He rested his head in her lap again, and Elise thought she felt him shudder, which caused her dam to burst. “I love you,” he whispered, his cracking voice raw with emotion. “If you refuse to marry me, then the title dies with me because I will never marry another.”
She tried to get him to see reason. Using the same tone of voice she used when trying to convince someone of the rightness of an idea she said, “You might love me, but you don’t trust me, Michael. In the back of your mind you will always wonder if another came before you. Then you’ll wonder who he was. And that type of obsessive and possessive thinking will eat at you and our marriage until we will no longer be able to stand each other—even if I did bear your heirs. Jealousy isn’t something you can just will away.”
“It is, Eli
