“You have nothing to apologize for,” he bit off. Still, he remained where he stood.
She had everything to apologize for. If Lord Rotheby learned of these new stories, regardless of whether she’d written them or not, they’d likely be tossed out the door without a chance to explain. “But…?”
“But nothing,” he said more softly. “I’m the one who should apologize, Aurora. I’ve been drunk and belligerent and absent. I’ve done everything to you that my father did to my mother, save cudgel you. And I nearly did that last night.”
“But you didn’t,” Aurora said, moving closer to him, reaching for him.
He stepped backward, reestablishing the distance between them. “No, I didn’t. But I threw your journal and only missed you by inches. If Jonas hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done. I lost control. I’m sorry. I’m so very, terribly sorry. I should never have married you. I’m not fit to be anyone’s husband.”
He looked so vulnerable. She’d never seen him vulnerable before. Quin’s eyes were big and sad, like a deep well of unshed tears. She wanted to soothe him, to comfort him. To hold him while he let it all out.
But again, when she stepped closer to him, he backed away. It felt like a mirror of how their marriage had been—always a certain amount of distance separating them, a permanent divide.
“You’re my husband,” Aurora said. “What’s done is done. You didn’t hurt me.”
“What if I do? What then?”
Oh, dear good Lord. If he didn’t stop it soon, she was liable to lose her patience. “You won’t. I seem to recall you telling me, rather angrily I might add, that you don’t strike women. So tell me why, all of a sudden, you seem so certain you’ll hurt me.”
“Because I’m just like my father.” Quin dragged a hand over his face, and then he turned and walked away.
“Wait,” she called out. He kept going. Blast him. Aurora raised the hem of her skirt and followed. “Slow down.”
He seemed none too inclined to comply. She hurried along behind him until she could reach him. “Please, Quin,” she said, taking hold of his hand and tugging until he looked at her. She could get lost in his eyes. They held a world of hurt and fear—a world she would never understand unless he talked to her. “Tell me about your father.”
“My father was a moral degenerate. He was the lowest creature in all of England. He drank and yelled, and if you were lucky he would only beat you with his fists. Mother was usually lucky, because she didn’t yell back.”
Quin looked out across the river, seeming to stare at nothing. “I wasn’t lucky.”
“You fought with him often?” Aurora prodded. She stroked his palm absently.
“Every time he came home smelling of whiskey and some other woman’s cheap perfume. Every time I caught him on his way into London to visit the gambling hells. Every time he struck my mother. Yes, I fought with him all the time. I’d fight with him again today if he dared to come within a hundred feet of my mother. We would see how tough he was against someone his own size.” Quin shook his head, the dimple on his cheek twitching as he clenched his unshaven jaw. “I’d kill him with my bare hands for all he put us through. He got off easy, being thrown from his horse. Fate was far kinder than he deserved.”
Aurora suddenly understood how very lucky she had been all her life. Her parents were not overly affectionate with each other, or sometimes not with her, but she’d never had to fear for her safety. She never wondered where the next blow would come from.
Her heart ached. She wanted to wrap him in her arms and soothe the boy trapped inside him. But that wouldn’t solve anything. His eyes still held too much anger, too much pain. “Was your father always this way?”
“It often feels that way. I remember those times so much more than the others—than when we were happy.” Quin led her to a soft patch of grass and spread his coat for her to sit on. “But the truth is, he changed. When Mercy died.”
His sister. The girl from the painting. “What happened to her?”
He frowned and squinted his eyes. “It’s difficult to remember all of it. I was only ten. Just a lad.” He swept a hand, indicating the area around them. “We used to come here a lot, Mercy and me. Always together. We were inseparable, even though she was three years my senior. But since she was thirteen and becoming a young lady, Father thought she needed to stop traipsing around all over the place with me. That she needed to behave like a young lady ought, and wear dresses, and learn to do embroidery. All those kinds of useless things girls are expected to do. Mercy didn’t particularly care for that idea. They had an argument that night—the night she died.”
He went still for a moment—long enough Aurora thought he might not go on. But just before she interrupted, he continued. “Mercy and I had been out riding through the hills again that day, when she was supposed to be with her governess. I had talked her into giving Miss Robson the slip. She wouldn’t have gone, otherwise. But she changed into one of the stable boys’ trousers and a shirt, and we rode off, laughing about what a coup it had been. Father caught us when we came back. He pulled her off the saddle, yelling about how ladies never ride astride, and dragged her into the house. They were at it for over an hour. I thought she was banished to her chamber for the rest of the day, so I tried to stay out of the way. I didn’t want Mercy to be in any more trouble because of me.
