted to see him. No matter what he had done, the things he’d kept from her from the inception of their relationship, they were married now. For better or for worse, they were husband and wife. And now that everything had been brought out into the open, they could begin to sort through it, find common ground, and hopefully, very soon, return to the blissful state they had shared only a day before.
In spite of the late hour, her mother, as well as every member of her new family, sat at the dining table in the breakfast room. Everyone except Benjamin, that is. Of course, she wasn’t surprised. It was late, and any other morning he had been up, and sometimes gone, just after sunrise.
“Good morning, all,” she greeted the room, trying to sound cheery despite the way she felt inside.
They returned her greeting, and then she took her seat and asked the footman for toast and tea. It wasn’t until she turned back to the table at large that she realized they all stared at her, silently. Waiting. Though for what, she did not know.
Trying to pretend everything was fine, Phoebe unfolded her napkin and placed it in her lap. She looked up and smiled at Kat, who forced a smile back. And that was just about as much as Phoebe could stand.
“Where is Benjamin?” she asked, knowing their odd behavior must have to do with the two of them.
As embarrassing as it might have been, she wondered if perhaps one of them had overheard their argument last night. Or perhaps he had told them all what happened this morning, while she still slept.
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before the dowager finally answered her. “He left this morning,” she said quietly. “He’s gone to London.”
Phoebe did her best to maintain her composure, despite the fact she wanted to crawl into a hole and cry until the pain went away.
He’d left her. And her heart shattered into a million little pieces. He hadn’t even bothered to stay and see if they could work out their problems this morning. He had given up on them already.
But the last thing Phoebe wanted was to confirm their suspicions that something was wrong. Clearly, that was why they had all gathered together, and clearly Kat wasn’t the only meddler in this family.
The laugh she gave next sounded hollow and forced to her own ears, but she hoped she was a good enough actress to pull it off. “Oh, goodness,” she said, waving her hand about in front of her, “of course he did!”
She saw the dowager’s eyes widen in surprise, but quickly turned her focus to her toast. She spread jam carefully and generously over the bread in order to keep busy and avoid eye contact. That was the only thing that would keep her from crying, she was sure.
“I was sleeping so soundly when he woke me and kissed me goodbye,” she continued before anyone could get a word in edgeways, “I suppose I thought it was a dream! But, yes, of course he is in London, to take care of that . . . thing he’s been talking about for days now.”
She rolled her eyes as if he had been plaguing her with talk of this thing and then stuffed her mouth with toast to keep from rambling on anymore. She knew she sounded mad, but she figured that was better than dissolving into hysterics in front of everyone at the breakfast table.
Blessedly, there were a great many smiles and shrugs passed back and forth between the members of her family, and slowly they began to retreat from the breakfast room. When it looked as if Phoebe was going to be left alone with the dowager and her mother, she jumped from her chair, made her excuses and left the room. If anyone had seen through her charade, it had been the two matrons, and one word from either of them would have been Phoebe’s undoing.
Once in the silence of the hallway, she collapsed against the cool marble wall and dropped her head into her hands. Only then did she allow the tears to fall.
***
As soon as Benjamin ar
rived at his townhouse in London, he made straight for the brandy bottle. He was beyond exhausted, having stayed up all night and then traveled half a day’s ride from Kent.
He hadn’t eaten, and he was starving. But every time he tried to eat something, the food seemed to turn to sawdust in his mouth.
All he could see was his wife’s face, wrought with disappointment . . . in him. All he could hear were her whispered words You lied to me. Everything else faded away. The London streets could have been mobbed and riotous and he wouldn’t have known. Gunshots might have been sounding in his ear. It would not have mattered. Nothing mattered now.
And so he lost himself in the bottle of brandy. Drank until he couldn’t see straight and then fell into bed, praying for sleep. Eventually, it came, but it was far from restful.
Chapter 17
Over the next few weeks, Phoebe found herself obsessing over the argument with her husband. She thought about that dratted letter from Lillian—which she had since burned in the grate—over and over until it didn’t quite hold the same power over her as it once had. She became desensitized to the words she had read, and it somehow gave her more perspective. It was true that Lillian had written the letter, and as far as she knew, Benjamin had made no effort to contact her.
Of course, she couldn’t speak for the last three weeks that he’d been in London working on that thing. But she could admit now that perhaps she had overreacted a bit. If only he were here so she could tell him that!
Blast him, why wouldn’t he come home? She wasn’t angry anymore . . . just lonely. And empty. And she was going mad.
Every day when the post arrived, she attacked poor Sikes, hoping for a letter, something—anything—from her husband. Or whenever she heard the clip-clop of horses on the drive, she ran like a banshee through the house to the courtyard, praying that it was Benjamin.
Gentleman Never Tells (Regency Historical Romance) Page 13