Marcus shoved his form to the top ledge of the wall and her heart caught painfully as he turned that charming grin on her. “My la…” His flirtatious greeting ended as his gaze snagged on her cheeks and that smile dipped.
Eleanor quickly angled herself away and brushed her palms over her cheeks. “My lord, I thought you’d not come,” she managed to infuse a steadiness and cheer to those handful of words.
Marcus hung by his hands over the wall and dropped to the earth. He landed with a soft thump in the earth below and paused. His gaze lingered on her eyes. She braced for a rash of probing questions.
Slipping his hands into his pockets, he strolled toward her. There was something so very sweet and endearing about the languidness of those movements. He evinced the same cocksure strength he had as a young man meeting the girl she’d been.
Eleanor reflexively tightened her hold on the wire rims, the useless, flimsy disguise she’d donned through the years. The rims snapped and the crack of metal echoed in the quiet. Startled, she looked down at the two pieces in her hand. Her heart caught. “My spectacles,” she whispered.
“Come, Eleanor, you never truly needed them.”
She lifted her unblinking gaze to Marcus, unable to sort out whether those words belonged to him or her. Wordlessly, she held them out and he collected the broken rims and tucked them into his front pocket.
…I shall hold it close to my heart, so a piece of you is always with me…
Eleanor captured her quivering lower lip hard between her teeth. He palmed her cheek and she leaned into his silken soft caress. Closing her eyes, she took in every delicate touch, every pure moment between them, because the moment she breathed the truth into the night air, she would forever shatter the sincerity in Marcus’ words for her. Eleanor drew in a steadying breath and opening her eyes. She stepped back.
“What is it?”
Gone would be that enticing, subtly seductive baritone. She lifted her arms. “My waltz at midnight.”
He froze. “Of course, your li—”
Eleanor pressed her fingertips to his lips, silencing the words there. “It is not about the list.” She smiled softly up at him. “This is for me, Marcus. I would take this dance, in your arms, not because someone demanded it or requested it. I would take it because, in this moment, at quarter past the midnight hour, I would claim that time that once belonged to us.”
Desire sparked within the depths of his eyes and threatened to burn her and, God help her, his was a conflagration she’d gladly turn herself over to; to know a touch born of love and tenderness and passion. Marcus swept his golden lashes down. Without a word, he settled his heavy palm at her waist and guided hers atop his shoulder, and then with their fingers joined as one, amidst the fragrant, springtime blooms, he waltzed her barefoot about the gardens.
Their breaths mingled and melded, and with the stars glittering overhead and the moon setting the ground aglow, they danced. She closed her eyes and turned herself over to the beauty of being in his arms. How many years had she ached for this stolen moment at midnight, with the darkness of demons slayed, so all they knew was joy?
“We are missing music, Eleanor,” he murmured and she opened her eyes, locking her gaze on the harshly beautiful angular planes of his face; the noble Roman nose, the hard, square jaw softened by the faintest cleft.
“We do not need music, Marcus.” They never had. Their bodies had long moved in a synchronistic harmony.
He curved his palm about her waist and she reveled in the thrill of his touch. “Ah, yes, but what waltz is complete without music?” Then, his breath tickling her skin, he began to sing.
“…Oft in the stilly night
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me…”
As his husky baritone filtered about them, in a slightly off-key, discordant tune, tears welled in her eyes and slid unchecked down her cheeks.
“The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me…”
Her breath caught on a sob and she dug her heels into the earth, bringing their dance to a jarring, painful halt. But then, ultimately, all beautiful moments died.
“Eleanor?”
The aching gentleness of Marcus’ tone gutted her and she hugged her arms at her waist. Why could he not be the coolly mocking cynic who’d come to hate her? Why must he now be this soft, tender man who sang songs of lost love?
Eleanor rubbed her arms in a bid to bring warmth into her trembling limbs. Unable to meet the intensity of his eyes, she wandered over to the cherry tree and ran her hand down the firm, broad trunk. The wind stirred and the pink-white blooms danced over her head, wafting the purity of their fragrant scent about her. She searched her raging mind for the truth he deserved. Odd, how the single most defining moment of her life had gripped her and consumed her for eight years and, yet, she stood before him silent and unknowing of where and how to begin her story. His feet ground up gravel as he strode down the path toward the shelter of the tree. Eleanor turned to face him and lifted a hand. The only place to begin was at the beginning “I was there.”
Marcus stopped so abruptly his feet churned up dirt and pebbles. A golden curl fell over his eye giving him an endearing, boyish look. “I don’t—?”
“You believe I did not show, but I was there, in Lady Wedermore’s gardens,” she clarified. And then a healing calm stole over Eleanor, driving back all the fear and reservations and horror of speaking of that night. There was freedom in it that lifted a weight from her burdened shoulders. “I was there.” She raised regretful eyes to his. “You were not.”
Marcus stared at Eleanor.
At last they would speak of it; the one night between them which had built an eight-year chasm. “Is that what you believed,” he asked slowly. “That I would not come?” Surely in all they’d shared, she would have known he would always come to her. “Surely that is not what would drive you into the arms of another.”
