“Do you honestly want me to believe that, Meggie?” He spoke very quietly.
She backed away from him, a good two steps. She said slowly, “Have I ever lied to you?”
“You lied by omission.”
“Ah, that’s a grand sin, isn’t it? Will you chew on that until your jaw locks? No, that was rhetorical. Have I ever lied to you, Thomas?”
He was silent. She opened her mouth, but he raised his hand. “No, be quiet. I’m thinking. We were together a goodly amount of time before we married. I’m trying to remember if you lied to me.”
Now it was Meggie who began pacing that dismal gloomy room. It was filled with shadows and every step she took sent her into deeper gloom. She hated gloom, she knew too well how it felt inside her. He turned to look out the window again, at the beautiful moon that glistened over the water.
It was magic, a night like this.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t remember you ever lying to me.”
“Well, good,” she said, nearly at a loss for words since she’d fully expected him to come up with something. She was only human, after all. “Then may we please try to begin again, Thomas?”
“Meggie,” he said, staying where he was, which was very far away from her indeed, “what if I loved another woman and couldn’t have her, then I married you, all without telling you a thing about her.”
Meggie stopped cold. She was shaking her head, then she stopped that too. She stared across the gloom at him. “Oh dear,” she whispered. “Oh dear.”
“Yes,” he said. “There is that, isn’t there?”
“I would throttle you if I found out. I would stomp you into the mud. I would shave your head and blacken your eyes, both of them. Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of the shoe on the other foot.”
He was pleased, but he wasn’t about to let her see it. “What I did to you was bad enough—forcing you on our wedding night.”
“No, what was worse was the last time when you just went away from me and didn’t say a single thing. That is horrid, Thomas. Please, don’t do that again. If you want to stomp me, I will allow it.”
She’d walked into the moonlight again, and that peach thing she was wearing shimmered all the way from her breasts to the floor. He could see too much of her.
“If I slam out of this room, I will be in the White Room again, your room.”
“Please don’t leave me,” she said and came up to him. She didn’t touch him, just stopped an inch short and looked up at him. “Thomas, why did you marry me?”
“Because I love you, you twit, because I believed you loved me as well.”
“But you never said anything about love to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He said very slowly, “Because there was just something about you, Meggie, something that made me understand how very young you were, how very innocent, untouched. You weren’t ready for that.”
“All that young and innocent, yet you believed I loved you? That it wasn’t some sort of schoolgirl infatuation?”
“I sometimes hate the way your brain works.”
“So does my family.” She sighed. “There is so much going on here at Pendragon. There is the someone who doesn’t want me here, enough to try to kill me. Then there’s you, Thomas. You don’t know whether you want to strangle me or kiss me or just slam out of the room.”
“If you are giving me a choice, then I would prefer to kiss you.” He had to touch her breasts, had to mold his fingers around her through that satin, and so he did and he closed his eyes as he cupped her in his palms, as his fingers roved over her.
He felt her pushing against his hands, and he opened his eyes. He smiled down at her. “I believe you want me as badly as I want you.”
“More,” Meggie said. “You taught me, Thomas, and you taught me well.” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his mouth. “Please open to me,” she whispered and he did, and all his heat, all the strength of him, all his passion and the immense hurt she’d dished out to him, it was all in that kiss, in the way he held her so tightly, she believed her ribs would crack, and then she just didn’t care.