Cora (Virtue & Vice #4)

Chapter 32

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

GIDEON

H e found his wife backstage, standing alone as if waiting for him. He seized her by the arm.

“Cora. What were you thinking?”

Startled, she stared at his face, then at his hand, then back at his face. Emotions flickered over her features. Unease. Regret.

“I was having a laugh at my own expense. Letting everyone know that I could take a joke. Let bygones be bygones.” Her eyes searched his face. “It went over well, don’t you think?”

“You humiliated me. Us. The family.”

She wrenched her arm away.

“Humiliated,” she echoed. Her gaze shifted past his shoulder. He didn’t need to glance behind him to know that his mother was on his heels, determined to give Cora the dressing-down of the century and prove that she was still the undisputed matriarch of the Wentworth family. Gideon glared. She stopped in her tracks. Her face white, she turned to snag Prince Leopold’s elbow where he was standing with a courtesan. A litany of apologies and excuses flowed from Martha’s lips. Each one threw Cora beneath the train a little harder.

“I don’t know what my son was thinking in marrying her, Highness. I am certain that Gideon can find a way to annul the marriage. If not, we can have her committed. No proper woman makes such a public display. No one could fault us for putting her away after that performance. You wouldn’t, would you, Your Highness?”

Fury blossomed in Cora’s eyes.

“Committed? To an asylum? Me? For playing a song at a concert of your devising?”

Gideon felt the situation slipping out of his control. His triumph, ruined. This must be how Cora had felt all those years ago when he tricked her into playing a different bawdy house song. Now, she had turned the tables. Deliberately.

“Cora. We need to have a word. Alone.”

Damn his mother, she would not leave well enough alone.

“If necessary, ” Martha strode forward with fury snapping in her eyes. “One way or another, we will find a way to be rid of you. Gideon deserves a proper wife. Not a—a gullion .”

He ought to say something—anything—to end this disaster, but for once in his life, he couldn’t summon a single syllable.

“You are ungovernable,” his mother spat. “Nothing but a low-born, ill-mannered upstart.”

“And I always will be.” Cora spun away, her scarlet skirt flaring. “I shall consult with my brother, the Duke of Gryphon, about the feasibility of obtaining a divorce.”

Gideon was caught in an avalanche. Ice rolled through him, chilling his blood and pooling in his stomach. His mother wished to destroy what he’d so painstakingly wrought. She was succeeding, damn her.

“Cora, no?—”

She strode away without a backward glance.

“You.” He rounded on her. “Leave Cora alone.”

“I will not lose everything we have built to that woman .”

“No, you’ll lose everything by trying to keep me from her.”

Cora had been right all along. His mother loathed her. They had both made the best of the situation he had forced them into for as long as they could, but at the end of the day, there was no reconciling two strong-willed women accustomed to ruling their own worlds. There could only be strong fences and solid boundaries.

He was the one who had neglected to build those boundaries. He had set Cora up to fail all over again, and tonight, she had done it spectacularly. With enthusiasm.

Why?

Suspicion crept in. He raced through the crowd, heedless of the people who sought to congratulate him. Half of them were tipsy, a few were drunk, and most of them were…laughing.

He caught sight of her conferring with Miss Caldwell. Both women looked up, glared at him. Then the shorter blonde moved away.

“Cora.”

“I’ll see you at home, Gideon.”

“Leave us, Miss Caldwell.”

The petite woman glanced between the two of them. Apparently taking his glower seriously, she cast Cora an apologetic glance and darted away.

“You cannot leave just yet.” He knew— knew —that ordering her was not the way to handle her at any time, much less when emotions were running high, yet his words ground out past his teeth, sounding like chewed gravel.

“I find performing tiring,” she said. Her hands were clasped at her waist. “Especially in front of you.”

“Cora.”

“This was your idea, Gideon.”

“Stop fleeing from me.”

