Three Little Secrets by Liz Carlyle Page A

nothing.”
    “It changes everything. ” There was an edge of madness in her voice now, and a feverish desperation in her face. “He paid you, he said. He paid you to go away. The equivalent of my dowry, he said. Thirty thousand pounds—the price you asked to give me up. You wished to be in business for yourself, Merrick, and you saw a way to do it.”
    Madeleine was beyond coherence now. He stood, and began to pace the room. There was no point in arguing with her, or in denying her father’s lies. Merrick felt nothing now; not even that which he deserved to feel. Wrath. Pain. Righteous indignation. There was just that cold, numb sensation in his chest where his heart should have been. It was better, he supposed, that the jolt of raw lust he had felt upon seeing her in his office.
    But beyond all the lies and the lust and the grief, one thing was profoundly clear. Whether or not she had ever loved him, he horrified her now. “I am sorry, Madeleine,” he said hollowly. “I would that we had never laid eyes on one another. Life would have been much less empty. And I wish you had not come back to London. But there was no annulment, Madeleine. There was no money. When you can bring yourself to think on it, you will know the truth.”
    “Oh, God!” Madeleine squeezed her eyes closed. “Geoffrey!”
    “Geoffrey?”
    “My son,” she whispered.
    Dear Lord. The boy by the well?
    “Please, Merrick,” she begged. “Please say no more of this business. I could not bear it if people called him—”
    “They won’t dare!” he interjected sharply. “People will call him nothing , Madeleine. Good God, do you think I mean to hang our laundry in Mayfair? Do you think I stood idly by for all those years whilst you lived with another man and called him your husband, just so I might stir up a scandal now? Do you think I am proud of what my marriage has come to?”
    “You—you are rich now,” she whispered. “You could have divorced me—if what you say is true.”
    “Not this side of hell, my dear,” he returned. “You’ll go to your grave wishing for that.”
    “I—I don’t wish it!” she cried.
    “No, you do not,” he agreed. “It is a vile, very public process, and your son would surely be ruined then.”
    “All I wish is to be left alone,” she said. “To live out my life in peace.”
    “In that, madam, I can oblige you,” he said. “I have no interest in cutting up your peace, or even of laying eyes on your again, if possible. You are dead to me, Madeleine. As dead as you were the day you climbed into your father’s carriage, and abandoned me to my fate.”
    She winced at his words, but did not back down. “Very well, then,” she said. “Kindly take back your house.”
    “No. I shan’t.”
    It was irrational, he knew. He had told himself that a man should put a roof over his wife’s head, that it was his duty, no matter who she was or what she had done. But did he somehow imagine that if he forced it on her, she would be any more his? The legalities of the matter aside, she was not his and never would be.
    “I am not a poor woman, Merrick,” she whispered. “But I have lived almost all my life under the thumb of one man or another. Until four years ago, I had never chosen anything— anything —for myself, save for the occasional bolt of dress fabric. I have always had what everyone else thought I needed. Have you any idea what that is like?”
    The truth was, he did not. And what did it really matter now? She loathed him, and he loathed her. Whatever she had done, it was what she had not done which haunted him.
    Roughly, he cleared his throat. “Seven thousand pounds, then.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “The price of the house,” he said. “If you still want it. And Madeleine?”
    “Yes?”
    He did not look directly at her, nor did he approach her again. He knew better. “Pray do not come here again. Deal with Rosenberg.”
    “Very well.” The words were a soft whisper, followed