The full moon cast its pale white light through the branches of the cherry tree and the glow kissed Eleanor’s pale cheeks so that her teardrop glistened like sad diamonds.
At her stricken silence, he said gruffly, “I was there.”
“You came too late.”
Her agonized whisper ran through him. “I…” He took in the tense white lines at the corners of her mouth, the suffering that now bled from her eyes, and distant warning bells went off. Marcus dug his fingertips against his temple and rubbed, trying to make sense, trying, and failing…
It is because I do not wish to make sense…
He dropped his arm to his side with alacrity and when he spoke, there was a peculiar flatness to his tone. “What does that mean I came too late?”
“Someone else arrived first.” Eleanor curled her hands at her sides. “A…man.”
A man—? A thousand questions boiled to the surface, and with them, the pebble of unease in his belly grew to the size of a boulder. Her words led him down a path he did not wish to travel. “Did he threaten you with ruin?” he asked slowly, silently pleading with the fates.
A strangled laugh burst from her lips and she buried it in her fingers.
His mouth went dry and his gaze caught on the white-knuckled fist pressed against her mouth. An icy chill raked his spine and ran a quick course through him, freezing him from the inside out and yet perspiration beaded his brow as he considered the new Eleanor who’d returned to London. A woman fearful of men; who’d punched him…
The earth tipped, swayed, and dipped. “Oh, God,” the agonized whisper came from the place where horror and fear dwelt. Marcus concentrated on breathing. No. The imagination was an active, dangerous beast. As long as she did not utter the words,
they remained untrue fabrications of an irrational thought based on a handful of incidences.
She pressed her palms to the uneven bark of the cherry tree, as though seeking support. “He didn’t threaten me with ruin.” Eleanor lifted her ravaged eyes to his and spoke in curiously deadened tones that sent a chill skittering around his insides. “He did ruin me.”
His heart ceased to beat and he tried to make out Eleanor’s raspy words as they ran together.
“He said no proper lady would be out meeting a lord in the gardens. He said as a poor merchant’s daughter, I-I was begging for any man between my legs.”
Insidious thoughts slipped into his consciousness of Eleanor on her back with the monster who’d stolen her innocence rutting between her thighs.
His stomach heaved and he closed his eyes a moment to keep from casting up the contents at her feet. With her strength and courage, she deserved more from Marcus than his frail weakness.
“I fought him,” she said, staring at a point beyond his shoulder, to the demons of her past and with those three words, she invited him into the world where she’d scratched, kicked, and clawed.
To no avail.
“Who was he?” The strangled plea tore from his throat. Who, so Marcus could end him with his bare hands.
“I did not know.” She avoided his gaze and a flash of terror lit her eyes, and then was gone so quickly he might have merely imagined it. “I knew nothing but his face and that he stank of brandy.”
The gardens echoed with the memory of imagined cries and pleas of some faceless, nameless stranger. Insanity licked at Marcus’ thoughts and cast a thick, dark curtain over his vision, as he imagined a hell in which the man who’d raped her was a gentleman he took drinks with or spoke to at Social events. Marcus tortured himself, imagining that bastard yanking her skirts up, shoving a knee between her legs, and—His breath came hard and fast in his ears, deafening. Oh, God.
“At first, when he came upon me,” she said more to herself, yanking him back from the precipice of madness. “I continued looking at the door, silently begging you to come. And then, I lay through his attack, silently pleading with you to not come. Because I could not bear it if you saw me that w-way.” The faint tremor to that word had the same effect as a blade being thrust into his belly and twisted.
His heart lurched. Where had he been? Whatever waylaid him that night, whoever it had been, was so very insignificant that he could not recall the name or reason for his delay. And yet, that trivial meeting had upended her world, shattered their happiness. He wanted to toss his head back and rail at fate. “Oh, Eleanor,” he whispered, and he, who’d charmed countless ladies in her absence, was so wholly useless in this moment. There were no pretty endearments or perfect words that could take away any of her suffering.
She hugged herself tight and he wanted to be the one to hold her in his arms, to take the nightmares and demons she battled and own them, so they belonged to him alone. But that could never be. This horrible thing had happened to her, and no matter how strong, powerful, or wealthy he was, it was an act that he could not undo.
Silence descended and yet the rustle of leaves and ragged, broken breaths deafened him. Marcus opened and closed his mouth several times. He shook his head. Once. Twice. A third time. As he worked through the horror of her revelation, no matter how much he shook his head, no matter how much he willed her words out of existence, they remained, and there they would stay.
No.
She nodded once. “Yes.”
Had he spoken aloud? How was he capable of words when his entire world was crumbling about him like an ancient castle blasted by cannon fodder? “Oh, Eleanor,” he managed to rasp. How many years he’d spent hating her, when all along he should have hated himself. Self-loathing unfurled inside him. He had failed her in the worst possible way; and for that, she had suffered the greatest pain and hurt.
He looked down at his chest. Where was the crimson stain upon the fabric if his heart was bleeding so?
She made a soft sound of protest. “Do not look at me like that. I knew you would look at me like that when I told you and I cannot bear it, Marcus.” Tears welling anew in her eyes, she shook her head hard. “So stop. Please.” At that desperate entreaty, a strangled groan stuck in his throat.
