“Anyway, Darce and I did some catching up, and then I lost abysmally at blackjack, so I had to keep playing until I’d dug myself out of the hole.”
Alarm bells began to ring faintly in my head. I didn’t like the sound of any of that, but then he pulled out a wad of cash, tossing it to the dressing table where most of it slid to the floor.
“And so I did,” he finished up, giving a bow. He was trying to charm me, I think, but I was in no mood, and I turned away, my robe fluttering.
“Well, thank god for that,” I told him, leaning down to pick up the bills that had fallen. “I would’ve been furious if you’d given all of Daddy’s money to some cruise ship gambler.”
My father had given us a honeymoon gift, you see. Fifty thousand dollars to spend as we saw fit, and it had been a joke between us since the morning after the wedding, what would we spend Daddy’s money on?
A camel, I had suggested, and then we’d wondered how much camels even cost and if you could buy one in Europe at all.
The crown jewels of England, Duke had decided, and I reminded him that, while fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money, I wasn’t sure it could buy that treasure.
So you see, I wasn’t trying to anger him or shame him. I wasn’t pleased with Duke, of course, and maybe that made the words sound more waspish than they were, but I thought I was pulling him into a familiar joke.
I straightened up, the money in my hand, quite a lot of it, and as I went to set it back on the dressing table, I thought to myself, Maybe Duke is the lucky one, not me.
And then he punched me.
Not a slap, but a closed-fist punch to my left cheek that made stars explode in my vision and sent me half slumping against the table. My bare feet tangled in my nightgown and robe, and I fell then, landing hard on my backside with my mind so dazed I hardly knew which way was up.
It didn’t hurt, not then. Or perhaps my brain was so busy trying to process the fact that my husband had just hit me that there was no room for anything else.
I felt like some kind of stunned animal lying there, looking up at him, blinking stupidly into that handsome face that, just hours before, I’d held in my hands as I’d kissed him on the deck, the night wind ruffling his hair.
It was the disorientation I remember the most. The feeling that I had just been violently hurled from a life I understood into one that made no sense at all.
“I don’t need your father’s fucking money,” Duke said, sniffing as he pulled the tie out from under his collar and tossed it on the bed. “Besides, that’s my money now, do you understand? And I’ll do what I want with it.”
He stepped over me to make his way to the en suite, and when I heard the door shut and the sink begin running, I made myself stand up, my legs shaking.
My cheek had finally begun to throb, but the rest of me was numb as I made my way to the dressing table, picking up a tissue to wipe away my lipstick. I didn’t meet my eyes in the mirror, didn’t want to see the bruise I knew was forming because then it would be real. This would all be real.
I have no idea how I slept that night, but somehow, I did, and when I woke in the morning, Duke was leaning over me, his hand—the same hand that had hit me so hard the night before—gently cradling my face.
“Christ, I’m a beast,” he murmured softly, his voice so tender. “I know better than to drink gin, and now look what I’ve done.”
“It’s all right,” I told him.
I know. I still can’t believe I said that. I can’t believe that in that moment, I genuinely felt sorry for him. He looked so sad. So remorseful.
And how benevolent I felt, laying my palm against his cheek and looking into his eyes and telling him I knew he hadn’t meant it, that this wasn’t who he was, that of course it was the gin, and I knew it would never happen again.
But I think even then I knew I was lying to myself.
My cheek turned a light purple, then a sort of sickly yellow green, and I covered it with makeup, and laughed at dinner about how too much champagne and the rolling of the ship had sent me into the side of my dressing table, whoopsie-daisy! And the other couples we ate dinner with at night laughed, and teased me when the waiter opened a fresh bottle of bubbly, and I pretended not to see the understanding—the pity—in some of the wives’ eyes.
He didn’t raise a hand to me for the next two days of that voyage, though. There was the fight with the earrings I told you about, but he was sober then, and I was the one who’d indulged in too many martinis before dinner, crying with rage because I found out he had canceled the Italian portion of our trip without telling me, preferring to linger in France once he’d heard from Darcy Butler that “several of the old gang” would be staying there.