“Yes.” Pen drew in a quivering breath. “Yes, please.”
“This is…delicate.” She released her hand, looked to Strider and then back to Pen. “Would you rather hear it privately?”
Pen shook her head, her fingers twitching around Strider’s. “No, whatever you have to say, Mr. Hoppler can hear as well. His discretion is unimpeachable.”
Her lips pulled inward for breath, considering, before she nodded. “My sister, Margot, she was six years older than me and I adored her the most out of all my sisters.” She paused, wiping at tears that suddenly brimmed along her lower lashes. “I am sorry, it is just that I haven’t spoken her name in so long. Margot. Not since I was young. She was here and then she wasn’t and I have never been able to speak her name since that time. There are—were—eight of us. Eight girls. No boys. My mother has always seen that as her failing, so has lived her life to make the best matches for us. Though two of us are spinsters and I am a widow.”
Pen’s grip on Strider’s hand tightened, her words breathless. “What happened to my mother?”
“I can only offer what I have pieced together from my older sisters. I was only thirteen at the time all of it happened, so I understood little of it.” She took a breath, her right hand splaying across her belly, her fingers playing with the gold military-styled buttons lining the front of her riding habit. “As far as I know it, my sister, Anne—who you met—she had fallen in love with a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was much below our station, but she fell in love regardless. A fool to begin with—I cannot fathom what she was thinking. She’s the eldest, so she was to set the bar for the rest of our matches. Mother and father were ruthless—they never allowed Anne to marry him and made certain all contact was broken between the two. Anne is stubborn—so stubborn she was willing to throw her life away on this man. She put herself on the shelf and has been there ever since. Wasted. Her life wasted over this.”
Pen’s brow furrowed. “Forgive me, but what does this have to do with my mother?”
Florence’s cheeks pulled back in a strained smile. “That lieutenant reappeared five years later at the arm of Margot after her summer in Bath. He was a captain by then and Margot and he were deeply in love. But Margot was much cannier than Anne. By the time my parents discovered his presence in her life, she was already with child. She thought it would force my parents to allow her to marry him.”
Florence paused, her hand on her belly stilling. “She was so young. Nineteen. So naïve about the way society works. About how my parents are. Even at thirteen I could see how naïve she was. And also how in love.”
“What happened?”
“My parents threw her out.” Florence’s shoulders lifted. “Disowned her. Locked her out of the house with nothing but the clothes on her back. It was quite awful and I remember looking down at her from the window in my room—she was standing outside the front door, crying, railing at my parents. I remember crying as I watched her, wanting to go to her. Anne wouldn’t let me. The captain was already gone at that point—he’d been called back to his ship. My third eldest sister—Georgiana—did sneak out and give Margot a valise filled with her best dresses and all the coin she could find in the house. Georgina has only spoken to me once about that time, and only after she was quite foxed. She said Margot planned to get on a ship and follow her captain to sea.”
Her throat constricted, Pen had to force her next words out. “You…you are telling me I am a bastard?”
Florence’s bottom lip jutted upward. “That I do not know. Maybe Margot made it to her Captain. Maybe they married before you were born. I do not know.”
“How do you not know?” Pen’s hand tore from Strider’s grip as she jabbed a step forward. “How did your family never track her—find out the truth about what happened to their own daughter?”
“It is brutal, I know.” Florence’s face crumpled. “I cannot apologize for my parent’s actions, for I have never been able to rationalize it in my own mind, throwing away a daughter like that. After they removed Margot from our house, we were never allowed to speak Margot’s name again. And Anne…”
She shook her head, her face going upward to the canopy of leaves above her. “Anne has always been so bitter. To the core. Margot stole her love and the hatred that has poured from her since then knows no bounds. She is one of the most bitter people that you will ever meet. Desperate and resentful and she has done everything in her power to make sure all evidence of your mother ever existing in our family was destroyed long ago. Her name scratched out of the family bible. Anne told all of Margot’s acquaintances that she disappeared during a walk by the ocean and was presumed swept out to sea and dead. From the moment Margot was pushed out the front door, she has been dead to everyone. But not to me.”
Her hand shaking, Florence reached out, setting her palm along the side of Pen’s face. “I am so sorry you never knew her. Your mother was such a kind, wonderful spirit that made everyone around her smile. She was special. So special. Which is why her fall hit the hardest. She didn’t deserve anything but happiness and that’s not what my family delivered. I can only hope she found her captain—Captain Willington, I can only presume by your surname. I hope she found him and she had a few months of happiness before she died.”
Pen’s fingers lifted, clasping onto the back of Florence’s hand on her cheek. Her eyes closed for a long breath, locking into memory the closest thing to her own mother’s touch as she would ever get. Her eyes opened to her aunt. “Thank you.”
Florence nodded. “She was loved. Loved before the end. So I know she loved you, child. I hope she got to hold you before she passed.” Tears welled in her eyes and she pulled her hand away from Pen’s cheek. “I have to get back before they realize I came after you.”
