Hope soared and his confusion died as his thoughts became icily clear. "Well played, Davenport," he said into the tense hush. Lightly he shook down his sleeve, palming a card.
Judith's fan snapped shut.
"You won't mind if I take a look at-"
Before he could finish the sentence, before his hand could reach to caress his opponent's cards on the table- to remove and substitute-Sebastian Davenport suddenly spoke, and the words sent a wave of nausea through the earl, bile filling his mouth.
"Permit me," George Devereux's son said, grasping his adversary's stretched wrist. "Permit me, my lord."
It was at this moment that Marcus moved. He pushed through the crowd, reaching his wife's side. He said nothing, but he grasped her elbow and the knuckles of his other hand punched into the small of her back, compelling her forward, away from the table.
She hadn't known he was there, and when she looked up at him, at the rigid set of his jaw, the fine line of his mouth, the black, adamantine eyes, she knew that he had seen it all. In that moment she fully understood what she was about to lose.
Marcus saw the dazed look in her eyes… the look of someone who has been inhabiting another world, a world of acute, single-minded concentration. He continued to compel her toward the door, oblivious of the scene still at the table.
"No…" Judith said, her voice thick. "Please, wait, just one minute… It must be completed."
The intensity in the low voice caught him off balance, and he stopped. Sebastian's voice was cold and steady in the now totally hushed room.
"May I see the card in your hand, my lord."
Sebastian's long fingers were bloodless as they gripped Gracemere's wrist, forcing his hand over to reveal the card lying snug in the palm.
Marcus turned his head slowly, although he maintained his hold on Judith. He watched in amazement as his brother-in-law slid the card from the earl's now-slack grasp. He heard his brother-in-law say, "Such an interesting pip on the corner, Gracemere. I don't think I've seen its like before. Harry, do you care to look at this card?"
Judith sighed, her entire body seeming to lose its rigidity as Harry Middleton took the card from his friend. Marcus wondered if he would ever understand anything again. And then with cold ferocity he decided that he would understand this if he had to put his wife on the rack to do so.
"March!" he spat out, and the pressure of his knuckles in the small of her back increased.
Judith made no further protest. She had now to face the one thing she'd feared more than anything.
They left Devonshire House without so much as a polite farewell and journeyed home in a silence weighted with dread. When the chaise drew up, Marcus sprang to the pavement, lifted Judith down before she had a chance to put a foot on the step, and swung her in front of him, propelling her up the steps and into the hall with his knuckles still pressed deeply into her back so she began to imagine she would always bear their imprint.
Inside, she glanced bleakly up at him. "Book room?"
"Just so." But he still didn't allow her to make unhindered progress and drove her ahead of him down the passage.
He pushed her into the room and flung the door shut with similar roughness. Judith shivered, afraid not so much of what he would do to her but of what she had done to him. He let her go as the door slammed and went to the fireplace, leaning his shoulders against the mantelshelf, his expression black as he stared at her standing silently in front of him.
"You are now going to tell me the truth," he said flatly. "It's possible you have never told the whole truth in your life before, but now you are going to do so. Everything. You will dot every "i and cross every 't,' because, so help me, if you leave anything out-if you obfuscate in any way whatsoever-I will not answer for the consequences. Now, begin."
It was the only chance to salvage anything out of the ruins. But it was a desperate chance at best. Judith took a deep breath and began at the beginning-twenty years earlier.
Marcus listened, unmoving, unspeaking, until she fell silent and the room seemed to close around them, the weight of her words a leaden pall to smother trust.
"I now understand why your brother was so anxious to make peace between us," he said, speaking slowly and carefully, articulating every word as if formulating the thought as he spoke. "Estranged from your husband, you wouldn't be much use to him, would you?"
"No," Judith agreed bleakly. What defense was there?
"So you were both looking for the perfect gull… that is the right word, isn't it? The perfect gull who would facilitate your long-planned vengeance."
Judith shook her head. "No, that's not true. I can see why you would think that, but it's not true. I didn't plot to marry you. Sebastian told the truth."
Marcus raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Deny if you can that I have been very useful to you."
"I can't deny that," she said miserably. "Any more than I can't fail to understand your anger and hurt. I ask only that you believe there was no deliberate intention to use you."
"But you didn't feel able to confide in me," he stated. "Even after matters were going smoothly between us. What have I done in these last weeks, Judith, that would deny me your trust?"
She shook her head again. "Nothing… nothing… but if I'd told you what we intended to do you would have prevented me, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, yes," he said savagely. "I would have locked you up and thrown away the key if it was the only way to prevent my wife from disgracing my honor in such despicable fashion."
Judith flushed and for the first time a note of vibrancy returned to her voice. "Gracemere got what he deserved. He's been robbing Sebastian blind for weeks now. Just as he defrauded our father… defrauded him and then accused him of cheating. Would you be so poor-spirited as to allow a man who did that to your father to go scot free? Can't you understand the need for vengeance, for justice, Marcus? The driving power that closes one's mind to all else but the need to avenge… to take back what has been stolen?"
Marcus didn't respond to this impassioned plea. Instead, he inquired in a tone of distant curiosity, "Tell me, was it pure coincidence that I received an invitation from Morcby for tonight?"
Judith's color deepened and the fight went out of her again as she saw the hopelessness of her position. "No," she confessed dismally. "Charlie-"
"Charlie? Are you telling me that you have involved my cousin in this deception… this betrayal?" His eyes were great black holes in his white face.
"Not exactly… I mean, I did ask him to procure the invitation but I didn't tell him why." She stared at him, her hands pressed to her burning cheeks, devastated by what she had said, by what he was entitled to feel.
He drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Get out of my sight! I can't trust myself in the same room with you."
"Marcus, please-" She took a step toward him.
He flung out his hands as if to ward her off. "Go!"
"Please… please try to understand, to see it just a little through my eyes," she pleaded, unable to accept her dismissal, terrified that if she obeyed him, the vast gulf yawning between them would become infinite.
He took her by the upper arms and shook her until her head whipped back and forth and she felt sick. Then his hands fell from her as if she were a burning brand, or something disgusting that he couldn't endure to touch any longer. While she stood dazed in the middle of the room, rubbing her bruised arms, he stormed out, leaving the door swinging open.