Page 34 of The Nightshade's Bride
And then it dawned on me.
I was in Ada’s room.Not my own.
"The baby?" Gideon asked, his voice low in my ear. “Is our baby still well?” His hand was hard and tight around my neck.
Oh yes, the reason he was being so solicitous was only for hisheir.
Bastard.
"I don't know," I lied, but he spanned my waist with his hard hands, fingers carefully examining where my belly still swelled.
Gideon's eyes burned with triumph at what he saw. The unmistakable evidence that I was with his child.
"You must take extra care," he instructed me, his hands weighing me down. "I think I feel movement. Do no unnecessary work. Ada will wait upon you."
She made a quick, choked noise, and Gideon frowned.
"Silence."
As I watched in surprise, he forced Ada to bring in a hot potato for my feet, then a shawl, then a book from his library, and finally my embroidery.
She did this all with a bitter, venomous look in her eyes that made me instinctively shrink from her touch.
"And when you do, you must say 'here you go, my lady,'" Gideon said. "After all, Deliverance is a lady and you are a whore."
Ada's lips tightened.
"Well?" he prompted.
"Here you go, my lady."
Her enforced obeisances were almost as unsettling as her previous cruelty had been, and I did not think she would be content in this role.
Dinners were uncomfortable affairs, and afterwards Gideon would leave the room with Ada, forcing me to listen to the hard, fleshy slaps of their bodies connecting as he took her outside in the hall.
Then he would come to my new rooms, not sharing my bed, but sitting in a chair, talking to me of strange things like herbs and colors and animals and things he planned to do with the Grayspires lands.
Why he did this, I did not know, I only waited anxiously until he was done, keeping my responses brief and minimal.
We had nothing in common. This wasn’t a normal marriage. I’d been a penniless orphan tricked into being a breeding mare for a cruel man. So why was he asking me about my day and telling me about his?
“I know you are a poisoner,” I said to him one afternoon as we sat together, me in the bed and him in a chair beside.
He raised an eyebrow at me over the newspaper.
“I haven’t poisoned you yet, have I?”
“No, but you could,” I replied.
He only shrugged.
“If I wanted you to die, I would have murdered you already. Be a good girl and I see no reason to poison you.”
“I wouldn’t give a farthing for your word!” I shot heatedly at him, but he only laughed at me.
One morning it was only Ada and I, and she took the opportunity to abuse me for the change in her fortunes.
"You better hope that baby comes out with dark eyes," she hissed. "If they’re blue Gideon will be so enraged he kills you."
