When Garson emerged from the bedroom the morning after the Jamesons’ dull musicale, he was puzzled to see Jane in the sitting room. Over recent weeks, he’d mostly breakfasted alone, then taken a long ride in Hyde Park. His wife’s late rising made perfect sense, given the hectic life she led. But he couldn’t help thinking that she lingered in bed to avoid him.

The sight of her lifted his mood. Perhaps she waited to tell him that she wanted to go to Derbyshire. He’d come to loathe London, which was strange as he’d always loved it before these last weeks. The prospect of a few quiet months at Beardsley Hall beckoned like heaven. But he’d be damned before he abandoned Jane to her admirers, while her husband limped away like a beaten hound. He and Jane left together, or they stayed to finish this purgatory of a season.

“Good morning,” he said, hoping against hope that he was right about Derbyshire.

He tightened the belt of his dressing gown, then sat and poured himself a cup of strong coffee to clear a thick head. Although last night when he got home, he hadn’t done much beyond go to sleep. If Jane had shown the slightest interest in bed sport, he’d have responded with alacrity. But he was sick to the stomach of making all the running.

“Good morning, Hugh,” she said without smiling.

She wore a pretty light blue gown, and behind her, the window was open on a lovely day. Spring had arrived since they’d come to London. Unfortunately the bright sunlight revealed Jane looking tired and drawn. His spirits fell as swiftly as they’d risen. This wasn’t a woman anticipating a rural idyll.

Although he supposed in its way, her subdued manner was an improvement. Lately she’d been as glittering at home as she was in society. It wore him out. He couldn’t imagine that maintaining the relentless cheerfulness was any easier on her. Especially as he knew damn well that it was all an act.

He hated to see her looking as downcast as she did this morning, though. As he’d grudgingly admitted to Silas at Anthony and Fenella’s ball, he was conscious that so far, he made an utter hash of his marriage.

“Have you had breakfast?” he asked, seeing the crumbled roll on her plate. Lately, she didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. It hadn’t missed his notice that the blue dress hung more loosely than it had last time he’d seen her wear it.

“Yes, thank you.” Her perfect politeness reminded him of the large-eyed little girl she’d been, getting under his feet and suffering a bad case of hero worship. Devil take it, these days he’d give his right arm to be her hero again. He had a disagreeable suspicion that he’d proven a vast disappointment as a husband.

“I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes this morning,” Jane said, as though she addressed a stranger. “There’s something I’d like to talk about.”

He scowled at her. “You’re my bloody wife, Jane. You don’t need to make an appointment to see me like a tenant in arrears with the rent.”

Garson regretted his outburst the moment he made it. He regretted it even more when she flinched as though he’d hit her. “I’m sorry, Hugh. We’ve both been out and about so much, I thought I should check if you’ll be here.”

“Out and about” really meant staying out of one another’s way. How in hell had all the passion and laughter they’d shared led to this point? “No, I’m sorry. Would you like to talk now?”

Jane began to pleat her napkin. When she fiddled with the table linen, it was always a sign that she was troubled. “No, I’ll see you in the library, once you’re dressed and ready for the day.”

“This sounds serious,” he said, trying to make her smile.

The gray eyes she raised to his were as dull as a cloudy sky. “Yes, I rather think it is.”

Shaken, he watched as she stood and left the room without another word.

He stared after her in consternation. What in Hades was going on? Was she about to confess some wrongdoing? Silas had mentioned Harslett pursuing her. Was that by way of a warning?

Surely not. Jane wanted him. He’d lay his whole fortune that she did.

But did that mean she couldn’t want another man as well?

The thought of his wife in someone else’s arms made his empty stomach churn. He’d feared this, almost expected it. But not this soon. They’d only been married two months. She couldn’t have tired of him already.

Couldn’t she? Something was wrong. Had been wrong for weeks. Like a blockhead, he’d hoped the trouble would blow over. Now he couldn’t mistake the ax poised over his head, ready to fall.

His hand slammed down on the table, setting the china rattling and a knife bouncing to the floor. Be damned if he’d give up without a fight.

Within half an hour, Garson was downstairs. Only to find his wife already waiting in the library.

His gut knotting with inchoate dread, he paused in the doorway to study her. As she sat on the couch and stared into the fire, her expression was desolate. This wasn’t the glamorous beauty who set society in a spin. She looked, in fact, like a better dressed version of the wan creature he’d called on in Dorset. His gut gave up twisting. Instead, it constricted with creeping, freezing fear.

