by Gaelen Foley
“You must have wasted no time in dealing with it.”
“Correct. The next day, I dismissed her servants, ordered mine not to let her out of their sight, confined her to the house, then rode to her father’s stables to put an end to this affair.”
“You mean you put her under house arrest. Just like you did me, back in Calcutta.”
He glanced at her uneasily, startled by the comparison, but he had no answer and continued with his tale. “When I arrived at her father’s stables, I found the man, and privately confronted him.”
“Did he challenge you?”
“On the contrary, he tried to blackmail me. My wife may have been in love with him, but he didn’t care about her in the slightest. Amoral blackguard. Aside from pure sex, his interest in her had been rooted in gold from the start. He wanted a hundred pounds in exchange for his silence.”
“Not that great a sum, considering. Did you pay?”
“Hell, no. I would never allow myself to be blackmailed. I told him he had twenty-four hours to get out of England or he was a dead man, and that if he ever opened his mouth and said one word about my wife, I would hunt him down wherever he was, and kill him like a dog.”
“I see.”
“He fled.”
“I would,” she said dryly.
“He went to Calais. That rogues’ haven.” He heaved a large sigh, musing for a moment. “I was so relieved to be rid of the threat that he posed, that I’m afraid I then did something I am not proud of. It was, in hindsight, my main mistake—second only to marrying her in the first place.”
“What did you do?”
“I lied to her. Told her he was dead. That I had killed him. Most men would have, you know. But I tried to be better than that. I knew that my false words would make her hate me all the more, but I wanted him out of our lives for good, out of her head. I didn’t want her entertaining any remote possibility that he might be coming back again, that she could find a way to be with him at some future time. I wanted her to know that it was over. And I told her this…because I wanted to hurt her.” He looked away. “As I said, I am not proud of it.”
Georgiana gazed at him.
“Things got quiet after that. I knew I’d succeeded in hurting her, because she withdrew into herself. I continued to use my staff to monitor her every move. And then, nine months later, a child was born. But was he my child, the true heir to my ancient lineage and all my fortune? Or was he the lowborn by-blow of a stable groom? There was no way to know for certain.”
“Matthew,” she whispered, her eyes widening.
He nodded slowly. “Matthew.”
Georgie gazed at Ian, mystified and upset by his unfolding tale, aching for him, for the pain and betrayal this woman had put him through. For his disappointment and humiliation.
Now the strained and distant relationship that she had found between Ian and his son when she had first arrived in England made sense. But she shook her head. “You doubted Matthew’s paternity?”
“For a long time, yes.”
“Not anymore, I hope? Surely you can see he is the spitting image of you. He’s got your dark hair, your few little freckles, the shape of his nose,” she said softly as her stare trailed over his beloved face. “He’s you all over again. Even your nature. Calm and serious, clever and curious about everything.”
“And willful?” he suggested with a wry smile that reminded her of Matthew’s flash of temper earlier today.
His own temper had already proved very dangerous, indeed.
She smiled back warily. “Oh, yes, he’s your son, all right. An aristocrat, through and through.”
“Which is why he will need discipline in life. Men in my position have too much power and gold and influence to be allowed to run amuck.”
“I do not disagree.”
For a moment, they gazed at each other in silence. Ian reached for her hand and she allowed him to take it. But although everything in her longed to wrap her arms around him, she held herself back.
“You still haven’t told me how Catherine died.”
He nodded and released her hand, drawing a deep breath. “As the months of her pregnancy passed by, I began to notice a change in her.”
“What sort of change?”
“For the better. She quit hating me quite so much. She became almost pleasant now and then. I deemed this a good sign and sought to encourage it. I thought, perhaps, she was beginning to forget her stable groom. I decided not to hire a wet-nurse for when the child came. I thought this would force Catherine to be truly responsible for the first time in her life. I knew she disliked me, and I was afraid she would reject the babe because of it. I thought if she were forced to feed the child from her own breast, this would strengthen the bond between her and the baby. Then the day came when she went into labor. Matthew was born in the afternoon, and the accoucheur informed me it was a boy, and that they both were well.”
“No fever?”
“No,” he whispered, lowering his gaze. He shook his head. “I am sorry for that lie.”
She reached over and touched his arm. “What happened, darling?”
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his stare made her take back her hand. She twined her fingers on her lap in rising tension.
“Two weeks later, Catherine ran away.”
“What?”
“If I thought that woman had betrayed me, it was nothing compared to her betrayal of Matthew.”
Georgie stared at him, appalled.
“She just—left him,” he said. “A newborn child. Barely two weeks old.”
“But, how could she? Why?”
“Remember her servants that I told you I had sacked? Well, through her former maid, the stable groom had secretly managed to get a letter to Catherine from Calais. He told her where he was, and urged her to flee me when she could, and come to him. So, for all those months that her behavior had improved, it was only because she was biding her time, knowing she was going to escape once she had given birth.”
“She planned on leaving Matthew even before he was born?” It was unthinkable.
