And then he found it. Relief assaulted him, more fortifying than drawing air into his lungs. Niall abruptly shifted direction, making for that gold crest emblazoned upon a familiar black door. Jumping down before Chance had come to a complete stop, Niall motioned over the driver and turned over the reins. The bewigged servant opened his mouth to speak, and Niall held up a silencing hand.
Then, reaching up, he tossed the carriage door open. Squinting at the abrupt shift in lighting, he found her. “By God, Diana Verney, if ya ever—” The cutting diatribe died on his lips. An eerie silence hung over the carriage, the rattle of an occasional passing carriage ominously punctuating that quiet. Huddled in the corner of the coach, Diana remained stock-still, giving no indication she’d heard or cared about his arrival.
“Princess?” Niall implored gruffly, hefting himself inside.
The driver pushed the door closed behind them. Niall opened his mouth to rain down a diatribe when she spoke, softly interrupting him.
“Do you believe it happens quickly?” she asked, her voice peculiarly empty. “Or do you think it happens gradually, over a matter of time, so that no one realizes until it’s already happened?” She directed those questions to the windowpane, the clear lead revealing the singular focus of her blank gaze trained ahead.
Niall followed her stare out to the sweeping institution across the street and frowned. His terror and anger dissipated as a new concern swept in. “Love?” he asked slowly, sliding carefully into the bench opposite her.
“The madness.” At last she looked to him, and the anguish and terror spilling from her eyes ravaged him. “Will I kn-know?” Her voice broke, and she hastily attended Bedlam Hospital across the way once more.
Niall didn’t want anyone’s secrets. Not even his siblings’. A person was entitled to those dark fears and silent thoughts without intrusion. One didn’t pry, because frankly, other people’s demons were their own. No one could slay them, and so there was no point in sharing. He’d operated that way for more than thirty years. Everything had changed. She’d changed him, slowly chipping away at those walls, so that he now sat helpless before her. Desperate to erase the stark pain marring her delicate features and bring back the smile she’d so freely shared since he’d entered her household.
This empty shell of a creature bore no hint of the formidable, spirited woman who thought nothing of challenging him and doing as she damned well pleased. Restless with his inability to sort through her fears and make them his own, Niall edged closer to her seat until their knees brushed. “Will you know what?” When she remained silent, he gently caressed her cheek, bringing her attention back to him.
Her lower lip trembled, and she swiftly caught it between her teeth, stifling that faint quiver. Did she believe he’d judge her as weak? Four weeks ago he would have. Since then, she’d challenged everything he’d previously accepted as fact about the nobility. She’d stared down death and hadn’t broken—until now.
“When I go mad.”
He cocked his head. What—? His heart wrenched; that damned organ feeling more than it had in the whole of his sorry existence. “Oh, love,” he said hoarsely, scooting closer. Niall gathered her gloveless fingers in his. Despite the early summer’s warmth, there was a chill to her skin, and he rubbed those long digits between his own, attempting to bring warmth back to them. “Why would you believe . . . ?” Then his gaze wandered over to the window. Of course. It was why she didn’t wish to marry. At last it made sense. “Ya aren’t going mad, love,” he said, wincing at that pathetic attempt. His heart cracked. Niall had always scoffed and sneered at the fancy toffs who visited his club, finding those dandies pathetic, useless scraps of manhood. Only to now find himself wishing he possessed the effortless words of assurance to drive back Diana’s grief.
At last she looked to him, a sad smile playing on her lips. “Oh, Niall, you believe you can command something or someone and will it to be, simply with your words alone.” Her throat moved. “But even you cannot stop it from happening. A person is an extension of the blood that flows in their veins.”
His stomach muscles clenched involuntarily, as those words he’d hurled came slamming back at him. He cursed. “That’s not wot Oi meant.”
