‘You hesitated.’

‘No, I did not.’

He might have behaved a little crazily at times, but he was no fool. ‘Five years I have waited.’ His grip on her was bruising now. ‘Five years I have loved you and protected you like a brother, as my father wanted.’

A brother waiting for the day he could finally marry his sister. She suppressed the shudder threatening to pass through her. The relationship had been uncomfortable from day one—even before her mother had wed his father.

‘You are hurting me,’ she said when her fingers began to tingle from the lack of blood reaching them.

He held on to her a few moments longer, eyes moving between hers, then let go. ‘Forgive me. My love for you can be overbearing at times.’

Blood rushed back into her limbs. She stepped back from him—too fast. He hated it when she moved away from him like that. She expected him to grab hold of her again. When he did not, she said as gently as possible, ‘I think we should wait a few months—out of respect to your father.’

‘A few months?’

She had wanted to say a year. Two, maybe. Or as many as it took for him to find an alternative wife, someone who did not recoil inside every time he came close.

He opened his hands to her. ‘I love you. I want the world to know it, to bear witness to it.’ When she did not respond, he reached for her. She stepped backwards again, an instinct. His hands went into his hair, gripping and releasing while she stood awkwardly with her eyes averted. After a short silence, he cleared his throat and said firmly, ‘I have a trip coming up. I shall be gone a few weeks. When I return, we will marry.’

He waited for her to look at him before continuing. Not wanting to aggravate the situation further, she obliged.

‘That is one month from now,’ he went on. ‘I believe that is an appropriate amount of time for all of us to grieve the former Earl of Hereford. Do you not agree?’

She nodded. At least she hoped it was a nod.

His hands opened and closed a few times, as though he were deciding whether to attempt contact again. ‘I promise you that, as my wife, you will want for nothing. You will be Countess of Hereford in every sense of the word.’

Another nod. ‘I know.’

He watched her a long moment, then bowed his head before striding away, chin high despite the gouging to his ego. She felt numb and cold all over as she watched him, picturing a lifetime of swallowing down her own discomfort.

‘I don’t trust him,’ Ita had said of Hodge the day he arrived with Lord Tompkin and troops at Maddock House five years earlier.

Isabel had assumed her friend was jealous of the attention the then nineteen-year-old heir was showing a fifteen-year-old Isabel. But as usual, she had been right.