“What are you saying to me?”
“I allowed myself to be charmed into forgetting my duties. I shouldn’t have done it. I have a duty to keep you safe, Thomas. I can’t let myself give in to temptation here.”
“Madeleine, I love you. Don’t you understand that? I’m in love with you. I just want to be enough for you. I want to help you overcome your fear so that we can be together.”
She shook her head. “That’s not going to happen,” she said. “It was my mistake to let you believe that it could. It can’t.”
“I told you I was willing to take any risk. I told you, you are worth it to me.”
“Thomas, what do you think the ladies of the ton would say if they heard you say such a thing?”
“I don’t care what they would say,” Thomas said. “When have you ever known me to care about what they say?”
“I’m not suggesting you’d care because they said it. I’m suggesting you’d care because it might be the truth,” she said. “They would tell you that you’d been bewitched or ensnared by me somehow. That nothing else could explain such willingness to riskeverythingfor the sake of a lady you hardly knew. That there was no reason you’d do such a thing, and it must have something to do with trickery. They would think I was a witch to do that to you.”
“And they’d be wrong. Why do you care what they think all of a sudden? You never have before.”
“I don’t care what they think. I care if it’s thetruth.”
“You’re being absurd! Of course you haven’t put some kind of spell on me. You would know if you had.”
“But my curse might be to blame for all of this!” Horrible things were occurring to her now, things she had never really believed before. What if the curse was to blame for the way they had met in the first place? What if the curse was the reason for the scandal that had brought them together? And what if—oh, how she didn’t want this to be true, but she had to consider it—what if he didn’t care for her at all? What if he only thought he did because the curse made him believe it?
It could all be a cruel twist of fate, designed to suck him into her life only to have him be destroyed, as everyone else she loved had always been.
“I love you, Madeleine,” he insisted.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe that isn’t real.”
“Of course it’s real.”
“Didn’t you say our affection for one another might just be a temporary trick? A side effect of the novelty of our marriage?”
“It’s not a trick,” he said, frowning. “Are you suggesting that I don’t know my own mind about this? That I don’t know how I really feel?”
“I’m simply saying that we shouldn’t rush to any conclusions. You think you love me now, Thomas—”
“I do love you,” he said fiercely.
“You might find, given time, that your feelings fade. And maybe it would be best to simply allow that to happen. Let yourself forget whatever you think you’re feeling now. Let it go. Then you won’t run the risk of being harmed by my curse. We’ll be able to go on with our lives.”
“Do you think I could possibly just go on with my life now that I’ve met you? Now that you’re my wife? I thought you felt the same way I did, Madeleine. I thought we had come to an agreement about all this. Was I wrong?”
She closed her eyes.
His heart went out to her. He could see that he was hurting her by pushing for this. He knew she wished he would go away.
But he also knew a part of her wanted him to keep pushing. She wanted this.
At least, he thought she did.
“Tell me what you feel for me,” he said.
She shook her head. “Thomas…no.”
“Tell me,” he urged. “I know you want to.” His fingers grazed her face, and she didn’t pull away. “Just tell me how you feel about me, Madeleine. It’s nothing new. You’ve told me already.”
“It’s a fluke,” she whispered. “It’s just a reaction. It will go away once I get used to being around you.”
