The Lure of a Rake

by Christi Caldwell

  “Guv’nor?”

  Cedric gave his head a clearing shake. “Many thanks,” he said gruffly and released the purse. The boy peered inside. His eyes made round moons. As though fearing Cedric would change his mind, he sprinted away. Swinging up into his saddle, Cedric nudged his mount onward. What a muck he’d made of his life. Only, he’d bumbled it all since he’d been a boy. He’d been a miserable brother and had proven an even lousier husband and son. He continued riding through the fashionable streets of London he’d long avoided, onward until he came to a pink stucco townhouse on Mayfair.

  Two black lacquer carriages sat outside the posh residence. Servants bustled back and forth from the home to the conveyance, loading trunks atop.

  Without thinking, he dismounted and motioned over a young boy. A new lad with shades of red in his hair rushed over. Another spasm wracked Cedric’s heart. She was everywhere, in every child he’d meet. This was to be his penance for a lifetime of sins; this great, gaping loss and a forever reminder of it in the faces of even small strangers. “I’ll be but a short while,” he said, reaching for a coin. “There will be more,” he promised. As he slowly made his way up the steps, servants stepped around him.

  Almost reflexively, he knocked once and stared at the wood panel. What am I doing here?

  He gave his head a shake and turned to go, just as the door opened. “My lord?” the butler inquired at his back.

  Cedric wheeled slowly around. “I…” His neck heated. He’d never stepped foot inside these doors. It spoke volumes of the manner of man he was. He’d been too busy living for his own pleasures.

  The servant stared inquiringly at him.

  With wooden movements, he reached inside his jacket and withdrew a calling card. “The Marquess of St. Albans to see Her Ladyship.”

  The butler of middling years accepted it. A flare of surprise widened his eyes, which he quickly concealed. He motioned Cedric forward.

  Even in the folds of his gloves, Cedric’s palms moistened. He’d no place here. For that matter, why had he even come? Was there a sort of absolution he sought? One he’d never be deserving of? “Forgive me,” he said quietly, and pivoted. “I—”

  “Cedric?”

  He froze, his skin heating as he spun about. His sister stood at the end of the corridor, her head cocked at a small angle. Shock marked the planes of her face. Their mother’s face. She was her image, in every way. While he, he was their father. He cleared his throat. “Clarisse. Forgive me. I should not have arrived unannounced.” At all. He shouldn’t have come at all. There was no accounting for his visit. Furthermore, why should she even want to see him?

  She held her arms out. At that subtle movement, the fabric tightened over the front of her gown revealing a slightly rounded belly. And a wave of unexpected agony assaulted his senses, sucking away logic, leaving him standing there in a world of remembered horror. Genevieve’s blood. The muffled sound of her weeping as he’d sat outside her chambers and tortured himself with every blasted sound of her misery. “Come,” his sister said with a surprising gentleness that brought his eyes open.

  He blinked several times. “I have to leave.” His voice emerged as a faint whisper.

  Clarisse moved over in a flurry of satin skirts. “You can visit for a bit,” she said gently, but a steely strength underscored her words.

  “I see you are leaving.”

  “For the country,” she said with a nod. “But we are not to depart for several hours. Come,” she urged.

  His sister fixed a benevolent look on him. Cedric’s feet twitched with a panicky urge to flee.

  “Come,” she repeated.

  Wordlessly, he followed at her side as she guided him to an empty parlor. He followed behind her and paused. Several easels had been set up about the room, close to the floor-length windows. Drawn to the colorful paintings, he strode past Clarisse as she claimed a seat on a pink upholstered sofa.

  He eyed a painting of a small urn of colorful blooms. It spoke volumes that he’d failed to know all these years that his sister, too, had a love of art. By the work tacked to those easels, she was quite good. He clasped his hands at his back and moved on to the next, riveted by the pale blue, summer sky. Soft, white clouds filled the canvas and he leaned forward, sucked back to another moment.

