He crowded her up against the wainscoting. She could smell him. She could see the rough texture of the stubble along his jaw. She could feel the size and the weight of him, as if he were on top of her, which in a way, he was.
“I will never be an unfaithful wife,” she said.
Breathing hard now, she gazed at his lips, so full, so soft-looking. Despite everything, she remembered what they felt like, what his tongue felt like inside her mouth.
“But you’ve been an unfaithful fiancée.”
Her eyes widened. He was right. She had been. But that didn’t make it any easier to hear, coming from him.
She felt angry all of a sudden. Life had been so simple before she’d met him. Adele defiantly raised her chin. “How dare you reproach me when I had never sinned before I encountered you. If I have fallen from my pedestal, it was you who brought me down.”
“Is that how you see me? As some kind of immoral snake?”
“Isn’t that what you are? You bed scandalous women. You don’t pay your debts.”
Heated shock flashed in his eyes and she hated herself for saying these things. She didn’t want to believe them, but it was easier this way.
“And you betrayed someone you cared about,” she continued. “What happened between us was about temptation and weakness, and now you’re comparing me to your mother, who was an adulteress. It’s all despicable. I am sick over it. Everything between us has been immoral and I regret all of it.”
Just saying the words was like a stake she was thrusting into her own heart. She had never been immoral before. She had always been good, and she hated to think that what they had shared had not been tender and loving. There was a part of her that still treasured what they had done. She had felt cared for and safe in Damien’s arms, but she had to bury that part. She had to convince herself that it was dirty and shameful. That was the only way to survive this.
“You’re too close, Damien,” she said, fighting to stay focused.
Damien’s eyes softened, and at long last, he stepped back. Adele grabbed hold of the windowsill beside her.
He stared at her for a long, excruciating moment. “Part of me wishes you were not so strong, Adele.”
Anger and confusion welled up inside her and burst forth like water breaking through a dam. “Why? So that I would betray Harold and you could congratulate yourself for being right about all women being like your mother? That’s why you haven’t married before now, isn’t it? You think all women are wicked and unfaithful, and you had to prove it with me. Harold told you I was saintly, and you didn’t want to believe it. You didn’t want to believe that you might be afraid to love someone, afraid to trust someone like Harold trusts me. You didn’t want Harold to have what you couldn’t have, because it made you jealous. Jealous of him for being able to love and trust someone. You are deficient and you know it, and you want to pull someone down with you, and that someone is me.”
Shock and fury coiled together within her. She could barely fathom what she had just said to Damien. She’d never attacked anyone like that before—attacked his heart and soul in such a direct, cruel way.
But she’d needed to be cruel. She was angry with him. Angry with him for making her feel guilty and immoral, and for making her want him when he could not be had. She was angry with him because he was not willing to fight for her—to choose her over Harold. To let go of his own misguided belief that no woman could be trusted. He was using this—these accusations about her integrity—to release himself from what would be a painful undertaking.
He turned and walked to the door. “No. Because this would all be easier to bear if I could think badly of you. I want to, Adele. I want to hate you, but all I feel is guilt, because you’re right. You are everything that’s good in the world, and I did bring you down.”
He did not look back. He simply walked out.
Adele collapsed onto a chair and struggled to catch her breath. I did bring you down.
Her heart throbbed painfully over all the hurtful words they’d just said to each other. Adele had told Damien he was deficient and immoral. She didn’t want to think those terrible things about the man who had saved her life, the man who had kissed her and held her in his arms, but she had to. She had to think of his reputation and accept that he could never be her prince charming. That was a fantasy.
She waited for a few minutes until she was certain he was gone, then she hurried from the room.
Violet, however, did not hurry from the room. She rose very slowly from the sofa she had been reclining upon—a sofa that faced the fireplace on the other side of the library.
She wanted to strangle Damien. Strangle him! Was there not one woman in England he could keep his hands off? Harold’s perfect, virtuous fiancée, no less?
Violet ground her teeth together and cursed her cousin. Damn, damn, damn him! She would not let it happen. She would not let Harold lose the one and only woman who had ever managed to lure his attention away from his precious laboratory long enough to get him to propose. Violet had never thought she would see that day come, and if Harold lost Adele, it might be another complete lifetime before he looked up from his bloody experiments to take notice of another woman. And what were the chances the woman he noticed would be an heiress as wealthy as Adele?
Slim. Very slim.
Violet stood up and walked out, resolved that she would do something about this. She didn’t know what yet, but she would figure out something, because she would not let that massive American fortune slip so easily from her grasp.
Damien knocked on Frances’s dressing room door as he always did after a performance—twice, then twice again.
“Come in, darling,” she called from inside.
He pushed the door open. The room smelled strongly of red roses that were lying about in bouquets. Sparkling costumes were draped over the backs of chairs, and decorative dyed feathers stood in tall vases.
