The Wedding Night of an English Rogue

by Jillian Hunter

  “Your chest,” she whispered. “Oh, Heath. I saw it when Drake and I removed your shirt.”

  “I should have warned you.”

  She shook her head, holding back tears. “I’m not thinking of me. Only of what you must have suffered.”

  “It’s past, Julia.”

  She nodded slowly, knowing he was too proud a man to desire her pity. There were faded, vicious scars on his chest. Deep and puckered purple craters of flesh that resembled healed burns. Julia pressed her fingertips gently upon each one. Deliberately inflicted by another. She felt sickened. How fortunate he had survived. Burns.

  He was tortured in Portugal, Russell had told her when he was explaining that he wanted Heath to watch over her. Nothing a lady needs to hear about. He’s healed. We all went through hell, and there’s no reason to discuss it. He survived. No other details. All very matter-of-fact, a soldier’s duty. The pain must have been unendurable.

  He frowned, clearly aware where her gaze had fallen. “Julia,” he said in faint irritation, “I do not wish to be coddled like an invalid. Please leave the room so that I may dress.”

  “Of course,” she murmured.

  He caught her hand as she twisted around in her chair. “Do I sound ungrateful?”

  Her heart clenched at the warmth of his hand on hers, the sight of his half-bare, muscular body sprawled out on the bed. He was a man to dream about. But the scars on his chest reminded her of how vulnerable even the strongest man could become. Her husband, Adam, had died before he was thirty, certain he was invincible. She fought down a surge of anxiety, of fear for Heath, and Russell. They both were trying to protect her, but who would protect them?

  “At least you didn’t shoot me this time,” he said with a weak attempt at a smile.

  “Thank heavens.”

  His voice lowered an octave. “I’d be shot by you all over again if I had another chance to change what happened afterward.”

  A current of heat went through her as his hand tightened over hers.

  “I wish . . . well, we can’t change it now,” she said after a long silence.

  “I remember everything, Julia.”

  “This—”

  “You remember, too. Why did you leave me?” His eyes searched her face, unguarded and dark with emotion. “Why did you run off to get married after we’d found each other?”

  She stared at him in astonishment. She could not believe what he had said. “Leave you?” She shook her head in confusion. “I didn’t leave you. You left me.”

  “You told me never to talk to you again. I thought you were ashamed—”

  “I was.”

  “I thought you needed time to realize what we meant to each other.”

  She kept shaking her head. Never once in all these years had she considered what had happened from his viewpoint. He was a known rogue. “I assumed you would think I was fast, too forward. I—”

  “I thought you were wonderful. I couldn’t believe my luck or my subsequent bad fortune. I couldn’t believe that I had met someone like you right as I was going off to war.”

  “You thought I was wonderful?”

  “Yes.” He gave her a black look. “And you told me to go away or I would ruin your life. You called me a demon with blue eyes.”

  “All this time,” she said in wonder, “and you remember my exact words.” She remembered, too. She’d revisited those hours often enough. Shed more than a few tears.

  “I remember that you told me you never wanted to see me again.”

  “Yes, but . . .” She lifted her free hand to her heart. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “The blue-eyed demon didn’t know that.”

  “I wasn’t about to become one of Heath Boscastle’s women,” she said defensively.

  That seemed to catch him by surprise. “What on earth are you talking about? What women?”

  “All the young women at that house party wanted you to notice them.”

  His frown deepened. “That doesn’t mean I wanted any of them.”

  Julia searched his handsome face, completely unbalanced by what he’d confessed. It was the first time she had allowed him to speak in his own defense. She knew he was telling the truth, had no reason to lie to her now. She had thought him heartless. “But Russell told me that in all those years, you never once mentioned me, never asked how I was or where I had gone.”

  A flush of anger crept across his proud, chiseled cheekbones. “For God’s sake, Julia. Of course I never discussed you with him. I promised you that what happened between us would remain a secret. I knew that if I started to talk about you, he would guess how I felt.”

  “How you felt,” she repeated numbly. “How could anyone guess? I can forgive you, Heath, because I do not believe you would lie. And after all this time, there is no need. But . . . you’re as difficult to understand as those Egyptian hieroglyphics you like to study.”

  He gave her a warning look as the door behind her opened. Drake and Hermia’s physician suddenly entered the room to bring a standstill to Julia’s revealing conversation with the man. She needed to think. So much time had passed. Wasn’t his admission too late to matter?

  “Is everything all right?” Drake asked, glancing from his brother to Julia as if he sensed the strange tension between them. “Heath? Do you want something for the pain?”

  “What pain?” Heath muttered as Julia came to her feet.

  And Julia smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Yes, she was rather bewildered by their conversation, but deep down inside she felt a fragile stirring of happiness. Perhaps even hope.

  I didn’t leave you. You left me. Had she said that? Had their misguided sense of virtue come between any chance of happiness together they might have had?

  She glanced back at his stark, masculine face, at his hard powerful body posed so incongruously in her aunt’s bed.

  “I’ll come back to check on you when you’re feeling yourself again,” she said as he gave Drake and the physician a forbidding scowl. “Do what you’re told, Heath.”