Pen nodded, her arms wrapping about her middle as she watched in silence as Florence went to her horse and untied the reins from the tree. Strider moved to her, offering his fingers clasped together as a step for her to mount her mare.
Within a minute, she was gone, her horse on a quick pace back to the road and disappearing around a bend.
Strider’s arm wrapped around her shoulders as his look stayed on the road. “I’m sorry, Pen.” His lips landed on the top of her head.
“Sorry for?”
“Sorry they are miserable pieces of human refuse—save for that one.” His head nodded to the road where Florence had disappeared. “You deserve better.”
“Do I? I don’t know what I deserve.” She curled slightly around her arms holding her middle. “I’m a bastard, Strider. Illegitimate.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know otherwise. The possibility of my mother finding my father before I was born—it would have been quite impossible, Strider.”
“So what if you are?”
The edges of her mouth dropped into a frown. How to explain this to him? “It is a death. A death of what I had always imagined. A death of my parents’ grand love affair. A death of her wanting him and him wanting her so much they had to escape across the seas to be together. Instead, it was ugly and my father went from one sister to another and then abandoned her. Ugly from her family. Ugly from my father. I wasn’t wanted.”
“Now that you truly don’t know.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then you need to stop your mind.” His arm tightened about her shoulders. “Now. Before you take all of that ugly from your family and apply it to yourself. You’re not their kind, Pen. You never were. If I were to imagine, I imagine your mother was the exact same as you. Kind and loving and trusting and always looking for the good instead of the bad.”
She looked up at him. “But you don’t like to imagine.”
He looked down at her, sincerity in his eyes. “I will in this instance.” His feet started moving and he steered her toward the carriage. “Let us get out of Bedfordshire and never return.”
She nodded, numb, the sense of her body, her person, quickly disappearing, leaving o
nly a gaping, vacant hole down the center of her in its wake.
Leave. That seemed like the best—the only idea.
Leave, and then what?
This hadn’t just been the death of her parents and what she had dreamed of them. It was the death of any sort of future she’d hoped to have. The death of her only escape.
What she would do now, she hadn’t a clue.
And she wasn’t even sure she cared.
{ Chapter 14 }
Two days into the journey back to London and Strider was beside himself. A state he had never experienced as an adult.
Beside himself because of Pen.
The silence that had permeated her during the last days. Her solemn face. Her wooden words in response to any question he asked. Something so deeply wrong within her that he wanted to shake her—shake out everything she had just learned—just felt—in Bedfordshire.
Even more, he wanted to go back to Baron Jacobson’s home and shake everyone in the family until their heads rolled. Each blasted last one of them. Except for Florence—though she, too, had walked away from Pen.
Strider had tried to convince himself that this was what Pen wanted—asked for—to know who her mother’s family was, regardless of the truth of it.
But she’d had hope. Optimism that they would embrace her. Tell her everything of her mother and how they had loved her before she left this land.
Hope that they would take her in, deliver her from the Flagtons.
And now she had nothing.
Strider looked across the small table at Pen staring at her full plate, fork in her hand, not having moved a single bite to her mouth since he’d delivered the food to her room. He had thought to retreat to his room at the coaching inn and leave her to eat alone, as would have been proper.
Separate rooms.
He hadn’t wanted to set any expectations on her and where she slept, no matter where his lips had been on her body days ago—and where her lips had been on his. That encounter had served a purpose—making her relax—even if it had unnerved him for how strikingly hard he had come. And into her mouth like he was a bloody animal. So raw that the very first thing he’d wanted to do after his body stopped shaking was to flip her onto her back and drive his cock full force into her.
Weak.
There wasn’t any excuse for how the whole of it had gotten away from him. And he couldn’t afford to have that happen again.
For he wasn’t about to allow her to look at him as her next avenue of salvation, though he already knew he would save her. Save her a thousand times over.
He’d already determined he was going to extract her from the Flagtons. What he couldn’t do when they were nine, he could do now. Give her the world and every opportunity it offered.
He'd tell her exactly what he was thinking—planning—before they were back in London.
But he couldn’t share any of that with her now. Not in her current state. She was clearly still in shock—she’d sunk so deep and so far into darkness that he didn’t trust her to be alone. He’d seen too many desperate people in this state do things they wouldn’t dream of in their right minds.
It'd been the right choice to sit down opposite her at the table. To eat his meal in silence. To watch her as she stared at her plate. She needed company—his company—whether or not she understood it.
He reached across the table with his fork, pushing a small round potato on her plate toward her. “You need to eat something, Pen. A bite. Two.”
It took a long moment before her face lifted to him. Her fork hand didn’t move. The vacant stare in her green eyes shifted to confusion, like she hadn’t realized he’d been sitting across from her for fifteen minutes.
His fingers went to the foot of her glass, nudging toward her the Madeira that he’d thought twice about setting down in front of her. “Or drink something. I’d even accept that. Anything to fill your belly. Most in your position would be four glasses in and foxed by now.”
