The Lure of a Rake

by Christi Caldwell

  It prevented her from thinking of him. Faithless rake. Regret and despair twisted her insides in a vicious pain. Her husband had never invited her along last evening, or any evening, because he’d had plans to see another woman. Unable to gaze at the small face upon the page, she looked up and found her friend, Francesca, and sister, Gillian, staring at her.

  For their benefit, she gave them a smile. If her smile grew any tauter, she feared her face might shatter. “Forgive me. I’m woolgathering today.” She made for miserable company.

  “Oh, Genevieve, your smile is really more of a grimace,” Francesca whispered.

  “I am so happy you’re here,” she said softly. If it weren’t for the other young ladies’ company, Genevieve would be alone in her chambers weeping tears that would never end. God, how she despised all of this. The folly in coming here, entering this world she no longer belonged to, resonated all the more.

  “Well, I’m happy you are here,” Francesca beamed. “London had been so very dreadful until you arrived.”

  “It is a dreadful place, isn’t it?” she said more to herself. How could Cedric wish to live here? There was nothing sincere or real in this place. Then, mayhap that is what he preferred—the artifice and veneer of falsity painted by soulless lords and ladies.

  “I heard Mother and Father speaking of what happened last night,” Gillian said softly, snapping her attention back to the moment.

  Of course they had. She cringed, just imagining what her always disappointed mother and father thought of their daughter attending one of those shameful affairs. Then, it was hard to give a jot about angry parents who’d never truly approved of her.

  “I am sorry you are hurting, Genny.”

  Gillian and Francesca sat side by side on the opposite leather button sofa, shoulders pressed together in a wonderful display of supportive friendship.

  Genevieve mustered her first smile since her life had fallen apart last evening. “It is not your fault, Gillian. Who could have known…?” She let those words trail off. For even with these two young women, loyal friends she trusted implicitly, she could not bring herself to utter the shameful, wicked things she’d observed last evening. Her throat worked. Though, the copy of The Times had quite delighted in enumerating every last scandalous detail.

  About the Marquess of St. Albans…and the woman he’d bestowed his attentions on last evening.

  About the poor, pathetic marchioness who’d appeared at the center of that shameful event.

  Fury melded with the agony of Cedric’s betrayal and with a growl, she picked up her book and resumed her sketching. She embraced the silence of the room as she concluded the sketch. Once done, she eyed the completed figure. Setting the charcoal aside, she blew on the page. The tiny little likeness with cherubic cheeks, with his almond-shaped eyes and crop of slightly curled locks was very much the image of a certain other. A man who didn’t even want him. Or her. He never had. Their cold arrangement had been colder than she’d even known. Pain, like a thousand jagged needles, stuck in her chest.

  Genevieve rested the book down and picked her attention up. Her sister and Francesca sat patiently, staring. How good they were. How loyal. They certainly deserved more than her morose silence. And she truly needed their friendship.

  “It was horrendous,” she said at last. She grimaced. That did nothing to truly capture the pain and humiliation that came in being married to a rake. Genevieve clasped her hands before her. “Needless to say, for Francesca’s optimistic opinion, the gossip proved invariably true last evening.”

  A shocked gasp split her sister’s lips. “Surely not.” Rage lit her eyes.

  Genevieve sighed. “Regardless, last night simply confirmed everything whispered about Cedric. It proved the rumors true.” And now she would never be the same. Her heart spasmed. So this was what the death of a dream felt like. Absently, she picked up the sketchpad and studied the babe’s form done in Cedric’s likeness.

  “What will you do now?” Francesca asked haltingly.

  What would she do? What did women do who were married and a part of cold, loveless unions? If she stayed in London, she would die. Her spirit would wilt until she became a shadow of the person she’d always been. Her lips twisted. Then, isn’t that what she’d become since returning? Her time in London had been like a slow death, with Cedric proving the only brightness in this otherwise dark world. She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She fiddled with the pages of her book. “Do you know, I believed there was nothing worse than being unwed, always on the fringe of Society, without a promise or hope of marriage. Today,” she turned her hands up. “Today, I would say this marriage to Cedric is so much worse.” This one-sided relationship where her husband cared for her was not enough. And it was her own fault for convincing herself it could be.

