Chapter 67 Stuck between two men (11)
Third person POV:
Afterward, in the drawing room, the truth began to unravel.
Lady Whiston who had never liked Arabella and liked scandal even more cornered Lady Langley by the piano forte.
“My dear, have you heard? They say the storm drove certain guests quite out of their senses. One young lady was discovered in a most compromising position with two gentlemen masked, of course, but the descriptions…”
She lowered her voice to a delighted hiss.
“Tall, dark, and fair. And married, poor creature.”
Lady Langley’s smile froze.
Across the room, Clarissa, who had been pretending to study a book of engravings, looked up sharply.
Her gaze found Arabella’s, held, and widened with sudden, horrified understanding.
Sebastian entered then, drawn by some instinct.
He took in the tableau Lady Whiston’s malicious glee, Lady Langley’s dawning fury, Clarissa’s white face and moved to Arabella’s side with the lethal grace of a panther.
“Something amiss, madam?” he asked Lady Whiston, voice silk over steel.
Lady Whiston faltered, but gossip was stronger than fear. “Only some wives forget their duty, Your Grace.”
Sebastian’s smile could have frozen the Thames. “Some wives,” he said softly, “are more dutiful than the world deserves.”
He offered Arabella his arm. She took it with fingers that trembled.
In the corridor outside, he did not release her.
“Walk with me,” he said. It was not a request.
They ended in the small octagonal room that overlooked the rose garden, private, quiet, the door locked behind them with a soft, final click.
Sebastian turned her to face him. For the first time since their wedding, his mask slipped entirely.
“You are with child,” he said.
The words struck her like a blow.
“I…How could you possibly…”
“I know your body now, Arabella. The way you taste when you spend, the way you cry when you are over-wrought, the way your courses have not come since the night of the storm.”
His hand settled, very gently, over her still-flat belly. “And I know I have spilled inside you often enough that the odds favour me.”
Terror and a wild, treacherous hope warred in her chest.
“It could be…” She could not finish.
“Edmund’s,” he supplied, voice rough. “Yes. I am aware.”
He cupped her face, thumbs stroking the tears she had not realised were falling.
“I do not care,” he said fiercely. “It will bear my name. It will be raised as mine. But Arabella…”
His voice cracked, the first time she had ever heard it do so. “I cannot watch you destroy yourself for him any longer. I cannot watch you tear yourself in two.”
She tried to pull away; he held her gently but inexorably.
“I love you,” he said, the words torn from him like a confession under torture.
“God help me, I love you so much it is killing me to share even the air you breathe. Choose, Arabella. Choose now, or I will choose for you.”
The door opened without a knock.
Edmund stood on the threshold, face pale as death.
“I heard,” he said simply. “Every word.”
He stepped inside, closed the door, and leaned back against it as though his legs would no longer hold him.
“Tell her,” he said to Sebastian, voice raw. “Tell her what you told me this morning.”
Sebastian’s jaw worked. For a moment Arabella thought he would refuse.
Then, “I offered him twenty thousand pounds and a passage to the Continent if he would leave and never return.”
Edmund laughed, a broken sound. “He thinks money will buy what my heart cannot surrender.”
He looked at Arabella then, eyes ancient with grief.
“I will fight him,” he said quietly. “Dawn tomorrow. Pistols. I will kill him or die trying, and either way you will be free of one of us.”
“No,” Arabella whispered. “No, please…”
Sebastian’s grip tightened. “There will be no duel.”
Edmund’s smile was terrible. “Then you will have to kill me here and now, Ashford. Because I will not leave her.”
The two men stared at each other across the narrow room, love and hate and desperation crackling between them like the storm that had passed.
Arabella felt the child quicken inside her impossible, so early, and yet she swore she felt it, a tiny life caught already in the same web that was tearing its parents apart.
She stepped between them, placing one hand on each broad chest.
“Stop,” she said, and her voice did not shake. “Both of you.”
She looked at Sebastian, his fierce, beautiful face carved with torment.
She looked at Edmund, the boy she had loved since she was sixteen, now a man prepared to die for her.
Then she did the only thing left that might save them all.
“I choose neither of you,” she said.
Sebastian made a sound like a wounded animal.
Edmund closed his eyes as though she had struck him.
“I choose the child,” she continued, voice steady now. “And I choose myself. You have both had pieces of me until there was nothing left. No more.”
She stepped back, out of reach of both.
“I will stay married to you, Sebastian, because the world allows me no other choice. But I will not share my bed, or my heart, or my body with either of you again until you learn that love is not ownership.”
She turned to the door. Neither man moved to stop her.
At the threshold she paused, hand on the latch.
“And if either of you raises a pistol, a sword, or even a harsh word against the other,” she said without looking back, “I will take this child and disappear where neither of you will ever find us. That is my bargain. Take it, or lose everything.”
She left them there two proud, broken men staring at the space where she had been, and walked alone into the bright, unforgiving morning.
Behind her, for the first time in weeks, silence reigned.
The war was over.
The reckoning had only just begun.