  Naturally Heath did not remain in bed. He ordered Drake and the physician from the room. He had work to do. And it was degrading, really, beneath one’s dignity for a former cavalry officer to be felled by an overanxious butler. Never mind that the butler’s mistress had felled the officer once herself.

  In fact, Heath reflected, as he threw off the feminine bed coverings, he had never completely recovered from his first encounter with Julia. In a sense, she hadn’t just shot him in the shoulder all those years ago. She might as well have taken aim at his heart.

  He stared around the room, looking for his shirt. Well, now Julia had seen the scars on his chest, which tended to fascinate or frighten women. She hadn’t fallen into either category that he could tell. He assumed she understood that the scars were Auclair’s handiwork. He wasn’t about to enlighten her if she didn’t.

  He pulled on his shirt, noticed the mud stains on it, then pulled it off again. Someone had draped his vest and jacket over a chair. He dressed, scowling at his reflection in the beveled pier glass. There was something about a shirtless man in a vest and evening jacket that looked quite off.

  “I’m not Beau Brummel,” he told the reflection. “And as I’m talking to myself, I think I may have sustained a brain injury.”

  At least the reflection didn’t talk back. He assumed that was a sign he’d retained a modicum of sanity.

  It was probably shock.

  Julia thought he had left her. All those years of hiding his wounded pride, of yearning, of searching for a woman to replace her. He hadn’t done it consciously, of course. But every woman he had courted, every one he had taken to his bed, had been held to the light of Julia’s joyous spirit and been found lacking. Ironic that they had not been reunited to realize their true feelings until she was engaged to one of his oldest friends.

  “Hell,” he said loudly. “Hell and damn.”

  He’d done more than initiate a seduction that afternoon long ago
. He had lost a valuable piece of himself to her. In those days he hadn’t been quite as self-contained as he was now, but he’d been wildly attracted to Julia from the moment they met. He would have pursued her after their sexual encounter. Except that she had never spoken to him again, and she probably would have murdered him if he’d approached her father.

  Marriage had been the last thing on his mind, of course. Still, he resented not even having been allowed a say in what had happened. She’d underestimated him, or perhaps underestimated what he thought of her. She’d assumed he was another rogue in a long line of them. That wasn’t untrue, but it didn’t mean he could never change.

  Then before he’d figured out the proper way to win her, or how badly he wanted to, she had sailed off to India to marry another man, not knowing how much she had meant to Heath because he hadn’t really known it until it was too late himself.

  Understanding this changed everything, and it changed nothing. He was still honor-bound to protect her. She was still officially engaged to Russell, a temporary situation he would remedy, but the fact was that the spark between Julia and him had never died. It had smoldered dangerously for years. Heath was of a mind to fan it; they’d both go up in flames before she got away from him again.

  Now that he had finally seen their past from Julia’s perspective, what had happened afterward made sense. Julia assumed that her “sin” had rendered her rather vulgar in his eyes. She’d been ashamed of her passionate response to his seduction, assuming it had been the kind of thing he did every day.

  It hadn’t been. Not then. Not now. He had been swept up in passion, in their encounter, had savored every sensual moment in his memory. But he’d hardly made a regular habit of ravishing young girls at house parties.

  His mistake had been in believing that Julia had been liberal-minded enough to ignore the strictures of Society. But even a freethinker could not escape certain social conventions.

  Until now.

  She had assumed that Heath, having seduced her once, being a Boscastle male, was an irredeemable rogue. Well, it might be time to start acting like one. If it took a rogue to win her, he could play the part.

  All he really had to do was follow his instincts.

  And perhaps put on a shirt.

  Heath appeared recovered enough the next day to go for a drive with Julia in Hyde Park. He assured her his head did not hurt. She relented but did not believe him. She frowned in concern as he put on his coat in the hallway.

  She even insisted on holding the reins of the curricle. To her surprise he did not protest. She suspected he might be in greater discomfort than he let on, or perhaps he wanted to be on guard. Whatever his motive, he did not seem to be in a talkative mood.

  Of course, after last night, they would be wise to think carefully before revealing any more secrets. By telling Heath the truth, Julia had placed herself in the most vulnerable position imaginable. Not to mention her uninhibited response to him in her bedroom. Six years of unsatisfied passion stored up. She had been quite shameless, almost insensible with need, although he hadn’t appeared to disapprove.

  She knew she could trust him to keep his silence the way he had for the last six years. But wouldn’t she rather that he fight for her? For the first time she realized that a passionate commitment was what she had always secretly wanted, waited for, hoped he would offer. The truth dawned on her as they circled around the park in the warm afternoon air. His deep voice only reaffirmed her regret.

  “I don’t blame you for hating me for what happened years ago,” he said, as if he, too, had been giving the matter a great deal of thought. “You were young. We both were, and I couldn’t resist you. That’s no excuse. I took advantage of you.” He ran his hand through his gleaming black hair, then shrugged in helpless apology.

  Julia drew back lightly on the reins. She didn’t look at him. Those sensual Boscastle eyes always put her at a disadvantage. “I never hated you.”