He walked in and closed the door behind him with a quiet click. Frances swiveled around on the stool in front of her mirrored vanity. She wore only her chemise, corset, and stockings, along with her stage paint and heeled boots. She had taken the pins out of her thick, wavy red hair, and it spilled wildly onto her shoulders. She knew that was the way Damien preferred it. She did not know, however, that he would have preferred to see her without the paint.
Saying nothing, Damien slowly sauntered across the room, tugging at his neck cloth along the way.
He usually smiled at her when they went through these motions after a performance, but tonight, he had no smile for Frances. He wanted only one thing, and that was all. He felt no need to charm. But she was not the type of woman who required it.
She slowly stood and meandered teasingly toward the red chintz sofa against the far wall, and sat down, leaning back. Damien came to a full stop in front of her and looked into her eyes while he finished untying his neck cloth. He left it dangling around his collar.
She looked up at him for a moment, reading him, then she sat forward on the edge of the sofa cushion. “Someone’s in the mood for something very naughty this evening.” She then proceeded to unfasten his trousers.
Damien closed his eyes, waiting to feel the desire flow through him as it usually did—a desire that he wanted and needed to feel tonight—but to his surprise and annoyance, a spontaneous reflex brought his hands up to gently take hold of her wrists. Before he knew what he was doing, he had taken a well-defined step backward, and Frances was looking up at him with an expression of bewilderment.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
For a moment, he had no answer, then at last he said, “Forgive me Frances, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, not quite able to understand. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself. He didn’t understand anything about himself lately.
“Sorry for what?”
He turned away and fast
ened his trousers. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because I would only be using you,” he said flatly.
“I’ve never minded before.”
Frances. She was no ordinary woman.
Damien faced her again. “We’ve always been friends, and you’ve known that, but something has changed. Things are different now.”
Her eyes narrowed with anger. “What’s different? It’s not because of the bracelet, is it? I certainly didn’t mean to become possessive, Damien.”
“I know that.”
“Then what’s the problem? Are we not friends anymore?”
He hated this. “I believe the time has come for us to be friends only, instead of what we have been to each other in the past.”
“But why?”
There was no point dragging this out. She deserved the truth—at least part of it. The rest he would keep to himself, until he could figure out how to deal with it. “Because it’s time I found a wife.”
Her jaw jutted forward. “That doesn’t mean we have to stop seeing each other.”
“I’m afraid it does.” Because no woman would have him if he was still connected to Frances, and he needed someone to have him. He needed a wife of his own. The sooner the better.
Frances’s head snapped back as if she’d been hit in the face with a ball. “I’d tarnish your reputation, you mean.”
He offered no reply.
“I have news for you, Damien. Your reputation was tarnished long before I invited you into my bed.” Her eyes flashed briefly with fury before she turned without warning and picked up a pink perfume bottle from her vanity, and hurled it across the room at him, striking his wrist bone. As luck would have it, the bottle was open, and the lilac scent poured all over him.
He was still recovering when a tall, glass paperweight of a nude woman came whirling through the air and smashed into his face.
“Bloody hell!” He cupped his eye and bent forward.
“You deserve it, you bastard!” she screeched.
Damien straightened. He did deserve it, he knew it, so he was willing to let it go. But when a vase—much larger and undoubtedly heavier than both the perfume bottle and the paperweight combined—was launched at him, his generosity reached its limit. He deflected the vase, and instantly moved to restrain Frances.
He wrapped his arms around her from behind, took a few hits, but finally managed to calm her down enough to feel somewhat confident that she wasn’t going to throw any more glass objects at him.
“I hope you rot in hell,” she ground out, breathing hard.
“I’m sure I will.”
He held her like that for a moment or two, feeling deeply ashamed. He had always been honest with Frances. They both knew what their relationship was about, but tonight he had come here to use her to relieve his own tensions and to suffocate his angst and confusion over another woman—a woman who was engaged to his cousin.
He had sunk very low.
Eventually, Frances’s breathing slowed and her body began to relax in his arms. After a moment, she said, “I hate you.”
“I know.”
“You’re a bastard.”
“I know that, too.” He rested his head on her shoulder, and let out a deep, miserable sigh.
She sighed, too. “Your eye is bleeding.”
She stepped out of his arms and put her hands on his face to examine the gash at the top of his cheekbone.
“Look at this,” she said, shaking her head. “You make me crazy, Damien. No man has ever made me crazy before.” Her voice softened. “That’s what I hate most about this.”
Blood was dripping down the side of his cheek. He wiped it on the back of his hand.
“Maybe I’ll be better off,” she said, going to fetch a cold cloth. “Maybe we both will.”
Chapter 16
Two days later, Adele sat in her bedchamber at Osulton Manor, staring absently out the window at the Chauncey Maze. Clara knocked softly and walked in.
“Seger and I will be leaving soon,” she said. “They’re loading everything onto the coach now.”