“Just so. As for the man, I have no doubt he was still bent on extracting funds either out of me or from her family, in hopes that we would eventually pay to avoid the scandal. Anyway, that night—the night of the storm—I had gone over to Hawkscliffe Hall for supper and drinking and a bit of billiards with your then-bachelor cousins. They wanted to congratulate me on the birth of my son. They had no idea of all the trouble I’d been having since my marriage.”
“You never told them?”
“No. Not even my closest friends.” He shook his head. “It was all so sordid. I didn’t want them to know how I had been cuckolded. I feared they’d lose respect for me.”
Male pride, she thought, though she supposed she couldn’t blame him.
“At any rate, when I returned from Hawkscliffe Hall, I found my household in an uproar and learned from my servants that Catherine had run away. Townsend said a carriage had arrived for her—the same maid and footman I had dismissed months ago from her service had remained loyal to their mistress, and had come to help her to effect her flight to France.”
“Oh, Ian,” she whispered in shock.
“I tell you, I was tempted to simply let her go and never have to see her face again, but I had a newborn infant in the nursery, and with no wet-nurse on hand, we had no other way of feeding him.”
“You’re telling me she would have left her child to starve?”
“That is exactly what she did.”
Georgie’s jaw dropped. She quite believed she hated this woman by now. Abandoning Matthew? And Ian, too?
“Under the circumstances, I had little choice. I was immediately back up on my horse and riding hard through the storm to catch up to her. By this time, I assure you, I had no feelings for the woman other than scorn, but I was not about to let the baby starve to death under my roof, whether he was really mine or not. I caught up to their carr
iage at the bridge.”
Anguish brimmed beneath his quiet tone, as though the words themselves were each a heavy weight. “The footman was driving. He kept striking at me with the whip, but then I aimed a pistol at him and he realized I was not going to let this happen. He floundered, and I managed to grab the leader’s bridle. I brought the carriage to a halt in the middle of the bridge. I got off my horse and went to pull her out. She and her maid were both inside, hysterical. Catherine somehow pulled herself together. She ordered her servants to stay with the coach while she got out and came at me—with a pistol.”
“A pistol!”
“Oh, yes. Charming, no? She said she hated me and that she’d kill me if I didn’t let her go. She said, ‘You’ve got your heir. That’s all you needed me for. Now let us be rid of each other for once and for all.’ I told her that notion would have suited me quite well, but I couldn’t let an infant die from her neglect. So I grabbed her.”
“What about the gun?”
“Misfired. The powder got wet.”
“Thank God!”
“The fact that she had actually pulled the trigger, though, that enraged me. I threw the gun over the bridge into the river, and that’s when I noticed how high the water level was. I looked around and noticed it was already sloshing across the bridge in places, weakening the joists. You could feel the whole thing swaying. The wind…was fierce. And the lightning was driving the horses to madness. It was all her footman could do to keep the team under control. Then all of a sudden, I heard a loud crack and the bridge lurched—Catherine screamed, but I still wouldn’t let go of her. That was when the horses bolted, taking the whole carriage and both of her servants with them. In seconds, they were tearing off down the road and out of sight.
“That left only the two of us on the bridge. My horse was still nearby. I picked Catherine up and slung her over my shoulder to carry her back bodily to the house, since she refused to come of her volition. The way she fought, you’d have thought I was a marauding Hun carrying her off rather than her husband. When she elbowed me in the eye, I set her down fearing I would drop her—I didn’t want to hurt her. She was still recovering from childbirth, after all. She tried to run—”
“What, after the carriage?”
“Yes. She was in such a screaming, violent rage by that point that I swear she barely knew what she was doing. Again, I caught her by her arm. I yelled at her. I said we had to get out of the storm. But she pulled away from me sharply, with a violent motion—and that was the same moment that the bridge cracked open. Right before my eyes, she slipped over the railing and fell into the river, and was washed away.”
Georgie stared at him with her fingers pressed to her lips.
“I ran to the edge and spotted her in the water below. It was all white, churned to foam. I couldn’t see where the rocks were, but I threw off my coat and jumped in to save her.”
“Ian!”
“The current was raging. The water was frigid and full of debris. God only knows how, but I managed to get an arm around her. I started to pull her to safety, but she continued to rage against me, though she was half drowned. She was like a crazed animal, like a cat, clawing me. I was so intent on dragging her out of the water that I didn’t see the rocks that we were about to be driven into. I just felt the edge of them slam into my shoulder and the back of my head. I was knocked nearly senseless. I lost my hold on her.” He paused with a grim look. “And that was the last time I saw her alive.”
Georgie gazed at him in somber silence.
“We found her body the next morning, less than two hundred yards downstream. We brought her back to the house, and that was when the lies began. I pledged my staff to secrecy about the circumstances surrounding her death. There was no need to embarrass the families. Hers. Mine. No need to spill her shame to all the papers. And above all, I would not allow the world to begin questioning my son’s legitimacy.” He shook his head with a formidable gleam in his eyes. “Not after watching what your cousins went through all their lives, thanks to their mother’s indiscretions. I had to protect my son’s future and his reputation. And my own,” he admitted as an afterthought. “I could not stomach the thought of becoming an object of ridicule and scorn.”
