Poppy didn’t love him.
She had never loved him. Her dragonish mother had coerced her into the marriage. The emotion at their wedding had been all his, which laid painfully bare the reasons for their pitiful intimacies. She didn’t love him; of course she didn’t desire him.
The rain was suddenly hot on his face, a hot drop here, a cold drizzle there.
“But I loved her.” Fletch said it out loud, into the silence of the gray rain. “I was in love with her.” That Christmas years ago in Paris was emblazoned in his memory. “I loved her. I—I—” But he stopped before he said that he still loved her.
She didn’t want him in the most fundamental way. She told him to find a mistress.
He walked until his heart was as dreary as the sky, until some sort of truth came to him.
He must be cursed, because he still loved her. He loved his wife. Even so.
And that meant that he couldn’t survive alone for five years as Poppy suggested. He couldn’t lie awake in the middle of the night and wonder what she was doing, with whom was she dancing. Naturalists, for God’s sake. Out of all the things her mother said, that stung the most.
Poppy was infatuated with that Dr. Loudan, for example. A skinny, weedy thing with a propensity for cutting up dead rodents for examination.
He’d spent years fashioning himself into someone he wasn’t, all to catch her eye. But she wanted spectacles. He pulled off his hat, raised his head and the rain sluiced over his face, over his carefully tumbled locks, spotting his shirt, chilling his fingers.
He had to do something with his life, make himself into the kind of man whom she would admire. She would never desire him; he accepted that. The scorn he saw in her eyes as she compared him to the professor…that was a scorn he felt for himself.
Their awkward couplings would surely improve slightly with further practice, but they had little to do with the fierce desire he felt, with the way his body longed to make love to her.
Yet he wasn’t the sort of man to be unfaithful. He couldn’t take a courtesan, or even a lady, to bed. The truth was that he didn’t want a mistress. He started walking again, letting the rain beat into the back of his neck.
He could survive without Poppy in his bed.
But he couldn’t survive without her in his life. She had to come home. He would promise that he’d never visit her room until they decided to have children. And he would promise to stop sulking.
He’d spent the last few years sulking. He had to give Lady Flora credit for that observation. He’d sulked because life hadn’t turned out the way he thought it should. Enough. Enough thinking about French women, and women’s desire in general. In fact, the hell with desire.
Monks did it, didn’t they? He didn’t need sex in order to be a man. What he needed—what he needed was Poppy. Because for some strange, stupid reason, she felt like the coffee he drank in the morning.
He needed her.
He turned around and started back for the carriage. He would make himself into someone she would be proud of, someone who wasn’t interested only in the cut of his coat and the sheen of his hair.
If he admitted the truth to himself, he wanted to be one of the most important men in the House of Lords. He wanted to make a difference to the country, to be a man whose words were feared and welcomed, like his father’s had been.
Then he would dispense with Lady Flora, which would be his gift to Poppy.
And finally he would lure her back to the house, before Christmas came again.
And then somehow, someday, he would woo his wife into loving him the way she used to. The way she loved him that Christmas in Paris, when she looked at him as if he were the world to her.
When she loved him.