Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

" W hat are you doing in here?" Matthew asked.

He felt as if he had been lifted out of his body somehow, looking at her with his sketchbook open in front of her. How could this be happening again? Hadn't he made it clear to her that she wasn't to snoop around in his things?

"You left it here," Cressida defended herself. "I thought that meant it would be all right for me to look."

"You can't possibly have thought that." He was shaking with anger.

And something more than anger. Something much more painful and difficult to cope with.

Fear.

She had discovered his secret.

He had seen the way she was looking at that picture. There was no way she didn't know.

She knew the thing he had kept to himself for so long—the thing that no one knew.

He stormed into the room, grabbed the book, and slammed it closed, as if by doing so he could somehow erase what she had seen from her mind. As if he could startle her out of remembering that she had seen it, or make her fail to understand the implications.

And she did jump when the book slammed closed, but her gaze never wavered. Her eyes remained glued to his face. "Matthew—what was that? That picture. That little boy was you. I would recognize you anywhere. But who was the woman in the picture with you?"

Deny , he thought. She couldn't know. Nobody could know this.

But this was Cressida. She was halfway there already. He could see it in the expression on her face. It wouldn't take much for her to figure out what she thought she knew. And if he tried to deny it…who could say what the effect would be? Perhaps he would only nudge her closer to the truth by making her feel as if he was trying to cover something up.

He cursed her for putting him in this position to begin with. Things had been going perfectly well between the two of them—he should never have had to lie to her. It wasn't something he wanted to do. He didn't feel good about it. He didn't even know if he was capable of the kind of deception that the situation required.

He was going to have to try. "It's only a drawing," he said. "You shouldn't be looking at my drawings without my permission, Cressida. I don't know what makes you think you have the right to do that. What were you doing in my study in the first place?"

"I was bringing you a gift," she snapped, pointing, and for the first time, Matthew noticed the large canvas in the room. He had been so preoccupied by everything else that he had somehow simply failed to notice it.

A touch of anger left his body as he thought of Cressida making the arrangements to get this for him. The canvas was of wonderful quality, and it was large enough to make a magnificent portrait. Already, he looked forward to beginning to paint…

But, no. What was he going to do, make a painting of himself with Cressida? Display that in his home? He couldn't even look at her right now, not knowing that she had seen this drawing. His deepest secret—oh, how could he have failed to put his sketchbook away? He had known that she was in the house, and she had always been so curious about everything, never hesitating to stick her nose in where it didn't belong. He should have expected something like this. If he was honest with himself, he would have to concede that it was his fault she had seen the drawing.

And yet, he couldn't bring himself to admit that, not even in his own mind. She shouldn't have been here. She shouldn't have been looking at his things.

"Leave my study," he said, his voice tight.

But she remained. She rose slowly to her feet, but she made no move to approach the door. "The woman in the drawing," she said. "I really want to know, Matthew. Won't you tell me who she was?"

Matthew pressed his lips together.

He had never felt so out of control in all his life, and the feeling terrified him.

This was Cressida. This was the lady he had been developing feelings for. Not just his wife, but a lady he had kissed on multiple occasions now. A lady he had thought he was beginning to love—and he had actually managed to feel some excitement about that fact, not just anxiety and dread. He had never imagined himself in a marriage based on love, but with her it had begun to seem possible.

Still, it was frightening. And it was made all the more frightening by what was happening here right now, because how could she love him if she realized the truth? If she knew his darkest secret—the one that no other living person in the world knew—she would run from him. He was sure of it.

There was only one way to take back control of this situation. The thought filled his mind with dread as it occurred to him. It was not something he wanted to contemplate. But if it meant preventing her from rejecting him, the way she surely would if she knew…

"Matthew," Cressida said slowly, "you drew that woman as if she was your mother. That's a drawing of a mother and child."

Matthew's blood turned to ice.

"But I saw your family portrait," she continued. "Your father's wife…this isn't her. This isn't your sisters' mother."

He couldn't speak.

"If your father had been previously married," she said, "if you had had a different mother than your sisters, and then she had died…"

"She did die." He bit the words out. "She died giving birth to me. This scene never happened."

