She laughed. “Such a polite reply, but I fear you’re thinking I’m a completely depraved female—”
“That’s not what I was thinking at all,” he cut in. “And in any case, depraved is both an inaccurate and cruel way to describe it, Delia. A young wife with an impotent husband is bound to have some degree of frustration. Only natural.”
She turned, tilting her head to study him. “You’re an incredibly easy person to talk to, do you know that?” she said after a moment. “I’ve never discussed this with anyone before.”
Yes, he thought,I’m an excellent father confessor. “Not anyone?”
She didn’t seem to hear the wry note in his voice, and she shook her head in reply. “I think it’s because I just… trust you. You’re so upright and honorable.”
Simon grimaced, feeling like an utter hypocrite, but thankfully, she didn’t notice.
“Anyway,” she went on, “my… ahem… frustrations weren’t my only consideration.”
“No?”
“I wanted a baby,” she said simply. “So much, I’d have done anything. I had come into my first marriage with precious little knowledge of male-female relations, but my second marriage had proved to be quite an explicit education in that regard.”
How explicit? he wondered, and his muscles tightened, desire flickering to life. Reminding himself how inappropriate that was at such a moment, he set his jaw and said nothing.
“Hamish knew before we married that people called me the black widow. He knew how much the nickname hurt me and how worried Iwas that it might be true. He also knew how badly I wanted children. If he had told me of all his health difficulties before the wedding, I would not have married him.”
“He deceived you?”
“It might be more accurate to say he was deceiving both of us. I think he hoped a young wife might turn the tide. Obviously, he was mistaken.”
“Such a condition might be grounds for divorce.”
“Perhaps, but even I’m not outrageous enough to try something so scandalous. Instead, I employed a different approach. Two years after we were married, I decided I’d had enough of kisses at the door and a pat on the cheek, so I seduced my husband shamelessly. I used every trick I could think of. And it worked. By some miracle, I conceived. Not that any of it did much good in the end,” she added softly. “Three days after Hamish died, I lost the baby.”
A shaft of pain hit him, obliterating the desire inside him like a candle flame snuffed out. He had no idea what to say, but he could not bear to offer the trite, conventional replies most people were wont to utter at moments like this. “Ah” was all he said.
That simple reply seemed to act on her like a cork popping off a bottle of champagne, and more words came spilling out of her mouth. “I know that all three of my husbands had in some way deceived me, but I loved each of them passionately and I grieved each of them when they died. In their deceptions and their deaths, I thought I’d felt all the pain a woman could feel, but I was wrong. When I miscarried, when my beautiful little boy followed Hamish to his grave, I wanted to die, too.”
He pressed a fist to his mouth, his heart hurting for her. She may have been born into privilege and wealth, but none of that could keep away misfortune, pain, and loss.
“I wandered around inside Stratham House for months,” she wenton, “hiding from the world, drowning in grief, unable to get past my pain. Hamish’s son and his wife wanted to move into the house,” she went on, “as was their right. He’d become the earl, so it was now his house, but I went into absolute hysterics. I would not let them in. I stayed in the house alone, refusing to see anyone for over six months. I stopped eating. I reached a point where I could barely find the will to get out of bed. My family was terribly worried about me, but I couldn’t seem to care about that. Or about anything else for that matter. I couldn’t see any point in living. There were times when I…” She paused and swallowed hard. “When I even contemplated killing myself.”
He studied her face, twisted with pain, and her eyes, haunted and dark, and his own emotions—dismay, sadness, and a deep, profound compassion—almost overcame him, but he knew she wouldn’t welcome expressions of pity, so he offered none. “Now I understand what you meant that night at dinner when I told you about my father. But,” he added when she nodded, “nothing stopped him. Something stopped you. What was it?”
She smiled, but it wasn’t one of the winsome or impudent or downright naughty smiles he was used to. Instead, it was a sad smile—sad and unexpectedly sweet. “It was Ritz.”
Suddenly, it felt as if a fissure in the earth had opened under his feet, sending him hurtling down, down, into a dark abyss. “How so?” he asked, his voice a tight rasp to his own ears.
“He came to see me. I refused to see him, but when it comes to not taking no for an answer, Ritz puts me to shame. He talked and wheedled and bullied his way past my butler, burst right into my bedroom, and told me this tale of woe—how he was in desperate need of help with the hotel, how he was just too overwhelmed to handle it all by himself, he didn’t know what to do, and how much he needed my help.”
As much animosity as Simon had for Ritz, he couldn’t help admiring the other man for finding the one tactic guaranteed to work with Delia. “So,” he murmured, “that’s how you came to work for the hotel?”
“Yes. He offered me a job. I made all sorts of excuses, but he countered them all, insisting again and again that I was the only person he could hire who understood him, who could truly see his vision. I accepted—which raised quite a few eyebrows in society, let me tell you, but I didn’t care. It was as if he’d tossed me a lifeline in a stormy sea. To this day, I’m still not sure if he did it for himself, or for the hotel, or for me, but—”
She broke off and gave a shrug. “Whatever his motives,” she went on, “he gave me purpose, a reason to get out of bed. At the most vulnerable moment of my life, Ritz gave me the courage to hang on until things could get better, and for that, he will always have my gratitude and my loyalty. Had your father had someone like Ritz, someone of boundless optimism and possibility, he might not have done what he did.”
Simon didn’t know how to reply. After all, what was there to say? Ritz had given her a purpose in life, but Simon knew that if Helen had her way, that purpose would be destroyed. And what, he wondered, would happen to her then?
“Goodness,” she said, her voice changing with mercurial suddenness to an airy tone. “Listen to us. How on earth did this conversation become so maudlin?”
She moved, stepping around him, adding, “We should rejoin your sister before she thinks you’ve spirited me off to Gretna Green. A girl of that age is so terribly romantic.”
She walked away, but he didn’t follow her immediately. Instead, he watched her for a long moment, and before her figure had vanished around the corner of the house, he realized what had been bafflinghim from the first moment they’d met. He realized why she set off sparks of both temper and arousal in him, and why, no matter what she knew or what she’d done, he could never treat her with the indifference and impartiality of a mere employee.