Her fingers plucked at the fabric of her cloak. “It is.” She spoke without recrimination. “You see yourself marked by your birthright, Niall, but your mother . . .” He stiffened. He’d not thought of or wondered about the woman who’d given him life in more years than he could remember. “Your mother worked as she did to survive. That did not make her a bad woman. It did not make her evil. She’d no other option.” Odd, he’d come to appreciate and accept that a person did anything and everything they could to survive on the streets of St. Giles, only he’d never thought of his mother in that same light. “Giving you away wasn’t the evil in her soul. Nor can you know why she did so.” She met his gaze squarely, gutting him with the agony in their blue depths. “But my mother. She did not pass to me rank and title alone, those details that don’t truly matter to a person’s worth.” She paused. “She passed on her blood and her madness. As did my father . . .” Her words trailed off to a threadbare whisper.
He’d never have pretty, soothing words for her or anyone. Niall gathered her onto his lap. She held her body taut against his, and he folded her close until the tension left her. “You are not your mother.” Nor the cowardly duke.
“I’m more my mother than you are Diggory,” she said against his chest, her voice muffled.
He frowned. He’d inextricably linked himself to the bastard who, early on, had shaped Niall into a pitiless killer. He’d never questioned his own evil. Had seen himself only in that dark, ugly light. Diana had thrown all that into upheaval. He tipped her chin up, forcing her eyes to his. “That you even worry of becoming her means you are nothing like her,” he said with a gruff somberness, willing her to see that.
Tears flooded her eyes, and those crystalline drops that would have earned his scorn and derision a month prior now suffused his chest with an aching pain. How in this short time had Diana challenged every aspect of whom he’d built himself to be? “But I will become that.” Her voice emerged as a faint whisper.
“Ya never treated me as though I was different from you.”
She blinked.
“Since I met you,” he clarified. “You didn’t treat me like a ruthless thug from the streets.”
“You’re not,” she insisted, giving her head an impassioned shake.
Niall brought her bruised knuckles to his lips and pressed a gentle kiss there. “And that, love, is why you’re nothing like your mother.” Or anyone else he’d ever met.
For the past year, Diana had focused on nothing more than her eventual descent into insanity. She’d linked her mother’s evil to her own blood and saw in it how easily her father had cracked. As such, she well knew the future awaiting her.
Here, outside that very hospital she’d expected to find her home one day, Niall forced her to look at herself . . . apart from her mother.
Would her mother have ever, regardless of age or point in her life, cast so much as a glance at Niall Marksman, or the men he called brothers? No, the ruthless woman who’d punished Diana for dancing in the rain and sacked a servant who’d become too friendly with her daughter would have sooner burned herself than mingle with people of other stations. That cruelty and unkindness was not a product of insanity . . . but rather the person the Duchess of Wilkinson had always been.
Her breath caught as she was buoyed with a healing lightness.
Niall brushed another kiss over her knuckles. “That is why you don’t wish to marry.”
She nodded, even as it was a statement more than anything.
Niall could not understand. Not truly. Society saw a woman and believed the only fate awaiting her was that of marriage. Since her birth, Diana’s family had had the expectation that she’d make a noble match. When she made her Come Out, Society had had the same expectation. But then, she’d
once dreamt of an altogether different life for herself.
“I always longed to fall in love,” she said wistfully. A memory slid forward. Two porcelain dolls, elegantly clad, dancing out the future she’d envisioned with her optimistic child’s mind. She tugged at the fabric of her cloak, attending the muslin fabric. “When I’d just learned my letters, my nursemaid would force me to write verses over and over. While I did, she’d sip from a small silver flask. She never checked past the first two pages.”
Niall shifted on the bench and angled her in his lap so he could more easily reach her gaze. “And what was on the pages she did not check?”
Warmth filled her heart. How well he knew her. Knew her when no one else did. “I kept a list of all the characteristics I desired in a future husband.”
“Well?” He jerked up his chin, demanding those items she’d never before shared with anyone.
The man who’d dragged her abovestairs to Ryker’s office would have never bothered with questions for her. He wouldn’t have cared to because he’d not even liked her. Now, how free he was in speaking with her.