"But then why wouldn't you have told me about it?" she asked him. "Why are you acting like this now—as if I caught you doing something shameful? To lose your mother in that way must have been painful, and I understand why the memory causes you grief, but it's nothing to hide from me. We could have talked about it."

He couldn't even look at her. Even now, she was making the most charitable assumption. Even now, she was willing to believe the best, to guess that something untrue might explain what was going on here.

He should have seized upon her explanation. She was the one who was offering it to him, after all. He should have accepted it…but he couldn't. He couldn't speak the words that would allow her to believe in the lie.

"That's not what happened," she realized. "At least, that's not all of it."

He pressed his lips together.

"The woman in the picture—she wasn't a lady," Cressida said. "She wasn't noble. The way she was dressed…that was a commoner."

He had to say something. "A maid," he said. His voice was so tight that the words hurt as he spoke them. "She was a maid in my father's house."

"Your father had an affair," Cressida whispered.

Matthew closed his eyes.

"Who else knows?"

"Nobody knows."

"Lavinia? Edwina?"

Matthew shook his head once, jerkily.

She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not going to say anything," she said. "If that's what you're worried about. I'm not going to tell anyone about this."

Cressida might have thought that was reassuring, but to Matthew, it felt like a slap. She might as well have told him outright that she agreed with his decision to keep this a secret, that his hidden history really was something to be ashamed of and that she understood why he had never wanted to tell anyone. Maybe she was even trying to say that she felt shame over being married to an illegitimate son, and that the worst thing she could imagine was for someone else to find out about that shame.

He felt as if he was choking.

How could he have left the sketchbook out? How could he have left such a life-ruining secret where she would be able to find it? Everything was destroyed now, and he knew that it was all his own fault. He couldn't even blame her for having looked at it, given the fact that it had just been sitting there.

"Matthew," she said quietly. "We can talk about this, you know. If your father cared for her then she must have been special. And for you to take the time to draw this scene—this thing that never happened…I'm your wife, Matthew. You can confide in me. Whatever you're feeling about all this, you can tell me."

But he couldn't. He had kept it all inside, kept it to himself, for far too long. He wasn't ready to talk about his sordid family history with anyone else, not even Cressida. He did believe that she truly cared, but could she love an illegitimate son?

It was the thing that had held him back from the idea from marriage all this time. It was the thing he had never been able to face. Now he had to face it.

"I'll go to my house in the country," he told her.

He couldn't look at her. He couldn't stand to see the expression on her face. He was too afraid—and too certain—that what he would see there would be relief. That she would be glad to be rid of him.

"What?" she asked, after a long pause. "We're going to the country?"

"I'm going to the country. You'll stay here. You'll have this house for yourself. I'll leave the majority of the staff to tend to your needs."

"Matthew—what are you talking about?"

Grief welled up in him, but he couldn't allow himself to feel that. He pushed it away, shoved it down, and allowed his anger at the terrible position in which he found himself to come in and fill him up. He directed that anger at Cressida. It was all he could do to keep himself from falling apart.

"You should never have been in my study," he told her. "I've told you not to pry through my things, and now I come home and find you with your nose in my sketchbook. You should have known better, Cressida. Haven't I told you that it's private? Was I unclear in some way about that?"

"Yes, you were! You let me look at it once before," she reminded him.

"And you thought that gave you free license to do so whenever you wanted moving forward?"

"I didn't know you would have added new drawings."

"Don't be so silly."

"All right, I guessed you might have—but yes, I thought it would be all right for me to see them! Matthew, I couldn't have known that you would have drawn something so personal—but it doesn't matter, don't you see? Now I know the truth, and we can?—"

"No," he cut her off. "Now we can nothing. I cannot have a wife who would go behind my back in this way. I cannot be married to someone I can't trust."

Cressida stared at him, her lips slightly parted in shock, and Matthew hated the way—even now—he found himself longing to kiss her.

"Our marriage can never be anything more than it was the day we said our vows," he told her. "We will be together in name only—and right now, I don't believe we can even share a house. I will go away and live in the country, and this house will be yours, and that will be the end of things between the two of us."

He turned and walked out of the room as quickly as he could, needing to get away before the emotions that threatened to overwhelm him could make themselves known.

He couldn't allow her to see the expression on his face—to see how difficult and painful all this truly was for him.

He had to keep it inside.