Sugar and Spice

"Please." To her horror, Gwendolyn Farrell felt tears well up in her eyes. She blinked them back, not wanting Adam to see just how desperate she was. He could not refuse her. His refusal would toll the death knell of their marriage, a marriage that she was not willing to give up on. Not yet. Not until she had done everything humanly possible to win him back, to make him love her even just a tiny fraction as much as she loved him.

She gazed at the man in front of her, at the hard planes of his face and the even harder look in his eyes. Being married to him was supposed to be her dream come true. Instead, it had turned into a waking nightmare.

She swallowed convulsively. The very worst of it was that he was in no way to blame. Their estrangement, the utter desolation of their marriage, was all her fault.

"You want me to come away with you to a house in the country " His lip curled into a sneer. "It sounds like hell."

"Would you not like to take a week's holiday out of the London fog and the miasma of the City " Almost imperceptibly she inched closer to him, hoping to persuade him with her closeness if she could not persuade him with her words. "To walk in the fields and along the rocky beaches, and breathe the clean sea air "

"The country I could handle. But the company "

"It would just be me." Despair, thick and black, boiled up in her soul. He had to come with her. Her happiness, her very life depended on it. "There would be no one else there you know."

He lifted one eyebrow. "Exactly."

"You have to come." She could not hide the pleading tone in her voice.

"And if I do not What then, princess Will you bribe the footmen to waylay me, truss me up like a goose ready for the oven, and deliver me to you "