A blink, and her head dropped slowly, her stare shifting to the glass, watching the burgundy liquid swirl along the insides of the glass from his nudge. A long moment and her left hand jerked up from her lap and she wrapped her fingers about the glass.
She sat like that for a long, silent minute, before her forefinger twitched and she lifted the glass to her lips. One sip. Two. So small he wasn’t sure she drank any of it.
“Pen, eat something. One bite.”
Her look lifted to him, her voice a rough whisper. “This is vindication for you. I’m sure it’s good to see. You told me what they would be like and I didn’t listen. You cautioned me about what could have happened to my mother, but I wouldn’t have it. And now this. I’m a bastard.” Her eyes closed, her voice catching. “I don’t matter—I’m worthless.”
His gut twisted—violently—nearly cutting off his air.
This is what had been consuming her mind? That she was worthless?
She was wrong—so very wrong. And he couldn’t bear to see her without hope. To witness the absence of all light within her—as though her very force of life had been snuffed out. He would do anything—inflict as much pain as possible on everything around them—until it lit back within her.
He wanted her pain gone and then never wanted to see it on her face again. Yes, she was naïve. Yes, she wanted to see good, the possibilities and wonder in everything. But he couldn’t stand to see her spirit jaded like this.
He’d assumed that her family would be the worst of the worst, and he’d been right. But she’d needed to see them for who they were with her own eyes. That didn’t mean he’d wanted her to lose who she was in the process. Who she had always been.
The only reason they’d stayed alive that year on their own when they were nine was because of her hope, her insistence that the next day would be better. The days never got better, but she never lost that optimism. Never. No matter how bad those days were—no matter how hungry, how hurt or scared—every night before she would close her eyes, her head resting on his upper arm, she would declare the next day would be better.
This current state she was in—he wasn’t about to accept it. She was better than this and he needed to remind her of that fact.
Strider set his fork down on his plate and stood up, moving around the table to her. He dropped down, resting on his heels, his look almost at eye level with her.
“You do matter, Pen.” His right hand slipped along the line of her jaw, the tips of his fingers sliding into her hair as his gaze pinned her. “You matter to me. You mattered to my mother, my father. You aren’t worthless and you never have been.”
Her stare stayed on him, her green eyes refusing to acknowledge what he said.
His left hand lifted and he captured her face, his voice going hard. “You do matter. You matter more than I could have ever guessed or wanted you to. You matter.”
Her body twitched, a full spasm echoing through her bones, and her eyes widened. Ever so slowly, her right hand lifted, her fore and middle fingertips going to his lips, her pinky caressing the side of his cheek.
Hell, but she had the touch of an angel.
“Don’t tell me things that aren’t true, Strider. It doesn’t become you.”
“Don’t tell me what I do and don’t believe, Pen. I know my own damn mind.”
The smallest smile came to her face as her fingers fell from his lips. “I do not think my heart can take losing you again.”
He lifted himself off his heels and leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “Don’t worry on that.”
The words came so easily—just like when they were children. Don’t worry. Even when he knew full well she should.
But she didn’t press it. Press him.
Good thing, for he was the one worried.
He couldn’t protect her when they were young, and every time he looked at her now, all he saw was his failure. Yet he couldn’t look away from her.
Stuck, staring at her, needing to save her from this river of pain she was drowni
ng in, but not knowing what to do, how to swim out and save her.
For three full breaths he tried to force himself to stand and move away from her, but then she did the unthinkable.
She leaned forward, her fingers sliding along the side of his face, and she set her mouth on his.
A kiss, sad and forlorn, and all he wanted to do was to flip it. Flip it into something good and beautiful and wondrous for her. Flip it from the misery that had prompted it.
His right hand dove deep into the back of her head and pins fell from her chignon, locks of her hair escaping wild under his fingers. He pulled her head tighter to his and parted his lips, hungry for her, taking control of the kiss. Demanding action from her. Demanding her body awaken to his touch.
It only took seconds before her tongue touched his and her hands wrapped around his neck. She wasn’t ready to let him go, her nails digging into his skin.
Their tongues warred and a soft mewl—carnal—echoed into his mouth.
At the sound, his damn cock sprang to attention, already throbbing at the memory of her lips wrapped around it.
Dammit. He only meant to flip the kiss. Kiss her and then excuse himself.
Another groan, guttural from her chest.
His hand itched to drift downward, to take the heft of her breast in his palm.
Wrong. Wrong, what he wanted to do to her, but knew he couldn’t. Not in her state, not now.
He ripped his mouth away from hers and his forehead tilted forward to meet hers. “We can’t do this. Not now.”
“What’s wrong with now?” She gasped a breath. “I know what I’m starting and I want you, Strider.”
“You’re sad.”
“So, make me happy.”
Make her happy.
Damn her blasted logic. Wrong. So wrong.
But wrong had never stopped him before.
The only person who had ever been able to stop him from doing anything was urging him to do the bloody thing he was trying to resist.
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