He swallowed hard. “So we dreamed up an honorable death for Catherine. Puerperal fever was an apt excuse, considering. I never told her family the truth. I never told my own. I never even told your cousins, my dearest friends. I didn’t want anyone else involved in our private ugliness.” He paused for a long moment. “Anyway, I was brought up to make a good show of things, wasn’t I? We had the funeral and it was all as respectable as the wedding had been. It was the first time in our acquaintance that I could recall her looking genuinely peaceful,” he added in a sardonic tone.
“My servants made her up carefully with white powder, her bridal veil covering her face. With my son in my arms, I never breathed a word about the stable groom. I built her monument and mourned her with every proper sign of grief. Society proclaimed me some sort of tragic hero.” He sighed with a cynical shake of his head. “But she wasn’t all that had died that night.”
“What else died, Ian?” Georgie whispered.
“Any hope in me that I would ever know real love.” He looked at her sadly. “That same hopelessness drove me to bury myself in work. Perhaps I was trying in some way to pay for my sins by helping others make peace, though I myself knew none.”
“Perhaps that made you understand its value all the more.”
“Perhaps. All I know for sure is that working full-force for five straight years without halt, especially during such difficult times for our country—Napoleon and the war and all—I wound up in some strange sort of dark fugue, spiritually, I suppose you might say. Desolate somehow. Your cousin Bel suggested that I might be exhausted. But it was not a physical exhaustion. It was…something else. Deeper. An emptiness. And that, Georgiana, was what sent me wandering off to Ceylon, where I was trying at last to make peace with my own private demons—without much success, I’m afraid. And then Governor Lord Hastings caught wind of my presence in the region, and asked for my help in dealing with the Maharajah of Janpur. I answered the summons,” he whispered, reaching over and gently cupping her face, “and then, there, on the far side of the world, I saw you. Like the promise of love I’d always dreamed of, but never thought I’d know. I’d given up on hoping.”
“Oh, Ian.” She moved closer to him.
“You saved my mission in Janpur with your meddling, and now, once again, I find my fate in your hands, my sweet Georgiana.” He looked into her eyes in stark longing. “Can you still love me, even though you know now what a fraud I’ve been?”
“You’re not a fraud,” she whispered, pausing for a long moment as she tried to absorb all that he had told her. “I think you’re a man who tried to hold his family together with dignity, despite a huge and terrible betrayal. And you’re a father who’d sacrifice what he holds most dear out of love for his son.”
“My honor,” he agreed barely audibly.
“But it isn’t lost, my darling. It’s right here.” She touched his chest, laying her hand over his heart. “And to answer your question, yes. Of course, I do still love you. I’ll always love you. Never doubt that.” She gazed into his eyes. “Thank you for trusting me at last with your secrets. Now I can see why it took you so long to confide in me. If someone had done such things to me, I don’t know if I could ever trust again. I love you, Ian. And I promise I will never betray you.”
“Does that mean you’ll stay?” he whispered.
Georgie summoned up a tender smile. “What, leave you? And that darling son of yours? That would make me an even bigger fool than she was. I’m not going anywhere, sweeting. This is where I belong now. With you.”
He shook his head, looking stunned.
“What is it?”
“I was so terrified that if I told you all this, I would lose you.”
“No. Not telling me, now, that would h
ave been worse.”
He nodded solemnly. “I understand.”
She leaned closer and kissed his cheek, draping her arms loosely around his wide shoulders. “You know,” she whispered, “I don’t expect perfection from you—even though, for some reason, you seem to demand it of yourself.”
He covered her hand with his own against his chest and leaned his head against hers. “Georgiana,” he whispered. “Tell me one more time that you’ll never leave me.”
“I won’t ever leave you, darling. I could never bring myself to go.”
He turned his head and kissed her face. She lifted her chin as he sought her mouth. Her blood caught fire as he gently caressed her lips with his own and took hold of her hip. She wrapped her arms around him, parting her lips to invite his deeper kiss. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and moaned softly as he pressed her back onto the bed with a smooth motion.
She knew his intent by the way that he kissed her—and she assented to it heartily.
“Never leave me,” he whispered again as his clever hands began deftly unfastening her bodice. “I love you.”
“I adore you, Ian,” she breathed, melting under his touch. She caressed his face and hair. “No one should ever have hurt you that way. But I’m going to spend the rest of my life giving you all the love you need.”
“I do need it. I need you.”
“Then take me,” she whispered, looking into his eyes. “I’m all yours.”
His groan was barely audible as his mouth swooped down on hers again in burning hunger, his fingers tangling roughly in her hair. He dragged her neckline down while she freed him from his cravat, in turn, and tore away his waistcoat.
“Hurry,” she panted.
“Wrap your legs around me.”
