“You suggest that I am simply waiting for you to die!” she cried furiously. “You insult me as well as Villiers!”
“Leopold is my closest friend in the world,” Elijah said quietly. “Even when he and I were estranged, I still considered him so. The fact is that I have never been and cannot become the charming companion you deserve. But my disinclination to nurse my health doesn’t mean that I am afraid to acknowledge that Villiers would be a better mate for you.”
“I cannot believe your arrogance,” Jemma said. “As you see it, I will prance away from your grave and turn directly to my partner in lazy crime, living the rest of my life in happy indolence?”
“Your characterization is not helpful. What you call arrogance, I would call logic.” He took another quick turn and stopped just before her. “I am merely trying to be honest with you, Jemma. It would be patronizing of me to not share my opinion.”
“I see,” she said, striving to get a grip on her temper.
“But just to make certain that I understand your point of view: although you consider Villiers to be a lack-wit, you have every belief that I will turn directly from your grave to his arms.”
“Poetically put,” he said dryly.
“Moreover, you refuse to take any action that might prolong your life, preferring instead to gallop recklessly toward that grave without a thought for—for those you leave behind.”
“I think of you, Jemma.”
“Do you? Why? I am nothing but a frivolity ensconced at home, a woman who can be quickly dispatched into Villiers’s arms the moment your brief candle burns out.”
“Not only poetic but Shakespearean.”
Jemma turned sharply and stared out the dark window, biting her lip savagely to control tears that caught at the back of her throat. Her heart was beating heavily, in harmony with her new—and wretched—understanding of her importance to her husband.
“I truly wish that I could be the man you’d prefer.” His voice came from somewhere behind her.
She controlled her voice with an effort. “I wonder, Elijah, that you bothered to summon me from Paris at all.”
He cleared his throat. “I do not understand your bitterness, Jemma. If you don’t wish to marry Villiers, you won’t do so. I merely—” His voice broke off and suddenly his large hands were on her shoulders, turning her around to face him. “Damn it, Jemma, the truth is that I envy him. I envy him your cozy afternoon, the chess game, the sympathy in your eyes, the affection between you.”
Jemma angrily dashed a tear away. “You just scorned such intimacies!”
“I am not made to be a courtier.”
What could she say? That she’d been fool enough to think that he was falling in love with her?
She leaned her head back against the cool dark window behind her. It wasn’t Elijah’s fault that his honor came before his wife. She should admire him for it. God knows, the world admired his nobility.
She opened her eyes again and looked at her beautiful, honorable husband. That same stupid, foolish man who thought to pass her over to Villiers like a package that might spoil if left in the rain.
“I am sorry to have caused you distress,” he said. She could tell he meant it.
“Distress.” She had to swallow. “Yes, well, I suppose that goes along with a dying husband.” The words fell harshly from her lips, and he flinched.
“It needn’t be like this between us,” he said, his hands sliding from her shoulders to her hands. “I thought we were…”
“We were what?” she inquired.
He didn’t reply. His eyes were the dark blue of a midnight sky, too beautiful for a man.
“You seem to consider me an appendage of the estate,” she said, charging recklessly, miserably, on. “A cow to be passed from hand to hand.”