“He’d allow me to ride astride.” The one time she’d attempted such a scandal had found her in her rooms for the whole of a day, unable to leave for even her meals.
Niall chuckled and rubbed his hand in small circles over the small of her back, and she closed her eyes, feeling that deep rumble of his mirth. “Ya’d never ask permission, Diana. Ya’d simply do it.”
Her heart swelled to bursting. She’d only ever been the duke’s dutiful daughter. Except to Niall. Warming to her telling, she continued. “He would enjoy picking flowers and painting.”
A strangled, garbled laugh shook his frame, and she joined in, feeling free for it. For him being here with her. She thought back to the girl she’d been, furiously dashing away at her list. “He would, of course, be honorable and caring. He would love me more than anyone,” she explained softly, finding a soothing calm in Niall’s gentle caress. “We would have a kennel of dogs and a household of laughter.” All gifts she’d dreamt of as a child but never truly known. She shuttered her expression. “And then at eighteen, I learned who my father was.”
A somber mask fell over his features, chasing off all earlier hint of mirth.
“He was a man disloyal to my mother.” Bitterness lanced at her chest. She’d hoisted her father upon this pedestal of greatness. “A man who loved another and had children whom he didn’t look after.” It hadn’t mattered that he’d not known of Ryker and Helena’s existence. It mattered that he’d failed to know. “He committed my mother, a woman who deserved to be committed, but a woman he also never loved. I won’t be that woman, Niall. A proper societal hostess who sips my tea while my husband visits your clubs, and beds other women, and loses a fortune.” Her voice shook with the power of her resolve. “I won’t be my mother, Niall.” Not in that way. “I’ll not bind myself to a husband.” Not a societal one. You would want this man. That dangerous whisper danced around her mind. She ran her fingertips over a white crescent scar on the top of his hand. How had he come by that wound? Who had held him when he was hurt and suffering?
They remained that way for a long while, with seconds passing into minutes, and the minutes losing themselves into some amorphous sense of time. Niall made no attempt to fill that quiet or issue pretty words or assurances the way a gentleman of the ton might. And she found a beautiful solace and calming peace in that, something so much deeper and more meaningful than empty platitudes.
When he set her away from his chest, she railed at the barrier erected again, the one that forced reality in. “You shouldn’t be here, Diana.” He shifted her off his lap, and she settled on the opposite bench. “We don’t know who wants you”—dead—“harmed, but unless I’m with you, then you cannot sneak off.”
She eyed him curiously. Was she just an assignment to him? Or had she come to matter to him, if even in some small way? Oh, she’d no delusions that Niall Marksman would ever open himself up enough to care, particularly for a lady from the station he rightfully despised. But surely, in his frantic worry coming to her and holding her as he had, there were some feelings there. And how pathetic I am for craving even those small scraps.
Niall bent, and a hiss of metal filled the carriage as he fished the dagger from his boot. The oval-shaped sapphires adorning the hilt glimmered and glittered in the sunlight streaming through the curtains. Wordlessly, he held it out. “Here,” he said gruffly. When she made no move to take it, he pressed it into her palm. Her fingers curled reflexively around the cool hilt.
“I don’t—?”
“It’s yours. Every person needs to have a weapon.” His voice possessed a gruff quality. “This weapon served me well over the years. It was the first thing Oi purchased with the coin from my club. Oi want you to keep it with you. Always.” So, when he wasn’t around . . .
His meaning was clear, and she may as well have inadvertently pressed the tip of the blade against her belly for the pain that truth brought.
“You would give me this?” she asked, emotion wadded in her throat. This weapon that meant so much to him. She held it out. “I cannot take this, Niall.” This, the second most important item to him outside his club.
He grunted and held up his palms, warding off her attempts. “Take it.”
“Niall—”
“Oi said take it.”