  …The sky is bluer and when you lay on the grass and stare up at the sky you see nothing but an endless blue, so that you think you can stretch your fingers up and touch the heavens…

  “Would you care for refreshments?” his sister asked and he spun about.

  “Refreshments?” At her nod, he shook his head and returned his study to that summer landscape. He dipped his head once again and then wandered over to another easel. A winter storm raged on the canvas. Tree branches heavy with snow hung low and at the center of it was a couple, cloaked in their winter garments. He peered at the man and woman; their bodies close, but their faces remained concealed. How similar he was to the pair trapped in a storm raging about. Cold in ways that he’d never be properly warmed.

  Registering the silence, he abandoned his examination of the painting. “Did you paint these?” he asked, as he strode over to a nearby gilt rimmed arm chair and settled into the seat.

  “I did.” She eyed his movements.

  “You’re quite good.”

  “Thank you.” A small smile hovered on her lips, but for that faint expression, she revealed none of what she was thinking. Then, all the Falcots had long proven themselves masters of their emotions.

  Cedric layered his palms to the arms of the chair and drummed his fingers while looking about the room. How little time he’d spent learning anything but his own interests these years. A sad day, indeed, when one at last confronted the manner of person he truly had been all these years.

  …You need to figure out who you want to be…

  Clarisse cleared her throat and he ceased tapping, glancing over to where she sat. “I do not believe you’ve come today to discuss my artwork,” she ventured.

  “No.” Except he didn’t know why he had come this day. He looked over the top of Clarisse’s head. He said nothing for a long, long while, searching for words. “I was a rather miserable brother, wasn’t I?” he spoke more to himself. It said much about his sister’s character that she did not simply concur with his obviously true statement. How much of his life would he gladly redo? Only there was no changing the hands of time. There was no righting past wrongs. There was just this empty acceptance of who he’d been and all that he would never have from life because of it.

  “You were certainly not the most devoted,” she said softly, jerking his attention to her face. He expected to see disgust, even loathing, in her pale blue eyes. Instead, there was—forgiveness. For him? He scoffed. Surely not.

  “That is being generous,” he muttered.

  A smile twitched on her lips. “Yes, it is.”

  He flinched. That he was deserving of. “I came to apologize.” It was harder to say who was more shocked by his pronouncement; his sister or Cedric himself. Her lips parted on a small moue. “I’m not so much a fool that I believe an apology can right the lifetime of wrongs.” Genevieve slipped in and agony bore him down, momentarily sucking away his breath.

  “You are forgiven.”

  How quickly she spoke. Surely there had been a lifetime of loathing from her; deserved loathing. He’d not been the devoted brother to protect her from unwanted suitors. Hell, he couldn’t even recall her having a Season. She’d been married off so hurriedly… He balled his hands. No doubt, her union had been forced upon her and he’d not even given a thought to her happiness or that she’d be forever bound to a man. He couldn’t be bothered over whether she’d be safe and loved and cared for at that man’s hands. “Your husband is good to you?” he asked gruffly, more than half-fearing her answer.

  Surprise shone in Clarisse’s eyes. “William?” Her eyes took on a wistful, far-off quality. “We are quite in love.”

  A vicious envy ripped a
t his insides, proving, once more, the selfish bastard he was. He shook his head.

  His sister shifted. Was she as uncomfortable with talk of emotion and past mistakes? What strangers they were. Then, he had quite expertly shut everyone out in the ways that mattered. “I read…” She promptly grimaced. “That Genevieve has gone.”

  Not gone. “Yes,” he said in hollow tones. Left. “She left.” Three weeks, twelve hours, and…he looked to the long-case clock across the room…twenty-three minutes ago.

  “I am sorry,” Clarisse said softly.

  “Yes, well.” He tugged his gloves off and beat them together. For really, what else was there to say? He could hardly admit that every day it felt as though his heart was dying. How he woke up, avoiding any room his wife had been in because the memory of her was so strong that her laughter still echoed around his mind. “No one to blame but myself,” he said to himself. He’d been the one to attend Montfort’s and… that was really just only the tip of the sins of which Cedric was guilty. His skin pricked with the directness of his sister’s stare trained on him. Unnerved by that focus, he managed a lopsided grin. “In the end, I’m very much our father, aren’t I?”