“Hours later, she hadn’t come for tea. Mother didn’t say anything of it, so I didn’t ask. But when she did not come to the table for supper, Father sent a maid to fetch her from her chamber. She wasn’t there, though. She was gone. The whole abbey was turned upside down with servants searching for her. Father told me to stay put, but I knew where she would be. She would be here—at the hermitage. Where we always came. So I ran out of the house and all the way here. I was too late.”
Quin’s voice hitched. A tremor ran through the hand Aurora held. “You found her?” she asked softly, holding him tighter when he tried to pull away.
“Under the tree,” he said and pointed to an oak just beside the hermitage. The lowest branch was easily higher than three men standing on each other’s shoulders. “She tried to climb it to dive into the river, but she fell. There was so much blood. It pooled around her and fell into the river. I still remember watching the trail flowing through the water. It went on forever. I thought it was my fault.”
“But you were just a boy!” she argued, cutting him off. He couldn’t still blame himself for such a thing.
“I was. And I thought it was my fault, because I’d convinced her to go riding with me that day. But then I blamed my father. He drove her to it. Only years later did I realize that it was no one’s fault. Only long after Father had died and blaming him didn’t make me feel better anymore.”
“Did he blame himself?” Aurora asked.
“Perhaps. I’ll never know. He had always doted upon her. When she was gone, he started to drink. He became belligerent. Whatever he felt, whether it was guilt or anger or grief, he took it out on Mother and me. Mrs. Marshall was my nurse at the time. She tried to interfere once, to stop him. Then she wasn’t my nurse anymore, but one of the maids. I was on my own. But by the time I was twelve, I had started to get taller, grow stronger. And I got a lot meaner, too. I was going to be just like him.
“One day, he went after Mother. I got in the way and pushed him off her. He came at me then, with his fists swinging like mad. I grabbed a candlestick and knocked him over the head with it. He stopped, but I didn’t—not until Mother pried me off him. Until then, I just kept hitting him everywhere I could with that candlestick and wishing it was enough to kill him. He eventually staggered to his feet and left. I never saw him again. His horse threw him that night. He cracked his skull open. I was only sorry it hadn’t been me with the candlestick to do it.”
Quin looked in her eyes then. He reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. She didn’t even realize she’d been crying. “You’ve married a monst
er, Aurora. I’m so sorry.”
~ * ~
Quin could have thrown himself from that oak tree just then. Why had he told her all of that? Why had he burdened her with his family’s horrifying past? It was bad enough that it haunted him at every turn, particularly here at Quinton Abbey, but now she would never escape it either.
“I’m not sorry I married you,” Aurora said. “You are not a monster.”
Her expression was sincere—clear, bright eyes, even through the shimmer of her tears. She couldn’t mean it. He must not have made her understand how depraved he had become in that moment. How he had grown to be everything his father had ever been. How she wasn’t safe with him.
Quin had to make her understand. “I tried to kill him. I would have, if I were only bigger. I might…I might hurt you. I wouldn’t mean to hurt you, but I might.”
She took his hand in her own, trailing her thumbs along the creases of his palm. “You were trying to protect your mother. You did the right thing. I don’t believe for a second that you would hurt me.”
Was she daft? Quin stood and paced to the riverbank. “I almost did last night.”
“But you didn’t.” Aurora followed him. Ever so carefully, she took his hand in hers again. “You won’t.”
He pulled away. “How can you be so sure of that? How are you so certain that I’m not the monster I believe—the monster that my father was?”
“Look at me,” she implored. When he didn’t, she took his face in her hands and pulled him to her. “You are not your father. You are Niles Thornton—the brave boy who protected his mother, now grown into a man. A man who, by the way, does not strike women. You won’t hurt me.”
If only he was so certain. Quin shook his head. “I can’t take that chance, Aurora. I love you too much. If I ever hurt you…”
Her eyes widened. “You love me?”
She didn’t return his words. Quin couldn’t very well expect her love. He damned well didn’t deserve it. But still, some small part of him had hoped.
“More than I could ever tell you with words. More than I could show you in a hundred years of trying. And because of that, I need you to leave. Jonas will take you away. Back to your father, if you’d like, or perhaps to stay with Lady Rebecca and her family. Somewhere away from me. Somewhere you’ll be safe.”
She should be relieved. She should be on her knees, thanking him.
Instead, she appeared affronted. No, that was far too tame a word. Aurora was livid. Her eyes turned to flames that licked at him, burning him to the core. She crossed her arms over her chest and planted her feet at shoulder’s width apart. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m not going anywhere, unless you leave. Then I’ll come with you.”
She spun on her heels and marched away, muttering beneath her breath something to the effect of, “Damned insufferable brute, thinking he can order me around, needs to learn a thing or two about how to treat a bloody wife.”
He ought to follow her. He should make her understand reason, or at least make her understand her place. A wife ought not to contradict her husband’s commands in such a manner, after all.