Her lips twitched, and she reverently caressed the enormous sapphires along the handle of the weapon. She’d come to learn and love so much about him. That gruff exterior he painted for the world, demanded everyone see, she saw clean through—there was a goodness and gentleness that he could not even see in himself. Did not want to see. But it was there and real, and so very beautiful. “Thank you,” she said softly, lowering it to the velvet bench.
He gave a brusque nod. “We should return.”
Yes, they should. To that town house that had been an empty, lonely cage for nearly a year. Niall reached for the handle and then stopped. “Sometimes people are just bad, Diana. It has nothing to do with blood or insanity, but rather who they are. There’s nothing bad about you.”
Not looking back, he pushed the door open and jumped out, leaving her alone.
There’s nothing bad about you. They were the closest words to a compliment Niall Marksman would ever give a person, and yet they touched her deep inside for the raw realness to them. He’d stripped away the veneer people coated their words with, found her greatest fear, and allayed it with the simplest of praise.
As the carriage made the slow journey from St. Giles to Mayfair, Diana peeled the curtain back, staring out. Niall rode alongside the carriage, a sentry ensuring her safe return home. With his ease in the saddle, he had the look of a warrior bracing for battle, seeking foes from any corner. In him, she searched for the boy he’d once been. Sadness suffused every corner of her person, leaving an aching hole in her heart. A starving, scared child on the streets; how easily he could have become the boy, Ryan, killed as a lesson doled out by a merciless gang leader. And Niall had been the fortunate one. Allowed to live, but beg like a dog and take lives in order to survive. Sometimes people are just bad . . . Yet, Niall was not bad or evil.
Diana had lived the past year inextricably linking herself to the woman who’d given her life and the crimes she was guilty of, only to have Niall force her to look at her existence through entirely different eyes. Make her question . . . that mayhap there was not an evil in her blood because of who her parent was. Diana drew in a slow, healing breath, letting it fill her lungs and every corner of her person.
“I am not her.” She whispered the truth aloud, saying it—believing it—for the first time since all the crimes had been revealed. Just as Niall was not Diggory and the dark acts forced upon him as a child. Diana released the curtain, and it fluttered whisper-soft back into place.
She looked over to Niall once more. Mayhap before he took his leave, she could help him find peace for himself. Help him see himself as the
strong, courageous man who’d thrived when any man would have crumpled under the struggles he’d endured. And that would have to be enough . . . knowing he found his way, free of anger.
Yet, selfishly, she wanted so much more. She wanted him in her life—forever.
Chapter 18
Later that night Diana stared out the floor-length crystal doors overlooking her mother’s prized gardens. Those long-overrun grounds in desperate need of care and tending. The moon hung high in the sky, bathing the walled-in area in a pale moonlight.
Were it not for the faint glimmer of his cheroot, Diana would have missed him.
It was the first glimpse she’d had of him since they’d returned that afternoon. For the glimmer of a hopeful moment, she’d believed that mayhap he’d let her in. But as soon as the thought slid in, she recalled his aloof silence as he’d trailed behind her.
No, they may have forged a friendship and a bond these past weeks, but she was never a woman Niall Marksman would or could love. The station divide between them alone would always be too great for one with a deep-seated resentment for the peerage to overcome. His friendship would have to be enough.
She drew open the doors, and the early summer air spilled into the room, wafting in the fragrant hint of those overgrown roses.
Niall glanced up. “Princess.” He flicked his ashes.
Once there would have been an acerbic bite to that greeting. She stepped out onto the balcony and layered her arms on the stone rail. “Sir,” she called down quietly.
Even with the space between them, the faint glow of the moon played off his grin. How easily he now smiled. Selfishly, she wanted that ease to be a product of her presence in his life. To know she’d brought Niall some of the happiness she’d been missing—until him.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Doing a final search of the grounds.”
She rested her cheek along her arm. “You’re always working.”
“It’s all I’ve known.”
The Lady's Guard (Sinful Brides Book 3) Page 22