  “I have to believe he cares for you,” Gillian put in, once more showing her optimism, which Genevieve hadn’t been without herself yesterday. “The man you describe who gardens with you and sketches is not the man the papers write of.” Her sister spoke with the same naïveté Genevieve had once carried.

  Francesca continued her defense of a man who could never be defended. “I do not believe that woman mentioned in the papers is…more to him.”

  On what did Gillian and Francesca base their flawed assumptions? On the morsels of happiness Genevieve had fed them? Morsels she’d allowed herself to believe were so much more. Her throat worked and, hating the sheen of tears that clouded her vision, she trained her gaze on her friend’s hand. “Yes, well, it really wouldn’t matter if she was,” Genevieve said, her voice curiously flat. “Our world is one where ladies and gentlemen carry on as they wish.”

  Her friend made a sound of protest. “I cannot believe that or accept that. There are some unions that are formed on love. My parents,” she said softly. “Until my mother died, were very much in love.”

  Genevieve lifted her gaze to meet the other young lady’s pain-filled eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “She’s been gone ten years and it still feels as though I’ve just lost her sometimes. But the most important lessons she gave me are that love is real and it matters. Above all else.”

  Those words resonated around the chambers of Genevieve’s mind. A pebble knotted her belly. Francesca’s very valuable lessons, imparted too late. For Genevieve had allowed herself to believe that stability and freedom were all she was entitled to. Only to find, with her husband only distantly interested in her and in the basest of ways, love was all that mattered. And they could never have that as long as he wished to live the same rakish lifestyle he’d lived all the years before her.

  “I have seen the way the marquess looks at you and it is very much the way my father looked at my mother,” Francesca said, pulling her to the moment.

  Her observation startled a sharp, empty laugh from Genevieve. “You are mistaken.” Just as Francesca had seen more in that first waltz, so, too, was she hopelessly wrong in this.

  “I don’t believe she is,” Gillian pressed. “I—”

  “He was touching her,” Genevieve said with a bluntness that elicited matching gasps from her friends. She tightened her mouth. “Are those the actions of a man who cares for me?”

  Gillian pressed her fingers against her mouth. “Surely not?”

  She gave a terse nod. “Indeed. I arrived to…see it.” The memory of Cedric’s long, tanned fingers against that woman’s perfect, white flesh assaulted her and Genevieve pressed her eyes momentarily closed to blot it out. “And then I promptly left. That manner of event is not one I wish to be part of. Even to be closer to my husband.” She’d not elaborate that her husband had, in fact, been caressing the woman’s naked breast. Such details were not fit for any lady’s ears; friend or sister. None of what she’d witnessed last evening had been. For his protestations afterward, the fact remained that Cedric had been there. Any of the remorse or regret he’d expressed last evening wouldn’t have existed—if he hadn’t been discovered by her. Nor was tha
t the greatest pain he’d inflicted last night. She ran a tired hand over her face.

  “What happened?” Francesca put in tentatively. At Genevieve’s furrowed brow, the other woman clarified. “When you left the…er…party.” Her full cheeks bloomed with color. “What did the marquess do?”

  She sighed. “He also left.” At the look exchanged by her friends, she frowned. “What?”

  Francesca cleared her throat. “Well, it just occurs to me, that if he were the manner of lecherous rake and scoundrel whispered about, he’d hardly care if you arrived and saw him so. Such a gentleman would, no doubt, continue on with his own…um…pleasures. But by your accounts, the marquess left.”

  “Hmm,” Gillian murmured, tapping her chin.

  Her frown deepening, Genevieve alternated her stare between the two young ladies. In the haze of shock and despair, she’d not given thought about Cedric’s following her. Why had he left his evening’s enjoyments if he was the coldhearted rake the world purported him to be? Except, the memory of his exchange with his father trickled in and twisted the blade of agony all the deeper. A sound of frustration escaped her and she leapt to her feet. Needing distance from the babe on that sketchpad, she wandered over to the hearth. “The marquess married me on a matter of revenge.” She shot a glance over her shoulder. “Against his father.” Hardly an auspicious beginning.