But instead of following her, all he could do was laugh—a huge bark of a laugh that shook the leaves of the trees around him and sent the birds aflutter. Quite a welcome change from his mood of late. Hearing such unladylike vocabulary from Aurora was a treat.
~ * ~
Send her home to her father, indeed. What did the blasted man think that would solve? Nothing! That’s what. If he sent her back to London, the gossips would double their already increased efforts at sullying both their names, she wouldn’t have a chance at giving him an heir (if that were even possible—she still had her doubts), and Lord Rotheby would take everything from Quin.
Ridiculous man. To tell her all about his troubled upbringing, then to tell her he loved her, and then to threaten to send her away? Over her dead body.
Aurora grumbled the entire way back to the abbey. If anyone were to happen upon her, they’d think her a madwoman.
With good reason, she must admit.
Aurora was well on her way to becoming that very thing, based on the way her husband was treating her at the moment.
She neglected to stop marching when she came through the door, peeling her gloves off and leaving them and her bonnet with Forster. Instead, she continued all the way through to the great hall, where Sir Jonas was enjoying his breakfast.
He labored to rise when she entered, a forkful of sausages halfway chewed in his mouth.
“No, no, it’s quite all right. Please remain seated.” She filled her own plate and joined him, settling into a high-backed chair across from him. “Actually, I was hoping we might talk.”
“Of course, Lady Quinton,” he said after he’d swallowed.
She took a small bite of baked eggs and chewed while she debated how to word her request. Finally, she blurted out, “Quin believes he will hurt me.” Sir Jonas looked ready to interrupt her so she rushed on. “I don’t. But whether he is right or I am, would you agree he is far less likely to do such a thing if others are present?”
“Others, ma’am?”
“Such as yourself,” Aurora suggested, sipping from her chocolate. “After all, he did manage to restrain himself at least somewhat in your presence, did he not?”
“Of course. He certainly would not want an audience. If he were to ever do such a thing, that is.”
“Indeed,” she murmured. An audience? Her initial idea of asking Sir Jonas to stay, and perhaps inviting Rebecca for a visit, seemed rather inconsequential compared to the thought currently swimming around in her head. “I believe I need a favor. I’ll need your promise to keep it a secret from Quin.”
Perhaps having a swarm of people around them would do just the trick.
Chapter Twenty-One
19 May, 1811
The blasted man clearly doesn’t know what’s good for him. He is so caught up in the past, he can’t see the present, let alone think about the possibilities for the future. Imbecile. Well, if he thinks the only thing that can save me from him and his blasted temper is having someone else around to witness it, then I’ll make certain he is surrounded. Endlessly surrounded, in fact. By people he would never dare to raise a hand against another living soul in their presence. I absolutely refuse to cower. And I will not run back to my father with my tail tucked between my legs. Quin needs to understand—I am not afraid of him. I might be afraid I’m falling in love with him—head over ears, and all that—but I will never be afraid of my husband. It is simply not in my power to do so.
~From the journal of Lady Quinton
After spending the entire morning by the river, Quin finally trudged up the path toward the abbey. He’d spent the time thinking, trying to devise a plan, but coming up with nothing feasible.
He could order Aurora to leave. Jonas would take her and be sure she was protected. Then she could be safe, but Quin would be utterly despondent. The thought of not having her by his side at night, of not being able to hold her, and savor the faint rosewater scent of her hair, and feel the fluid warmth of her body—it robbed him of his breath and felt as though a mountain were suddenly atop him, pressing him into the earth.
Quite simply put, he couldn’t live without her.
Damn it all to hell and back.
Which meant he was going to have to somehow manage to not become his father. No telling what that would entail. But the time to begin the process was upon him. The time had also arrived to discover, once and for all, who had taken the pages from Aurora’s journal.
When Quin came through the main doors of Quinton Abbey, Forster was sending a monstrous stack of letters off with a postman. “What is all that?” he demanded of the butler.
Forster somehow managed to raise a single, overly-arched eyebrow even higher than it normally rested. “Her ladyship’s invitations, of course.”
“Invitations?” Quin drawled. “She can’t possibly think t
o accept them. We’re not going back to London. Not now.” Who in bloody hell would be sending her invitations all the way to Wetherby? Particularly when such vile gossip was being spread about her. She ought to be a pariah in the ton at the moment, from what he could gather, not a social butterfly, being invited to every soiree and ball and concert.
“You misunderstand, my lord. These are the invitations Lady Quinton is sending out for the house party at Quinton Abbey. She said you insisted they go out in today’s post, as you wanted as many people to attend as possible.”
A house party. At Quinton Abbey. While he was trying to learn patience and to stop relying so heavily on brandy, no less.
This had to be Aurora’s idea of torture.
Twice a Rake Page 25