  “Thank God. I deserved it.”

  She was tempted to laugh. “What a wicked pair we are.” They were both equally guilty, or equally innocent, depending on how one looked at the situation. “There’s only one reason, actually, why I can never forgive you.”

  She felt him turn slightly toward her. His body brushed hers like a warm iron, solid and strong, but capable of leaving a painful brand. A true warrior beneath that deceptively languid frame. A fluttering heat swirled in the pit of her stomach. She dared not look at him.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  She stared at the young couple who rode past them. “What is what?”

  “Answer me, Julia.”

  She slowed the curricle, afraid of where this conversation would lead. Yes, it was good to clear the air, but what would be left of them afterward?

  He reached across her lap to grab the reins from her hands. His eyes searched her face, and in that moment she felt a shiver of empathy for the enemies he had confronted during war. There was a ruthless streak beneath all that refined beauty. His stare felt as though he had taken a scalpel to her soul. “Last night each of us confessed things that were unsettling and should have been said before,” he began. “There is no point in continuing that course of stupidity. We are both old enough to accept the truth.”

  She bit her lower lip. “I was rather hoping we were going to do the civilized thing and forget that conversation. It was quite painful as I recall.”

  He would not back down. Merciless, these Boscastle men were when it came to having their way. “What have you not forgiven me?” he demanded.

  Had she really hoped he would relent, be polite, and pretend she hadn’t laid her heart open to him? No. She wanted him to know. The truth had been festering inside her like a thorn for too many years. Let him pluck it out, even if she bled to death. He was probably used to it. The Boscastles in ancient battle had been a bloodthirsty lot.

  The curricle had come to a complete stop in the center of the ring. They were interrupting the flow of fashionable traffic. Several riders cast them curious looks in passing. She wasn’t accustomed to all the attention. Heath was. There wasn’t a male in his family who hadn’t attracted notice from his first nursery days.

  “All right, Your Royal Arrogance,” she said. “I’ll tell you. And afterward you will never wish to talk to me again.”

  He raised his brow. “I doubt it.”

  She pulled off one of her gloves. “Do you really want to know?”

  He leaned into her. “Julia, we are not budging an inch until I know.”

  He meant it. She could picture both of them sitting in this curricle through a complete change of seasons, having their meals brought to them by the Boscastle servants, coal braziers and blankets provided for the cold, plum pudding for Christmas.

  “Oh, fine.” Her throat felt tight and achy. “I don’t forgive you for not fighting for me. For not asking me to marry you after what we’d done.”

  “For not fighting for you?” His blue eyes glittered with anger. “Who was there to fight?” His voice deepened in disbelief. “You?”

  “Yes!”

  His mouth flattened. “You told me you never wanted to see me again. You told me I was a devil, a libertine, a rake, a— You made me swear upside down that I would leave you alone.” He shook his head incredulously. “You made me swear on my mother’s grave that I would pretend nothing had ever happened between us, that, should we ever meet again, I was to act as if we were polite strangers, that—”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said in a quiet voice. “I wanted you to pursue me, but I thought you’d think I was fast. I thought—”

  He started to laugh. “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  “You couldn’t have told me this a little earlier? Say five or so years ago? When it could have made a difference?”

  She reared back. Was he telling her that it didn’t make a difference now? And if it didn’t, why had they been together in her bedroom last night? “I
shouldn’t have told you.”

  “And you would have married me—if I’d gone to your father and asked for your hand?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, giving a heartfelt sigh. “Yes, I would have. Of course I would. I’d have run off to China with you if you’d asked.”

  He shook his head again, looking utterly bemused. “Even though I had already asked to see you again, and you had refused?”

  “Which I did only because I was afraid you were only asking me because you’re such a gentleman.”

  He exhaled and readjusted the reins he’d wrested from her hands. At his expert touch the horses redirected themselves into the ring. Julia studied him from the corner of her eye. Obviously it wasn’t easy for either of them to discuss the past.

  “Julia,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve had enough experience with women since then that I actually do understand your logic. Or illogic.”

  She took a breath. “Now you must think I am not only fast but also a fool. A fool with no morals and a loose tongue. A—”

  “Why did you marry?” he demanded, his temper rising again as he remembered how furious he had been, how he’d practically set sail for India when he had heard about her intended marriage. He’d ridden halfway to the wharves like a wild man before realizing that Julia would have been wedded and bedded before he could reach India. That she had forbidden him to talk to her again.

  “I married him because he asked me, and you didn’t.”

  “I asked you to elope,” he said darkly.

  “I didn’t think you meant it,” she said quietly. “Did you?”

  “Probably.”

  She lifted her brow. “Probably? That doesn’t sound very definite, does it?”

  “I thought you were coming back in a year,” he said, frowning at her.

  “That was our original plan,” she said, frowning right back at him. “I thought you were planning to fight in India with your brother Brandon.”

  “That was my original plan, but . . .” His face darkened as if he were on the verge of a violent outburst. “But Russell persuaded me to go to Portugal instead.”