  Francesca scratched her brow. “What did you do to the Duke of Ravenscourt?”

  A laugh burst from her lips and she managed her first real smile. God love Francesca Cornworthy in her optimism and unaffectedness.

  Gillian laid her hand on the other lady’s. “I believe she means because His Grace did not approve of her.”

  “Why—?”

  “The scandal,” her younger sister supplied.

  “Ah, yes. Of course.”

  Of course. The scandal that had sent her from London and saw her returned as the shamed, whispered about lady. It had also found her married to Cedric for it. Her stomach twisted as a sharp pain stuck at her. God help her for being a fool. Even with everything that had come to pass, she loved her husband still.

  “If I may?” Francesca ventured, clearing her throat. “By your own admission, you married the marquess for matters of convenience.”

  Yes, but it was different.

  “Why is it different?” her friend persisted.

  She started not realizing she spoke aloud. “It matters because I love him. It matters because, even as I agreed to marry him for a mutually beneficial arrangement, I cared for him then.” And I love him now.

  Gillian pushed to her feet. “Isn’t it possible,” she began softly, coming over. “Isn’t it possible that His Lordship mayhap entered into your marriage feeling much the same way and that he, too, has come to love you?”

  …I care about you…

  Not love. It had never been about love with Cedric. Not on his end.

  Even if they moved on from Lord Montfort’s party, it was what had transpired after that made their union impossible. “There are too many insurmountable challenges between us,” she said tiredly. The greatest being the child nestled in her womb. Another agonizing pain struck low in her belly. For that was just another detail about her husband she could never share with her sister or Francesca. Somehow, breathing the words about his antipathy for children would make that truth more real in ways that would shatter her. She shifted as another twinge pulled at her back.

  “What is it?” her sister asked, concern underscoring those three words.

  Genevieve opened her mouth, when a cramping low in her belly robbed her of breath. She shot a hand out, finding the mantel. What is wrong with me?

  A slight gush between her legs wrung a gasp from her and she swayed, dimly registering her sister’s cry as Gillian caught her about the waist. She heard Francesca’s frantic calls for help. Another spasm wracked her middle as agony plucked at the corner of her consciousness. Gillian guided her down to the floor.

  “Something is wrong,” Genevieve managed to rasp. Noting the footsteps of rushing servants and her sister’s frantic cries, she remembered nothing more.

  *

  Cedric had done any number of rotten, vile things in the course of his life. Never had a word uttered or a deed committed given him so much as a fleeting afterthought.

  Seated at the back table of his club, with a half-empty bottle of brandy before him, he found with no little amount of shock that he was capable of—guilt and pain and every other bloody emotion he’d believed himself immune to. A pressure tightened his chest and, in a bid to dissipate it, he took a long swallow of his drink. Alas, the dulling power of the spirits had long ceased to have any effect.

  …I do not want to be part of your life, Cedric. I do not wish to be part of any of your world…

  She didn’t want him in her life. And why should she? He stared into his drink. He’d proven himself unworthy of her time and time again. He’d married her for the worst of reasons and last night, he’d inadvertently pulled her into the ugly world he’d dwelled in; a world she had no part in. She was goodness and purity. And after last night, with the revulsion and horror in her eyes, he’d instantly shattered whatever fragile happiness they’d built between them.

  …I love you…

  She loved him. His gut clenched. Or she had. That gift he had no right to.

  Aside from heartache and pain, what had he to offer her? Nothing. It was why he was his father’s son. He was undeserving of love and incapable of giving it. Wasn’t last night proof of that? The memory of her trickled in as she’d stood at the center of that ballroom, with an innocent smile on her generous lips. And the moment that innocence had died. At his hands. A groan lodged in his throat and he rubbed at the dull ache in his chest. To no avail. It continued to throb. Just as it had since Genevieve had walked away from him last night.