Adele stood. The thought of her sister leaving sent a sudden, intense wave of emotion through her, and she had to stifle the urge to cry—as she often had to do lately, whenever she thought about her family leaving her here alone, or never seeing America again. It was not Adele’s habit to cry. She was usually a master of stoicism in the face of adversity.
She managed to put on a brave face for her sister, because she didn’t want to lay all that on Clara’s shoulders. It helped when she reminded herself that she would be traveling to London soon to visit her oldest sister, Sophia.
“I’m sure you’ll be glad to get home,” Adele said. “You’ve been away for a long time now.”
Clara moved fully into the room and took Adele’s hands in hers. “I will, but I will also leave here feeling very worried about you. Are you sure you’ll be all right? You don’t seem like the same sister I knew back in New York—the sister who always had everything well in hand. You’ve seemed sad, Adele.”
Sad. Yes, Adele had indeed been that, which made no sense because she was surrounded by happy people, and she’d gotten what she’d always wanted—a wonderful fiancé her parents approved of.
After Damien left, Harold had finally taken her on a tour of the house. In addition, Eustacia had taken her and her mother on a carriage tour of the estate and into the village, and Adele had spent many pleasant hours with Harold’s grandmother, getting to know the elderly woman and enjoying her intelligent conversation. Adele had participated in each evening’s activities, singing and playing instruments in the drawing room. Everything had been quite perfectly lovely.
“Does it have anything to do with Lord Alcester leaving?” Clara asked, hitting the mark as she always did.
Adele finally realized that she could not continue to keep this problem to herself. Clara knew. She had always known. She had simply not pushed.
“Yes,” Adele replied at last.
Clara’s eyes warmed with compassion. “I know that you think you have to hold everything together and be the perfect daughter and the perfect fiancée, but you don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is. Come and sit down.”
They sat on the edge of the bed.
“Tell me everything,” Clara said, “and I’ll see if I can help.”
Adele nodded. “All right. Though I’m not sure where to begin…at the beginning, I suppose. It started the first night, when he came to rescue me in the kidnapper’s cottage.” She recalled her first glimpse of him. “He broke into my room, strong and forceful and extraordinary looking, and when the kidnapper tried to shoot me, he saved my life. I was grateful, but at the same time wary of him, because everything about him was frightening. He’d just killed a man. Then later, I remember wishing that it had been Harold who had come, because somehow I knew that Damien and I would experience things together that we should not experience.”
Adele described the conversations they’d had and the trouble she’d had sleeping. She told Clara about Damien sharing her bed after she’d had too much wine.
“He could have taken full advantage of the situation, but he didn’t do anything I didn’t want him to do. And he knows me, Clara. He sees inside the real me, and he has made me see inside myself, too. And it happened after three short days. When I’m with him, I say things and feel things that I’ve never felt before. I open up to him completely, and because of that, I find myself doubting my relationship with Harold.”
“You don’t think Harold knows the real you?” Clara asked.
Adele lowered her gaze. “I don’t think he really sees me, not the inner me. He talks, but he doesn’t listen. I feel rather invisible when I’m with him. I feel like a shell of a person, whose only purpose is to nod and smile and agree with
his opinions. Which is basically the person I was in New York.”
“You’re not that person now?”
Adele shook her head. “Ever since I met Damien, I’ve been questioning who I am, and I think I understand it now. I wasn’t happy after we left Wisconsin. Our way of life in the city was so strange to me, and I was no longer free to roam in the woods by myself. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I just did what people told me to do. I clung to rules and tried not to think about my life before. I couldn’t bear the longing for the country. And when Mother introduced me to Harold, I was content to marry him because I had begun to forget the person I was before. But then I met Damien and I became attracted to the wildness in him, and his lack of care about society’s rules. He makes me remember who I was before New York. He makes me feel free.”
Clara nodded. “But what does that mean for your future?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Adele replied. “One thing I do know is that I need to live in a place that makes me happy. New York wasn’t right. I felt displaced and frustrated. I couldn’t be myself there.”
“Will Osulton Manor be the right sort of place?”
Adele considered it. “Possibly. I love the countryside. I could become very attached to this part of England.”
“But you need to become attached to more than just the place, Adele. You must also become attached to your husband.”
Adele looked down at her hands on her lap. “I hope that I will be able to feel that way.”
“Hope is not a plan,” Clara said. “What about Damien? How will you feel about being his cousin by marriage?”
Adele shook her head. “I don’t know. We said some terrible things to each other before he left. He compared me to his adulterous mother, and I told him that what we’d done was immoral. I believe he was intentionally trying to push me away because he is very protective of Harold, and I was trying to do the same, so I don’t know if we could ever get past that. What exists between us does not feel right. It feels very wrong.”
In Love with the Viscount (American Heiress Trilogy Book 3) Page 14