  His sister frowned. “I do not believe that,” she said chidingly.

  A rusty, empty laugh escaped him. “No?” He’d celebrated the same base pleasures, broken his wife’s heart. He was exactly the man’s image.

  “If you were like him, you’d not be here even now.”

  He lifted his shoulders in a casual shrug. “Perhaps.”

  Clarisse gave an emphatic shake of her head. “No. Not perhaps. You wouldn’t. Do you know how often he’s visited?” She didn’t wait for him to venture a guess. “Never.”

  “One unannounced visit is hardly a good deal more.”

  She scooted to the edge of the sofa, closer to him. “It is a very good deal more.” She held his gaze. “Because of what it signifies, Cedric.”

  Uncomfortable with the show of emotion, he pulled his gaze away. “Sometimes it is too late to change or be anyone different.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said automatically. “I did,” she added. “But not anymore. My husband showed me differently.”

  At the emotion teeming from Clarisse’s words, he looked back at her. Her gaze distant, so much love poured from their depths that another wave of envy assailed him. How very close he’d been to having all of that. But in one careless night, he’d thrown it all away.

  Clarisse fiddled with a ruby heart necklace about her throat. He stared at that piece, dimly recollecting it about another woman’s neck. “It was Mother’s,” she said, following his attention.

  “I…recall.” He’d forgotten—until now. So resentful over her having simply turned him over to his father’s tutelage, he’d forgotten much about the woman who’d given him life. “Even she knew what I was,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from seeping in.

  His sister flared her eyes. “Is that what you believe?”

  It’s what he knew. He allowed his silence to serve as his answer.

  “Our father had little purpose in either of us, Cedric. You were the heir and I was the chess piece to increase his power…but you were the one who served the most purpose for him.” Cedric had known as much. It was what had fueled his motives of revenge against the old bastard. “So many times when we would go outside, Mother would talk about you and how, before I was born, you were her partner in the gardens.”

  A pressure that was oddly constrictive and freeing all at the same time blossomed in his chest. “Did she?”

  Clarisse nodded. “She did. Father put a cease to those visits, she said. Alas, future dukes did not take breaks from their studies to play in their gardens, though, did they?” She spoke with an almost rote quality to her voice, the way one who’d heard words uttered so many times she’d had them memorized.

  “Yes,” he said tiredly. “Well, it hardly matters now.” Knowing did not change who he’d allowed himself to become. It did not replace this aching, empty void left with Genevieve’s absence.

  The ticking of the clock filled the room as silence otherwise reigned.

  “You love Genevieve, don’t you?” his sister said without preamble.

  His throat worked and he dug deep for a careless, witty rejoinder about being a rake and rakes never needing or wanting love. But he couldn’t force the words out. Instead, he gave a disjointed nod.

  “Go to her, Cedric. She loves you. I saw that the day you were married.”

  A sound, half-groan and half-growl, lodged in his throat as a memory slid in: Genevieve walking up to him that day in the hedge maze with so much emotion he’d not known what to do with it. It simply poured from her emerald eyes. “I bumbled it all,” he said hoarsely. And there could be no going back.

  “I suspect you did.” His sister waggled her golden eyebrows, wringing a pained laugh from him. “But you can fix it. Go to her,” she repeated.

  “It is more complicated than that.” There was the babe, lost. A child he’d never wanted because he’d hated the Falcot line, and hated even more the possibility of spreading his vile blood to another being. Those pieces he couldn’t share with Clarisse. For he didn’t know what would happen to him when he breathed those words into existence. It would force him to confront what he’d almost had and what he’d lost. A gift he’d never known he wanted.

  “I do not doubt its complexity, Cedric,” Clarisse said, pulling him to the moment. “But if you do not go to her, you’ll never be happy. You’ll be destroyed by loneliness and regret.” More than ten years younger, how could she be so very much wiser? “Love has a wonderful power to heal. Trust that.” And how could he trust that when he’d spent the whole of his life—alone, resisting love, warmth, any emotion?

