Prelude to Heaven by Laura Lee Guhrke

visit his mother, but during the days that had followed, it was Tess who had become the object of his rapt attention. Those days of courtship had been exciting and heady. Swept off her feet by an earl's attentions and charming manners, she had never realized what lay beneath. Only after she’d married him, had she discovered the truth.
    Tess stared down at the weed in her hand. Somehow, fate had played a cruel joke on her. Fate had given her two loving parents who had shown her what marriage and family were supposed to be like. In marrying Nigel, the man she loved, she had assumed her new life would have the same love and happiness of her old one. But that innocent assumption had been snatched away so quickly, replaced in that first month of marriage with coldness and brutality and pain. Her life had left her unprepared for such sordid emotions, and both her innocence and her love had died a quick death, and she had finally understood that there would never be enough love to fill the deep, empty hole inside her husband.
    Not even her father had been able to help her. He had died during her wedding journey. And there was no one else, a fact Nigel had never let her forget. “You're the daughter of a dead vicar,” he'd sneer. “A nobody. You have no money, no family. You have nothing. Without me, you are worthless.”
    Tess dropped to her knees and yanked another weed from the ground, anger seething up inside her. She had done nothing to deserve the horrible things Nigel had done to her. She had done nothing to deserve the humiliation, the abuse, the degradation. She had done nothing wrong. Nothing. She wasn't worthless. She would work hard and she would prove it.
    She pulled weeds at a frantic pace, remembering how Nigel had denied her gardening, one of her greatest joys. “I have made you a countess!” he'd shouted down at her the first and only time he'd found her on her knees in a flower bed. “Do you want to have callouses and dirty hands?” He had dumped the basket of weeds over her head. “Do you want to be a bloody gardener, countess?” He had pushed her down, grinding her face in the dirt. “Do you? Then you should look the part.” She could still taste the dirt in her mouth.
    Tess pushed herself harder, tearing each weed from the ground, crushing it in her hand, and throwing it onto the growing pile as if it were a piece of Nigel’s flesh. On she worked, not stopping until she reached the end of the row.
    Breathless and sweating, she paused for a moment and sat back, staring down at her dirty, green-stained hands with both pride and fury. What would Nigel say if he could see her now? She wondered if men could see earth through the flames of hell. God, she hoped so.
     
    ***
     
    Alexandre marched through the courtyard, slapping the straw hat he'd brought out for her against his thigh as he walked. He'd seen her through the window, weeding with a frantic energy that alarmed and angered him.
    She'd promised him she wouldn't do any hard work. But every day, she seemed to work longer and harder, pushing herself to do more and more and more. He didn't know what was driving her, but it had to stop. He would stop it. “Mademoiselle!”
    His shadow crossed her. She did not even pause in her task, but continued pulling weeds savagely out of the ground.
    “I did not make you my housekeeper to acquire a slave,” he told her. “Stop this.”
    She didn't. Her frantic pace only seemed to increase. “I have to finish this today. I have laundry tomorrow, and mending. And after that—”
    “Mademoiselle!” He moved to kneel in front of her, slamming the hat to the ground. He grasped her by the shoulders. “I am your employer, no? I will tell you what work you can and cannot do. And you will do as I say. The sun is hot, and you are in no condition for this sort of work.”
    She froze, her wrists locked in his hands. She looked up at him, and all the fight went out of her as quickly as it had come. Her face, flushed