  Following her retreat, he’d sat in the silence of his office contemplating the man he was. He’d been a rake, a rogue, and a shiftless bounder. He’d wagered too many good funds and fleeced other gentlemen out of theirs. Through all those years of inanity, he’d sought to lose himself in a mindless existence that prevented him from accepting the truth before him—his life was an empty one. He ran a tired hand over his face. She deserved more than Cedric Falcot, worthless Marquess of St. Albans. And yet, stuck with him, she was.

  God help him for being a selfish, grasping, self-centered bastard. Even with her hating him as she did, he wanted her anyway. Throughout his life, he’d disavowed marriage. So when threatened by his father, Cedric could have easily found an equally ruthless, heartless lady who’d be Cedric’s perfect match in every way.

  He went still.

  Yet, he hadn’t. He’d wanted Genevieve. Nay, needed her. Even as he’d convinced himself the offer he made was one born of necessity for the both of them, now, with only his miserable self for company, he at last accepted the lie he’d perpetuated against himself. Against the both of them—he’d wanted her. He wanted her in every way. Not because he required a wife. Not because he wished for an empty marriage where he was free to carry on with countless whores and widows.

  He wanted her because she’d reminded him what it meant to smile; not the practiced, false grin she’d easily seen through the day he’d offered her marriage, but rather, a smile borne of happiness. He wanted her because she celebrated his love of art and did not mock him for that interest as his father and friend had. When the world, when his own family, had seen nothing but the self-centered, worthless rake, Genevieve had seen more. Seen more, when he’d never been deserving of her faith.

  His throat worked spasmodically. Then, in one faulty, unforgiving misstep on his part, he’d destroyed all of that. Her innocence. Her smile. And more, any hope of happiness between them. A cold emptiness filled him. To drive away the coldness, he tossed back the remaining contents of his glass and glanced across the club.

  His gaze automatically narrowed at the familiar figure cutting a path through the club—a man h
e’d called friend. Odd, he’d known the Earl of Montfort for almost twenty years and Genevieve for less than three months, and she had been more a friend to him than the faithless bastard striding over to him now.

  “St. Albans, my good man. How are you?” the earl asked with boisterous cheer as he swiped the bottle of brandy and motioned for a servant.

  Cedric studied the other man’s lazy movements; the way he poured himself a snifter full and then searched around for an available whore. Montfort caught the eye of one woman and the young beauty sauntered to their table. “How much?” Cedric asked quietly.

  The earl blinked several times.

  “How many silver pieces does it take to betray one’s friend?”

  The beauty he’d previously summoned stopped before the table. “Not now, love,” Montfort murmured, his gaze still locked with Cedric’s.

  Fury thrumming through him, Cedric concentrated on the safe, hollow sentiment, for it prevented him from thinking about the only person who truly mattered. The only woman who’d ever meant anything to him. “You bastard,” he seethed.

  Montfort rolled his shoulders.

  Cedric curled his fingers into hard fists to keep from bloodying the other man senseless. How had he ever called him friend? “Nothing to say?” he asked coolly when the other man remained silent.

  “I gather you’re speaking about my involvement with your father?” With an infuriating calm, Montfort shrugged. “I didn’t do anything different than what you yourself would have done had you been in my shoes.”

  Cedric surged forward, rattling the glasses on the table. “I called you my friend,” he bit out. Other gentlemen peered over in curiosity and he lowered his voice to a furious whisper. “I confided in you things I shared with no one. And knowing all of that, about the man I hate, you betrayed me, anyway?”

  The earl tightened his mouth. “Oh, how difficult it must be for you,” he spat. He swiped his hand in Cedric’s direction. “You speak as though your life has been a rotten one. Why? Because you had a nasty father?” He leaned forward shrinking the space between them. “We all have miserable fathers. Children serve but one purpose. To advance our lines. Yet, you,” he peeled his lip back in a mocking sneer, “you act as though your father is somehow different. Hate him all you want.” He lifted his glass in salute. “But the man has built a fortune you’ll one day inherit, whereas men such as me are left in near dun territory because of my sire’s recklessness.”