'Twas the Night After Christmas by Sabrina Jeffries Page B

frown. “Probably for the same reason you don’t wish to talk about your relationship with your mother. Because it’s private.”
    He ignored that. “Did your husband mistreat you?” he asked in a hard voice. “Is that why you don’t wish to discuss him?”
    “Certainly not!” she said, appalled at the very thought. “You always assume the worst of people, don’t you? He was a vicar, for pity’s sake.”
    “That means nothing,” he said evenly. “Men who mistreat women exist in every corner of society, trust me.”
    “Well, my husband didn’t mistreat anyone. He was a crusader for the poor and the sick.”
    “Yet not in love with you?” Before she could answer, he added, “Let me guess. He saw you at the orphanage and determined that you would be the perfect helpmeet for him in his work.”
    She shot him a startled glance. “How did you know?”
    He shrugged. “The average crusader tends to see women only as an extension of his mission.”
    “That’s a most astute comment for an overgrown child.”
    He walked over to lean against a bedpost. “Children often pay better attention to their surroundings than adults give them credit for.”
    “Another astute observation,” she said.
    “I have my moments.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “So how did you end up married to this crusading vicar? You seem the kind of woman who would marry only for love.” His eyes glittered obsidian in the candlelight. “Did he tell you that he didn’t loveyou? Or did he pretend to be enamored of you until after he got you leg-shackled for life?”
    “You’re very nosy, aren’t you?”
    “If you have nothing to hide, why should you care?”
    Since she preferred to keep her most important secrets from him, she should probably fob him off with inconsequential ones. “If you must know, he never pretended anything. We’d been friends a few years when he made his proposal. He pointed out that he needed a woman of my skills, and I could use a home and a family. So he suggested—” She caught herself with a scowl. “I don’t know why I should tell you this. I haven’t even told your mother. Then again, she was never so rude as to pry.”
    “No, Mother isn’t much interested in anyone’s situation but her own.”
    She glared at him. “That’s not true! She’s kind and thoughtful and—”
    “Don’t change the subject,” he bit out. “You were saying that your vicar gave you a most practical proposal. Go on. Didn’t he spout any romantic drivel to get you to accept him?”
    A pox on him. He was going to push her until he knew it all, wasn’t he? And if she refused to tell him, she risked having him delve deeper into her past, which she couldn’t afford.
    “Kenneth wasn’t the romantic sort,” she said tersely. “If he felt anything deeper than friendly affection for me, he didn’t say. For him, our marriage was more of a fair trade in services.”
    “That sounds cold-blooded even to me, and I’m definitely not the ‘romantic sort.’ ”
    “What a surprise,” she muttered.
    “So, was it? A fair trade, I mean.”
    She pushed up her spectacles. “Fair enough . . . until his heart failed him three years after we married, and he left me a widow.”
    “Ah, now I understand. You married him because he was older, more mature—”
    “I married him because he offered,” she said blandly, annoyed that he presumed to know so much when he knew so little. “And he was only a few years older than you. The doctor told me that it happens like that sometimes, even to young men in good health. One day Kenneth was well; the next he was gone.” Leaving her alone with an infant, very little money, and her grief.
    Some of her distress must have showed on her face, for he said, “You loved him.”
    The earl had misunderstood entirely, but she wasn’t about to explain how complicated even a loveless marriage became when there was a child involved. She’d sought to build a family; instead she’d