He covered his mouth with his hand, and stalked over, obliterating the remaining distance between them, and then stopped, at sea. He was like a child’s toy, stuck in a vicious squall, and it was ratcheting his world down about him. “How can I look at you with anything but love?” For even as he’d hated her for an imagined betrayal, he’d loved her beyond thought.
“Do not say that.” She closed her eyes and a little cry burst from her lips. “Do not. I don’t want that from you. Not here.”
Not now. She’d deserved that profession from him years earlier. She’d deserved it the moment she’d reentered his life. Instead, he’d given her nothing but his scorn, and…
Bile climbed up his throat and he nearly choked. Oh, God. He’d tried to seduce her. With his every word, his every promise and pledge, he’d offered her nothing more than a place in his bed. A sob escaped him. The weight of his shame brought his eyes closed. There was a special place in hell for men like him.
Her husband had been worthy of her, after all. Worthy in ways that Marcus never had been. Suddenly, his dead rival, the man he’d hated since discovering his existence, earned Marcus’ unending gratitude. She’d deserved the honorable Lieutenant Collins, a man he was grateful to for having been what Marcus had not.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “That is why you left,” he said woodenly. Of course it was why she left.
Her slight nod dislodged a curl. “That is why I left,” she said softly. “He took everything from me. I was powerless, in every way. If you hated me, I wanted it to be for reasons within my control. I wanted you to hate me for decisions I made and not for something that was forced on me by a man I did not even know.”
Marcus dug his fingers into his palms with such ferocity, he ripped the flesh. The sticky warmth of his blood coated his hand, and he welcomed the pain. “Did you know me so little that you think I could have ever hated you for that?” His voice emerged broken. “That I could have ever held you to blame?”
A single tear trickled down Eleanor’s cheek and she moved over in a flurry of gray skirts. She captured his hands and forced them open. “How could I know that? How, when I hate myself even still, all these years later?” she whispered. In the way a wife might care for her husband, she reached inside his pocket and withdrew his monogrammed kerchief. She brushed the white fabric over the jagged wound left by his nail, gentling cleaning away his blood. Eleanor turned the cloth over to him and incapable of words, he tucked it away. She broke the silence, proving herself, once again, stronger than he had ever been or ever would be. “It is because I thought so much of you that I left. I do not doubt you would have done the honorable thing. You would have never been free until you found him and then you would have dueled him.” Eleanor lifted his hand to her cheek and leaned into his uninjured palm. “And I would never have allowed that for either of us.”
“I would have married you,” he gasped out. I will marry you.
Her shoulders shook from the force of her silent tears. “I know you would have, which is also why I left.”
What if he’d arrived in time? What would life be for either of them, both of them, even now? “Yet you gave another man that right.” A right that should have belonged to Marcus.
Except I failed her. I was late meeting her, and she was alone, unprotected, and raped for my tarrying. He groaned and the sound tore from deep inside where agony and regret dwelled.
The sadness glowing from within her eyes blended with surprise. The potent emotion there stuck in his chest twisting the dull blade of agony all the more. “Oh, Marcus, you still do not know?”
He no longer knew up from down or right from left. “Know what?”
“There never was a Mr. Collin
s.”
A night bird sang. Crickets chirped. No Mr. Collins? “Marcia…?” And the air left him on a whispery hiss.
“Who needs a miserable son? I would have a daughter who looks like you…”
“…And would you name her Marcia…?”
Good God. He choked. That night of terror had brought her a child. All of Eleanor’s life remained a fabricated truth built by a young, unmarried woman. He tried to imagine the fear she would have known as a girl of just eighteen years; bruised and suffering, and compounding the horror with a babe from the monster who’d raped her. Yet…Marcus’ throat worked spasmodically…that babe was now the child, Marcia; a little girl who worried over her mother being afraid and who’d waltzed on the tops of his boots.
Eleanor drew a quavering breath. “My father was a miserable merchant, Marcus. But he was a wonderful father. He moved us to the corner of Cornwall and allowed us to carve a new life, for me, for Marcia.” She ran her palms down the front of her skirts. “So now you know.”
Now he knew.
How very calmly matter-of-fact those words were when she’d ripped his world asunder with the truth.
And he would be irrevocably altered, forevermore.
Eleanor lifted tear-filled eyes to his. “I never stopped loving you, Marcus. The memory of you sustained me when I prayed for death.” Then, leaning up on tiptoe, she touched her lips to his in a fleeting kiss that tasted of sadness, regret, and eventual parting.
Marcus remained frozen. “Eleanor, I…” Love you. Want to make you my wife and Marcia my daughter. He killed the request he so desperately ached to put to her. She deserved his profession of love and a plea for marriage, but both had to come later. To give them to her now would seem obligatory; prompted by her revelation, and not for what they were—driven by the love he’d always carried for her.
“It is fine, Marcus,” she said softly.
It could never be fine. No right could undo these wrongs.
Then, ducking her head with the same shyness of her youth, she turned and left him standing there staring after her.
A Heart of a Duke Regency Collection : Volume 2--A Regency Bundle Page 21
