The Rebel Bride by Catherine Coulter

Luncheon and dinner trays were returned to Cook with scarce a morsel taken from the plates. A firm believer in the benefits of pork restorative jelly, Cook artfully hid spoonfuls of the thick gray substance beneath a cutlet or among the sauced vegetables. “The only one who’s benefiting from my jelly is that miserable tabby,” she said to Mrs. Cradshaw, as she dished yet another uneaten plate of food into the cat’s bowl.

Kate had no idea that she was unwittingly adding to the culinary pleasure of the kitchen cat, so closely was she locked into herself.

One afternoon, after wandering into the estate room, she returned to her room and huddled into a chair close to the fireplace, pulling a cover up to her chin. She had tried so hard not to think, not to remember, that she felt as if her mind was weaving itself into circular patterns. Finally, unable to withstand the onslaught of the bitter, shadowy memories, she allowed her mind to dwell upon them, each of them in turn. As once she had sought frantically to forget, she now forced herself to recall every detail, vividly re-creating the past five months, from the moment she’d fallen dead at Julien’s feet in her duel with Harry.

She rose reluctantly sometime later to light candles against the early-winter darkness. As she carried a branch to a table near her chair, the glowing lights blended for an instant with the orange embers in the fireplace, creating a lifelike shadow that loomed upon the wall in front of her. She could almost feel Julien’s presence near to her. It was almost as if she could reach out and touch him. She had but to listen closely to hear him speak to her. The large shadow flickered and flattened into an insignificant blur.

She sank into her chair and buried her face in her hands. With appalling clarity she remembered their last night together, when she’d taunted him until, finally, his calm, impassive facade crumbled. With a fury that matched her own, he had shouted at her.

“You speak so scathingly of my unbridled passions. But listen to yourself, madam, you rant like an uncontrolled, hysterical termagant. You can’t say that you were mistaken in my character, for indeed you have never exerted the slightest effort to determine what sort of man I am. You have acted childishly, ignoring the needs and distress of everyone else around you. Your arrogance is amazing, your assumptions even more appalling. Damnation, woman, stop acting the shrew one minute and the victim the next.”

“Damn you, how can you say such a thing, how—”

“How dare I what? Speak the truth? Make you realize that this mockery of a marriage is not only of my making? How many times you have hurled at my head that you dance to my every tune? I will tell you, madam, that the piper no longer plays.”

She rushed at him with clenched fists. “You lie, just as you’ve always lied, just as you—” She raised her fists.

“Don’t do it, Kate,” he said in a voice of deadly calm. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure at this moment than to thrash some sense into you. You’ve quite nearly pushed me over the edge. Don’t give me the excuse to do it.”

“Ah, yes, your pleasure.” She drew up, panting. “I’ve been naught but an instrument for your bloody pleasure, your token countess, whom your gentleman’s code forbade you to seduce. You were forced to marry me so you could bed me, nothing more.”

“Forced to marry you?” He looked at her thunderstruck. “Is that what you believe? You witless little fool. Hear me, Kate. I could have had quite an admirable selection of women for my wife. My choice of you for my wife, as the countess of March, had very little to do with the gratification of my sexual appetites. Only your irrational refusal of me caused me to act in the way that I did, that and the dreadful way you were forced to live by that maniacal father of yours.”

“How very fortunate for you, my lord, that women find you so irresistible, else you would be forced to expend considerable energies staging your elaborate scenes.”