  Heavy footsteps sounded outside the doorway and they looked as one to the entrance as the Marquess of Grafton stepped inside. “Love, are you—?” His words abruptly ended as he took in his wife’s visitor. A flash of antipathy shone within the previously warm eyes.

  Could he blame the other man for his hatred? He’d been a careless brother to Grafton’s now wife. As such, Cedric would not force Clarisse’s husband to suffer through his company. “I was just leaving,” Cedric murmured, coming to his feet.

  His brother-in-law proved once more the nature of his honorable character. He schooled his features and strode over, hand extended. “St. Albans,” he greeted, his tone colder than a winter frost.

  Cedric returned the hard handshake.

  His sister quickly came to her feet. “Isn’t it wonderful that Cedric came to call?” From the corner of his eye, he caught the unspoken look pass between husband and wife. There was a wealth of meaning and significance to that private exchange; they were two people who needed no words to know the others thoughts and he felt like the worst sort of interloper on that special bond. Pain scraped at his heart. I had that. I had it and let it go…

  “It is,” the other man said at last.

  “You surely have much to do before you leave,” Cedric murmured, stuffing his gloves inside his jacket front. “If you’ll excuse me?” Except, he lingered. How did a brother, in fact, say goodbye to a sister? He’d not been one, for the course of his life that he didn’t know how to be…just as he’d not known how to be everything Genevieve had deserved in a husband. “Yes, well,” he said awkwardly with the couple staring expectantly at him and he started for the door.

  Focused on the soft tread of his footfalls, he made his way from the room and down the empty corridor.

  “Cedric?”

  He spun about.

  His sister rushed down the hall, her skirts whipping noisily at her ankles. “I want you to have this.” She fiddled with the latch at her throat and removed the ruby pendant. “Mother gave it to me in love.” She pressed it into his palm and his fingers curled reflexively over the warm metal. “It is for your Genevieve.”

  He made a sound of protest and made to return it. “I cannot…”

>   “You can.” She closed her hands over his and gave a squeeze.

  “Mother would not have wanted—”

  “She would have, Cedric,” Clarisse cut in and released his hands.

  Agonized regret clogged his throat and, unfurling his palm, he stared down at the gleaming ruby heart. “Thank you.” He blinked, his eyes stinging. Surely dust. How else to account for the dratted sheen blurring his vision? He stiffened as his sister folded her arms about him, while his hung awkwardly at his sides. Of their own volition, his arms rose up and closed her in a hug. A pressure eased in his chest; freeing and light. He closed his eyes. Perhaps there was such a thing as forgiveness, after all. Cedric let his arms fall. “Thank—”

  “Do not thank me.” She leaned up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “We are siblings. Now go.”

  Cedric hesitated and then with the cherished gift conferred by his sister in his possession, he left her townhouse and made the short horse ride to his own fashionable, Mayfair townhouse. As he climbed the steps, the doors were opened with a familiar ease by Avis. Cedric didn’t break his stride. He continued abovestairs and strode the length of the hall. He did not stop until he reached his wife’s chamber. Pressing the handle, he stepped inside the darkened space. The curtains drawn tight blotted out nearly all light with the exception of a small sliver that shone through a crack in the brocade fabric. He closed the door with a soft click. He laid his back against the panel and stared about her chambers, allowing the memory of her to assail him.

  Skimming his gaze over the immaculate room, he searched for a hint or sign of her, but it was as though she’d never been. Cedric walked slowly over to the chaise where they’d sketched together on the night of their wedding and he sank onto the edge.

  …I expect you have said that to any number of women…

  He dragged a hand over his face. Even in those shared, special moments between them, she’d easily seen the life he lived. She’d seen herself as no different than any woman to come before, when all along she was unlike any he ever had or would know. Cedric sucked in a shuddery breath and pushed restlessly to his feet. Clasping his hands at his back, he rocked on his heels.