“No.” He said it fiercely. “I need you to be gone. I can’t think about you, or worry about you.”
She nodded.
“Forever,” he continued. “Go back to London, or to France, or wherever you want.”
“No!” she gasped.
“It’s over between us,” Piers said, feeling a strange sense of remoteness. Upstairs, his patients were dying, and even so, his heart was twisting; even so, the gleam of tears in her eyes felt mortal. “You always knew it would be the case,” he added, more gently. “We have no future.”
Her jaw set, and suddenly she looked remarkably like his mother.
Piers looked to his father. “Pry open a window, if you would. Take my mother to the guardhouse, down the ocean path. Linnet will be ready to leave with you in two minutes.”
He and Linnet stood like marble statues while the duke pushed a window out of its frame.
“Be well, Piers, my love,” his mother said as the duke held out his hand next to the window. “Be careful.”
“I never catch anything, Maman,” he said, with perfect truth. He always thought it was nature’s compensation for his injury.
At last, they were gone.
“You don’t know that you won’t be infected,” Linnet said. Tears gleamed in her eyes.
He shrugged. “If I do, I shall care for myself properly. I lose very few patients to this particular disease, as long as they reach me in time. I myself have no plans to succumb.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want to marry you.”
There, the truth was out, clearly spoken.
“You’ll have to wait outside for my father,” he said. “Stay away from anyone you see out there, including Prufrock. Do you hear me? In fact, wait by the side of the house. I think it’s spread by coughing.”
Linnet took a deep breath. Piers was leaning heavily on his cane, exhaustion in every line of his body. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“You’ve got no choice,” he said. “God almighty, Linnet, how many ways can I put this? I don’t want to marry you.”
“I haven’t decided whether I wish to marry you,” she said, trying for a small jest in the face of nightmare. “I think I might.”
“The possibility is not in question. It never was, not really.”
Linnet looked at him, the shadow of his beard, the shadows under his eyes, and knew she loved him. That she would never love another man. Piers’s fierce wit had tempted her, but it was his passionate heart that had won her.
“Go on,” he said impatiently. “I don’t want to marry you. I won’t marry you. Is that clear enough?”
“No.” She saw the pain in his eyes and could recognize it for what it is. “We belong together,” she said with a feeling of perfect truth. “You will never love anyone but me.”
“You are blinded by your own claims to beauty,” Piers said, avoiding what she had just said. “Will you please leave now, before I say something I regret?”
But Linnet’s heart was flying on a wave of passion and love. “I love you!” she said again. “And you love me.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Piers said.
For a moment she didn’t hear him. Then she didn’t understand him. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. I don’t care what you feel for me, or believe you feel for me.”
“Why are you being so cruel?”
“I’m not. Indiscriminate niceness is not indicated in this situation. Honesty is.”
She ran to him and grabbed his lapels. He recoiled violently. “I might be infectious. Stay back!”
“You are not ill. You never get ill. I believe you.”
“Then why don’t you believe me when I say this: Linnet, I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to marry you!” He was shouting it.
“Yes, you do,” she said, and reached out, clasping his face, bringing it down to hers. Her lips sought his, hungry, welcoming, even adoring.
“I won’t marry for sex,” he said, pushing her away.
She couldn’t understand him, and her hand reached out to catch his sleeve as he turned away.
“For God’s sake, have you no dignity? I tupped you, and we were good together. But you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”
Linnet felt her throat tighten. “Why are you speaking to me like this?”
“Because you damn well won’t listen to me any other way,” he said with obvious frustration. “You know what kind of man I am, Linnet. We had fun dallying together, rutting, shaking the sheets, whatever you want to call it. But I never pretended to you that it would result in marriage.”
“No, you didn’t,” Linnet whispered, a chill creeping over her. “You were very clear about that.”
“I suppose I should have turned you down,” he said. “But you were there, you were eager.”
Linnet swallowed. “Because I was—eager?” It seemed she was like her mother, at least in Piers’s eyes. “Is that why?”
“You’re also damned beautiful,” he said, raking his hair back. “But yes, you were eager. You might want to practice more discretion if you find yourself in that situation again.”
Her heart fell like a stone.
“Look, you have to go. I need some sleep. Sébastien and I have a castleful of patients, and Bitts is already down, which means the other two might go down as well.”
“I could—” she said, and the words died in her throat.
“Go,” he said wearily. “You can’t help. We don’t need you here.”
“And you don’t want me,” she said, needing to say it aloud.
“If you mean, do I want you in a sexual way, then the answer is yes. Reference your beauty and general enthusiasm. Every man wants that in his bed. But do I want you in a marital kind of way, a death-do-us-part kind of way? No. And I never will.”
His eyes were faintly kind. That kindness, Linnet felt, was rather horrid. “You don’t want to admit to loving me because that would mean you have to take responsibility for being miserable—or in this case, not being miserable,” she said, raising her chin and staring back at him.
“What?”
“Just what I said,” Linnet retorted. “If you married me, if you admitted to your feelings, it would mean that misery is not a given, but a choice.”
“Bollocks!”
“Well, I love you,” she said. “I’m not afraid to say it aloud. And I want you too.”
“I don’t—”
“I see you don’t,” she cut in, moving away from him, toward the window. “I hope all goes well in the castle.”
“It will,” he said. Now that she had her back to him, it seemed that his voice had pain in it. But when she turned, his jaw was set, his face unyielding.
She stopped, just one more time, because she was a stubborn woman. “I’ll wait for you in London,” she said. “For a time. In case you change your mind.”
“Has no one any dignity around here?” he said, half shouting it. “You’re as embarrassing as my father.”