He thought she was finished, but she drew breath, hesitated, shook her head, and continued.
“As a girl I looked like a freak,” she said. “My second teeth grew in before my face grew to fit them, and my freckles were as big as pennies and covered my nose and my cheeks. A few of the other children in the neighborhood used to call me carrot top. When I was thirteen and painfully in love with the physician’s boy, who was sixteen and wondrously handsome, he dashed my regard for him by telling me I looked like the rabbit and the carrot all in one package. But this talk is abject foolishness, and I would not indulge in it if the hour was not late and I was not tired and you had not asked.”
Her mother must have been both horrified and embarrassed when her first child was born within nine months of her marriage with such undeniably red hair.
“Plain or even ugly children often grow into beautiful adults,” he said. “It certainly seems to have been true of you.”
“If it is true,” she said, sounding cross rather than reassured, “then it is the wrong sort of beauty. When I went to London for my come-out Season, I had to stop looking at men. So many of them were looking back at me with—”
“Admiration?” he suggested. Had it been such an unwelcome surprise? Surely she had left behind her likeness to a rabbit years before then?
“With lust,” she said. “Though I hardly knew the meaning of the word then. There was no respect in those looks. It was not the admiring, even worshipful way they looked at the delicate, accredited beauties. One older lady, who had a great deal of influence in the ton, once told me there was a certain vulgarity about hair of so decided a red. As though I had chosen the shade. As though my hair defined my character.”
A more confident young beauty would simply have smiled at such spite, knowing that she could take the ton by storm with such startling good looks if she chose—as Lady Angela Allandale had done last year.
“Lust is often a form of admiration,” he told her. “Coupled with good manners it could be seen as flattering.”
“Not when one is told that one could be the most expensive, sought-after courtesan in London if one wished to be,” she said.
“If someone actually said that to you,” he said, “I hope you slapped him very hard across the face.”
“He apologized,” she said, “when he saw that he had distressed me.”
He felt a sudden suspicion.
“Was this the man who was paying court to you before your sister ran off with Nelson?” he asked her.
“It does not matter.” She sighed, her breath warm against his neck. “I had a fortunate escape from him. Sometimes it takes time and a bit of maturity to realize that.”
She still had not named the man. Perhaps it was just as well. He realized he’d reached a point where he would want to do a great deal more than just slap the man’s face.
“And then there was last year,” she said. “If only I had been born with my mother’s dark hair, none of that would have happened. No one would have thought of spreading such vicious gossip. And that was all it was—gossip. I am so sorry. I hate habitual complainers. They are a dead bore.”
Yes. He should be bored. But in listing her complaints about her hair, she had told him a great deal about herself. He had not wanted to know. He still did not. It would be altogether more comfortable living through the marriage to which they had agreed if he knew her only by her day-to-day behavior. But he was beginning to realize that it had been naïve of him to expect such a shallow relationship.
Something occurred to him.
“Why tonight?” he asked her. “If you have hated your hair all your life, why was tonight the crisis point? Did something happen today? Did someone say something?”
“No.” She sighed and did not continue. She was not relaxed, though. He could feel tension in her body, warm though it had become inside the blanket. He waited. “It was because of this morning.”
“This morning?” He frowned.
“Last night you unbraided my hair,” she said against his neck. “You spoke of the glory of it and of your desire for me. This morning you looked at me with distaste and left to go riding. And I knew that something in our marriage had been spoiled and that my hair was to blame. Always my hair. Tonight I thought you probably would not come at all.”
Good God!
He set his head against the high back of the chair and closed his eyes. He had not bargained for this. Why the devil had he taken off her nightcap last night? It had been a bit like opening Pandora’s box.
How was he to explain to her?
“Chloe,” he said, “I cannot love you. I cannot love.”
“I have not asked it of you,” she said. “I do not ask it. Did you think last night and this morning that I was—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “I know—I knew that you were not trying to lure me, to use your own word from last night. Also, last night we agreed that desire is not a bad thing in a marriage such as ours, but I would not take advantage of your acquiescence. This morning I was afraid of taking advantage.”
“So you went away out of respect?” she asked him, sitting up on his lap and frowning at him.
“It was most certainly not out of revulsion,” he said. “Or out of any feeling that you were behaving like a . . . courtesan. The very idea is absurd, Chloe. You? So why the deuce did you cut your hair?”