"You must tell me all, else I will consider myself released from the promise."

"Oh." She hadn't realized that even as she had trapped him into making his promise, he had trapped her even more neatly. "How did he punish you?"

"He would restrain me with rope and he would administer punishment." Her heart pounded with her audacity to share this secret, to actually betray Dr. Meeker. Even though she had longed to tell James this, it still felt like the worst disloyalty to a man who had only wanted to help her.

"How did he punish you?" James' tone was harsher, commanding, compelling her to obey.

"He used a cane." The words slipped from her, her voice hushed as though that might mitigate the wrongness in the betrayal of Dr. Meeker, and yet she felt a tremendous load lift off her shoulders, as now that she had told, she knew that Meeker could never hurt her again. James would never allow it. Still, one final shudder over the matter shook her frame. "How I hated that cane."

She could feel the tension in his body, radiating on the air like that feeling one senses moments before a storm.

"You hated it." His voice was harsh, oddly hushed. "Yet, you defend him again and again."

"He saved my life. And perhaps he saved my sanity too, time will tell."

"There's naught wrong with your sanity. I tell you this over and over. Why do you value his word over mine?"

"He is a learned doctor! Who are we to question him?"

"He may be a doctor but he wronged you."

"He had the best intentions. It is my fault that I couldn't tolerate his methods. I suppose I have been too coddled in my life. I could no' bear a little well-deserved discipline from someone who only wanted to help me reform."

"Are those his words? Did he say he believed you were too coddled? Too ungrateful for his discipline?" James had practically spat the last word.

"He didn't mean it unkindly."

"He did more than cane you, didn't he?"

She breathed, slow and long inhalations, trying to draw the strength to answer. "Yes."

"Christ."

"He had to. I had to be retrained."

"Exactly what did he intend to retrain you to do?"

"To come only for a man, for a husband."

She could sense James' whole body having gone rigid beside her.

"And he substituted himself as a husband?"

She nodded slowly, each motion painful.

"How?"

"You mean how did he..."

"Yes." Pain resounded in his tone.

"His hand. He touched me-intimately..." Her voice broke. It was difficult to breathe. Cold queasiness spread through her stomach. She could see herself bound and spread open to the doctor's flinty dark stare. She could see the blue-veined hands, the thick, knobby veins that shone through skin as white and papery dry and rough as coarse parchment. She could feel their iciness as he touched her, relentlessly trying to force her to feel things she could not. Dr. Meeker's voice, full of sorrow, admonishing her for holding herself back from him. Telling her that he was only trying to help.

She was the uncooperative one. The ungrateful one.

James released his breath loudly. "And you made me promise not to kill this blackguard?"

"I consented to his treatments."

"Treatment?" The word sounded torn from him. "It was no proper medical treatment, and you were in no fit mental state to consent to anything."

"It is the latest thinking from some of the most learned medical minds of our times. The tension a woman carries in her womb can drive her mad, just as it did me. He was only trying to redirect my sexual energies so that I could more properly-"

"Oh damnation, Catriona, can you truly be so nave? Can you possibly be so blind?"

"He was only attempting to help."

"No, he wasn't! For God's sake, see it for what it was. He was having it off with you!"

At his tone, which shook her very bones with its outrage, shame burnt her. "He was my doctor. Aunt Frances called for him."

Her voice went very small, for the final effects of James' angry yet self-confident tone hit her, searing through layers upon layers of assurance that Dr. Meeker had laid there. Soft blankets of assurance that had comforted her in her darkest moments.

Yet, now, it was as if an obscuring fuzziness had been lifted and she could see clearly, even if for just the briefest glance.

Could Meeker really be the blackguard that James insisted he was?

James was intelligent, shrewd, and a fine, able judge of character. He had known many types of men in all kinds of situations.

James would never lie to her. He would never intentionally hurt her. This she just knew in her bones.

But she'd often had her doubts about Meeker, especially of late.

And for once, that thought was not accompanied by the pangs of guilt and a feeling of having betrayed a protector.

Oh, God!

Had she been such a poor judge of character? All this time?

