“What are you doing?” Phillip hissed to Marina, his lips all but pressed to her ear as they walked.
“You have asked me on many occasions to trust your judgment where mine is lacking due to experience, Phillip,” she answered, her voice low but her face still smiling and bright. “In this instance, I beg of you to do the same. There.” She pointed toward Olivia, who had just finished a third dance with the Viscount and was being led by him to find some refreshments. Marina quickened their pace until she reached them and tapped her sister on the arm.
It was not long after that she found herself, once again, alone and enraged in a carriage with her husband.
CHAPTER 27
“What did you speak to my uncle about?” Phillip demanded the moment Marina returned to the carriage after seeing Olivia inside.
“Yes, Phillip, I did enjoy my night at the ball. Overall, it was a fun and pleasant experience, and I am glad that we got to attend at last,” she remarked bitterly, staring out of the window.
“He told me directly that he would not be attending when I inquired last I wrote him, Marina, or I would have not gone, nor would I have permitted you to go?”
“Permitted me?” Marina’s voice was full of venom as she turned to meet his gaze. “Perhaps you are confused about what marriage means, Phillip, but I am notyour prisoner. If I wish to attend a ball, I will attend it whether you forbid me or not.”
“You are avoiding the question. What did you speak of? Did you explicitly plan to meet there, thinking that I would not notice?”
“You cannot be serious!”
“But I am! It is quite convenient that the two of you met one another just as you and I parted ways. Now answer the question I have asked twice already. I will not take kindly to asking it a third time.”
Marina stared at her husband, aghast. He had not threatened her before. Drawn hard lines in the sand, yes. Raised his voice, yes. But this? She recoiled, pressing her back against the carriage wall.
“He said that I looked unwell and asked about my sister’s marriage prospects.”
“Your sister’s marriage prospects?” Phillip furrowed his brow, deeply confused.
“I was equally appalled by the question,” Marina continued, “so I stood up to leave, and that was when you came upon us. You are a foolish man, Phillip Hayward.”
“How so?”
“You act on your impulses after jumping to swift conclusions. You sit here speaking to me in such a vile way when it is I who should be most cross with you!”
“Me? What could I have done to make you cross now, Marina? It is as though each time I turn my back, you find another reasonto think ill of me. I have half a mind to return to Paris and leave you here, alone. Perhaps then you will find it in your heart to be happy.”
Marina gasped, taken aback by his words, but she did not back down. “Who was it that you were speaking to tonight?”
“Aside from you and your sister?”
“Yes. Other than me and my sister.”
Phillip hesitated for only a split second before answering, but the pause was enough to tell Marina that what he said next was deliberately obtuse. “I cannot know who or what you mean.”
He could have said all of the cruel things in the world to her, and none of it would have pained her in the same way that this now did. Her eyes darkened, and she quietly turned her head to the side, no longer wishing to look at him. His refusal to answer her was as good to Marina as a confession—whether the woman he spoke to at the ball was someone he was having an affair with or not, that he would put Marina in a position to be scrutinized and then deny it to her face was enough to convince her that he was not, in fact, the man she had hoped to find out he was.
CHAPTER 28
Marina and Phillip avoided one another for days after the ball. Each of them believed the other to be in the wrong, and neither was willing to swallow their pride. Phillip felt as though she had, once again, betrayed him by entertaining even a few moments of conversation with his uncle and that she had lashed out at him needlessly when she was pressed up against a wall and could not deny her wrongdoing.
Marina was convinced that her husband was having affair and that his uncle had come to her to tell her as much and been turned away. She could no longer deny that it was the only thing that added up—Phillip’s behavior was bizarre, and she had no reason to believe otherwise. He kept strange hours, he refused to tell her where and when he was coming and going, and he wasdesperateto keep his uncle away from her.
She wanted very much to speak with someone about it all, but there was no one to turn to. She had burdened her friend and sister enough as it was. The one person she wanted to speak to most of all was gone from this world forever, and the secondwas her father, who could never be reasonable when it came to Phillip. If she went to him about her concerns, he would surely keep her from ever returning to the Hayward Estate.
It pained her to admit, but that was not what she wanted. As heated as she was after what had transpired at the ball, Marina still had a last shred of hope that she was, perhaps, wrong. Initially, she wanted to wait Phillip out—perhaps he would come around after some time to think alone and realize that she needed to hear the truth about the dark-haired young lady he spoke to.
But the silence stretched on between them with no apparent end in sight. Marina remembered her mother talking to her about marriage briefly when she was younger. She often said something to the effect that men were rarely as honest as they wanted to be, for they spend much of their time wondering whether their honesty will hurt those they love.
It was this sentiment, though not one she wanted to dwell on, that brought Marina to Phillip’s study in the dead of the night. She held her hand aloft to knock on his door, but before she could, the door creaked open.