He’d promised to make Jane happy. Given what he saw now when she believed herself unobserved, he’d abjectly failed. Guilt rose until it tasted like bile on his tongue, and he shifted on his feet.

The movement alerted her to his presence, and she looked up. “Hugh, you’re early.”

“So are you,” he said, grimly noting that she didn’t even try to smile. He checked her hands, but they weren’t doing their nervous dance. Jane was still and composed—and that suddenly seemed the most worrying aspect of all. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was so on edge that the click of the latch rang like a death knell in his ears.

He moved to sit beside her, but she stopped him with a curiously truncated gesture. “No. Please. Sit…sit over there.”

With bad grace, he shifted to where she indicated. The chair was a few feet away, yet he felt like she exiled him to Siberia in the depths of winter. Only when he sat did he realize that the stark light streaming through the window lit him like he was on a stage and left Jane in the shadows.

“What the devil is going on, Jane?” His roiling panic flared into annoyance. He folded his arms and scowled at her. “You look like you’re about to make a dreadful confession.”

Her mouth flattened in dismal acknowledgment. “I am.”

That rancid feeling in his gut turned nastier than ever. She didn’t look like she was joking.

“Is it someone else?” To his shame, he sounded like he suffocated.

Jane’s eyes were like mirrors. The pause before her answer shredded his heart into ragged gobbets. Until this moment, he hadn’t really believed she’d taken a lover. Yet why the hell wouldn’t she? It was clear that her husband didn’t make her happy.

His raging bitterness almost made him miss her soft response. “I suppose it is.”

Garson’s world turned black as pitch, and the blood in his ears pounded like an angry ocean. “Jane?” he asked through the gathering storm.

He wasn’t even angry—yet—the hurt was too grievous. He started to rise on unsteady legs, but she made another of those keep off gestures, and he slumped back into his chair.

“Hugh, if I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?”

He felt disoriented, awaiting a disclosure, not this calm inquiry. Despite everything, he just couldn’t believe that she’d gone to another man’s bed. “I’ve always been honest with you.”

He hoped to hell it was true.

Another of those bitter little twists of her lips. “Yes, you have.”

A longer pause that felt like the silence before an execution. When her question came, it was from such an unexpected direction, it left him at a loss.

“Are you still in love with Morwenna Nash?”

He lurched to his feet. “What in Hades…”

The temper that flashed in her eyes was the first sign that Jane wasn’t as self-possessed as she strove to appear. “Please answer me.”

His brows lowered, and he glared at her. “Has someone been talking? I warned you there would be gossip.”

Her gaze remained uncompromising. “Answer my question.”

Garson ground his teeth. He hated talking about Morwenna and his old engagement. To date, the greatest failure in his life. Although his marriage promised to become a fiasco on an even grander scale. “I told you when I asked you to marry me…”

Jane rose abruptly and stepped forward into the light. He bit back an appalled exclamation. She looked strained to the point of breaking, her features bleached white beneath the deep red banner of her piled-up hair. “Yes, you did. But a lot has happened since then. I wondered if you’d changed.”

“I don’t change,” he said flatly, even as with reluctance, he visited the shrine in his heart where a beautiful black-haired woman would always reign. Did he love Morwenna? Of course he did. “‘Loyalty unto death,’ remember?”

Jane’s expression didn’t alter. She still looked like she faced the gallows. But somehow he knew that a light inside her had flickered into darkness. She twined her hands together at her waist, so tightly that her knuckles turned bloodless. “That’s what I thought.”

Gradually he found his feet in this bizarre conversation, and his brain began to link the facts together. He should be relieved she wasn’t confessing to taking a lover—by God, he was. But he found no consolation otherwise. “What’s all this about, Jane?”

She lowered her shoulders and met his eyes. The misery he read there made him flinch. “I thought perhaps if you didn’t love Morwenna anymore, there might be a chance you could come to love me.”

He recoiled as if she’d cursed him. His foreboding, building over weeks, gathered into a great crashing wave of denial. He bloody well didn’t want to hear what came next, although he had a queasy feeling he already knew what that would be. “That’s damned—”

“Because I’ve gone and done a really stupid thing, Hugh.” She went on as if he hadn’t interrupted. Then she spoke the words that forever dissolved the fragile, spun sugar confection of their life together. “I’ve broken every promise I ever made. I’ve fallen in love with you.”