Well, why not? She'd been lost, utterly lost in every other way.

That little thread of doubt she had struggled to deny for months came undone, much like a loose thread unraveling a ball of yarn tossed down the stairs. Thoughts and emotions hurled themselves through Sunny's mind.

What if she had had this whole matter the wrong way around?

What if Meeker had truly been having it off with her, as James had so angrily put it?

Oh God, oh God, oh God!

Emotion churned within her. The fierce wave overwhelmed her.

Make it stop!

But it would not stop. Her doubt, now brought sharply to the surface, would not be suppressed again. In its wake came anger. Her long-denied anger.

A spell had been broken. Yes, that was what it was like. Her anger became a fist striking a mirror, shattering the glass and revealing an open window to the outside, letting light into the darkest corners of her mind.

I have been asleep. Walking and talking, yet my mind has been submerged.

Her anger turned toward herself. She had told Meeker every secret of her marriage. Things she ought never to have told anyone. Freddy's deepest shame shared with another. What kind of wife did such a thing?

She moaned and covered her ears, wishing she could quiet the accusing voices in her head.

Faithless wife!

Faithless!

Her inner voices screamed with self-loathing, with shame and the heaviest guilt.

She clutched her hands over her ears tighter. "No!" she moaned. The bed rocked again and James' weight settled against her. He pulled the quilt down and then his hands clasped her shoulders and he pulled her against himself.

How strong and solid he felt. He could protect her against Meeker and whatever else the world could throw at her.

But he couldn't protect her from her own weaknesses, her own shortcomings.

He caressed her back. "Darling, darling, you are not to blame."

At his gentle tone, something broke inside her. She choked on a sob, feeling tears burning at her eyes and her throat. She swallowed hard against the sensation.

"Oh mercy, you are right about Meeker." She sobbed. "I could no' see it."

"You had an inkling."

"I had doubts but I was too afraid to act on them. Too cowardly."

"That's not true at all. You came to me. That was right. That was brave."

"I suppose. But it was also selfish of me. You are an important man and you have higher duties than to play nursemaid with me here and hold my hand."

His arms tightened on her. His lips brushed the top of her head. "Shh, shh, I'll hold your hand for as long as you need me to."

She couldn't picture a time when she wouldn't need that from him. Already she'd grown too dependent on the warm, safe feeling it gave her when he coddled her like this.

"Oh, James, it is so bad. Terrible."

"What is?"

"I should no' have told Meeker all the secrets of my marriage. They weren't mine alone to share; they belonged to Freddy too."

"You've told me."

How could she tell him that he didn't know all? She took a deep breath and continued. "You are a Blayne, you were Freddy's cousin. It does no' seem so bad."

"Hush, you had to tell someone. Meeker tricked you into trusting him."

Yes, she would have gone completely mad if she had not been able to share her inner hell with Dr. Meeker at the time. "I should have been able to see it. I can see it all so clearly now. Why can I see it now but could not then?"

His large hand cradled her head. "You were nearly prostrate with grief, you were not yourself-you were in no state to make clear judgments or protect yourself. Then they kept you drugged and unsure of yourself. I should have been there."

"How could you have been there?" She could hear the sobbing catches in her breath, coming in between her words.

"I don't know." His voice sounded strangled. "But I should have been there to protect you when no one else could."

"There was a war." There was a ludicrousness to her simple statement, made to a man who had fought in that war, who had known nothing but risk and peril. She hadn't even been able to survive a marriage and the death of her husband.

"What the hell was wrong with Aunt Frances," he said.

"She did what she thought was best."

"She behaved like a hysterical peahen."

"That is unkind."

"They have all treated you as a criminal."

"You don't know me, not fully. You don't know the things I have done!"

"You had an affaire with a servant."

"Well, that's not all."

"What else is there?"

"I killed Freddy!"

"Nonsense. His heart gave out."

The assurance in his voice enraged her. The lies had been spread so easily. Lies told to protect her.

Her heart broke. "Did it?"

"Didn't it?"

"No." She sat then yanked impatiently at the fallen shoulder of her chemise. "You've been told the same fictions as the rest of the world."