“Unlike you, I am trying not to make a scene.” Water glistened at the corners of her gorgeous eyes. She blinked rapidly. “The carriage will be here momentarily. I would like to ride home alone.”

He absorbed this information like a blow from one of his boxing opponents.

“You aren’t leaving me.”

“Give me one reason not to.”

I love you.

He nearly said it. Out loud. For anyone to hear. The truth clenched his heart. Agonizing. He had loved her from the moment he laid eyes on her from across a ballroom. Her statuesque height and glorious curves. The slope of her nose and the mischief sparkling in her green eyes, and the proud slant of her chin.

He had to tell her. Now.

But the words stuck in his throat. They shriveled into nothing before they could emerge from his lips.

He could show her with his mouth on her skin, but telling her? Handing her the dagger that could cut out his heart?

Cora turned away in disappointment.

She didn’t need him to hand her a dagger. She already possessed one of her own devising.

“I married you because I wanted to know why you’d played that cruel trick on me. I thought I had an actual shot at redemption.” Her gaze cut to his. “I wanted to know whether there was anything to the way you stared at me from the across the room weeks before you ruined me. That feeling…” She trailed off. “I have never experienced anything like it.”

He knew precisely what she was talking about. The electric frisson like a cord tied between them, so intense that neither of them could ignore it. Nor could they face it directly. Their fate.

“Nor had I,” he managed to grind out past parched lips. Her brows arched.

“Had?” she asked.

“Have.” His palms were sweating. He felt the cord that had bound them for so long fraying. “I have never felt that way about anyone but you, Cora.” I love you. The words were right there on the tip of his tongue, desperate to spill out into the open. But they remained barred behind his teeth. What did they matter, now?

“I wanted to know whether there was a man worth knowing behind that ruthless mask you wear in public. I was confident and curious enough to bet the rest of my life that there was a caring heart.”

She touched him in the center of his chest. Though the contact was gentle, Gideon rocked on his heels, dizzy like he had taken a blow to the solar plexus.

“I was wrong. It was all just another cruel trick.”

She smiled sadly and pulled back, clasping her hands in the center of her chest like a prayer. “It is one thing to hurt me on purpose. You had a reason, in a twisted sort of way. Just because your family is devoted to the worship of Wentworth’s bank doesn’t mean you can mold me into your image. You only wanted me because you couldn’t have me. Once I was yours, I was no longer the compelling ingenue or mysterious spinster. I was only plain old me. Cora. I had to be changed. Molded. Shaped into someone you could show to others without embarrassment.”

Her hands dropped to her sides. “I know what you did, Gideon.”

Her words left him standing adrift in a howling void. He was sinking. Drowning in his own cold-hearted perfidy. Found out, like a naughty schoolboy, only his punishment would be far worse than a thrashing.

“I know what you did to my family,” she said quietly. “How you created that bank run. You would have ruined my brother, who has been my closest family and best friend, the man who has stood by me no matter what, the only person who understands what it means to be constantly unwanted and perpetually on the outside…”

She bit off.

“How?” he croaked. He’d been so careful. Hunted her down like a wolf after a lamb. The rumor he started should have been untraceable back to him.

“Honey told me.” Her eyes misted, but her chin tipped upward with resolve.

“When?”

“Before the performance.”

“So that’s why you played that song. For revenge.” A servant chose this tense, awkward moment to inform them that her carriage had arrived. “I do love you.”

Her eyes flared wide. Then her gaze dropped to her feet. When she raised them again, unfathomable sadness darkened her eyes like a forest at midnight.

“You have a strange way of showing it,” she said quietly.

Cora swept out into the night as regal as the day she had ventured into the private chapel to marry him. He could not stop her, for he knew now that vows based upon coercion and manipulation were nothing more than empty promises.

As enraged as his mother had been by Cora’s performance tonight, divorce was unthinkable. Scandalous beyond repair. Victoria would be appalled.

He had to win her back. It was imperative that he find a way to fix this, for he had let her go once, and lived to regret it. He would not make the same mistake again.