Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

  The muscles of his stomach spasmed. She hugged her arms to her chest and he ached to take her in his arms. The clock ticked loudly in the corner as Lily stood there, her body so tightly held, a strong wind would likely shatter her. And he knew before she even uttered the words…

  She drew in a shuddery breath. “Would you have me tell you how after two years, the old, kindly gentleman required altogether different services of me?” Her words emerged as a faint, broken whisper.

  Oh, God. Even expecting it as he’d been, the words gutted him. “Lily,” he rasped.

  “How he threatened to turn me out without references and, instead, offered me a place in his bed or nothing at all.” She panted.

  Agony tightened in his belly and he wanted to clamp his hands over his ears to blot out the flood of those gut-wrenching words.

  She was relentless as she advanced, coming toward him, ravaging him with every word she uttered. “Do you want to know the woman you hired to care for your sister’s child has been nothing but a whore for the past six years?” Her words caught on a sob.

  Yes, he’d known the words were coming. The self-hatred she wore that could only rival the same he cloaked himself in, stood as testament to her belief she was the whore she spoke of. Even expecting them, however, could not dull the blade of shock that ripped through him. Unable to face her in light of what his brother had visited upon her, Derek slid his gaze away. An ugly slithering of green envy snaked about him. Equal parts jealousy at the man who’d laid claim to her body and burning hatred for the same bastard who’d taken advantage of a young girl sent out alone in the streets, melded into a vicious blend of madness.

  Then she stumbled back. Her eyes formed round moons as she slapped a hand over her gaping mouth. “I w-will leave,” she said quickly, jerking his attention back. She staggered further away from him, all but sprinting to the door.

  He’d wager his other eye she’d been running since she was fifteen and, yet, trapped all at the same time. “What will you do?” His quietly spoken words halted her once more.

  Lily lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. “I will survive,” she said in a flat, emotionless tone that sent a chill running through him.

  She would survive. Just as she’d done for years. When surviving meant sacrificing her body and laying herself open before a base lord who’d take his pleasures with her, for the fleeting security. The maddening bloodlust pounding through his ears was the powerful beat that had pulsed through him in the thick of battle with enemies bearing down on him.

  He stood stiffly, willing her with his silence to continue. When it became apparent there was nothing more she intended to say on the matter, he took a step toward her, craving the stinging fury and indignation she’d displayed when she’d stormed his household. “Why did you not tell me before?”

  A sad laugh escaped her. “You would have had me come to you, asking for a position on your staff, after such a confession?”

  “Yes,” he said plainly and she flinched. “I would have you tell me the truth.”

  “Come, Derek.” She gently chided. “You’d have never granted me a position.”

  Would he have? He looked over the top of her head. Would the man he’d been a week ago, the same man who’d sought to destroy his former friend’s happiness, have done anything but mock Lily and call her a schemer and a grasper? Shame tightened his belly. He didn’t much like the man he’d been. He liked even less the haunting truth of her words. “Very well, then.” He fixed a probing stare on her, searching? For what? Answers he did not want? Questions he did not know? “Why did you come to me?”

  “I had no choice.” She spoke in such emotionless tones, that ice skidded along his spine.

  So tired of serving a base lord’s pleasures, she’d come here, to the household no person cared to be—trusting he’d grant her a position. “What of your family?”

  He was grateful when she broke across the tense guilt gripping him. “My father was…” she grimaced, “is the vicar at your family’s estate in Carlisle.” A wry, mirthless smile formed on her lips. “One can hardly maintain a level of dignity within the parish if the daughter who was discovered by the village gossip remains on as an indelible memory of that day.”

  Oh, God. His gut clenched. Even now, the man who’d turned her out had been, and was in fact, still the vicar on his properties? Her father had turned her away and she’d come to his family. He scrubbed a hand over his face, thinking about the reception she’d received from his mother who’d protected that coveted title of duke for her son like she guarded the gates of a kingdom. Lily would never have received his family’s support. And in the end, she’d little recourse but to open herself to some lecherous nobleman who’d taken advantage of a desperate girl. With all the wrongs his family had committed, she’d still shown Derek more kindness than any other person since Toulouse.

  “That bastard,” he said quietly.

  Lily gave him a sad smile. “No,” she said softly. “It was not his fault, Derek.” She’d defend the coward who’d sired her, even so? “There was my sister and my brothers, and what livelihood exists for a vicar whose daughter gave herself to his employer’s son, in that public way?”

  He winced, hating that she should defend the man even now. Who’d defended her? Pain threatened to cleave his heart in two.

  With the truth echoing between them, Derek slid his eye closed. By God, if his brother was not dead, he’d kill him all over again. He’d use his scarred and marred hands to take his limbs apart and then choke him for what he’d done. “How you must despise me,” he whispered.

  Lily moved toward him. His body, attuned to her every nuance felt her beyond his shoulder and he faced her. She stood before him pale and uncertain when she’d only been bold and proud. Another spasm racked his heart. What had the Winters’ done to her? “I did,” she said at last. “I hated anyone and everyone who shared his blood.”

  And yet she’d come here anyway. She’d come for employment to be free of her post as mistress, when she’d deserved far more repayment, of which no amount could ever right the injustices done.

  Lily took his hands in hers. “But then I realized something as I was here. There is Flora.” His niece. The sole person of any goodness who shared his blood. “And there is you. And there is only good in the both of you.”

  His chest moved hard with the force of his rapidly drawn breaths. For there wasn’t good in him. He’d been the same indulgent lord George had been. Though careful to not litter London with his bastards, Derek had been driven by his own pleasures. If he’d returned and found Lily Benedict on his doorstep, pleading, would he have been the callous bastard his mother and brother had been? Or would he have been the person she deserved? Part of him didn’t know the answer to that and it made him hate the whole of himself for it. His throat constricted painfully, making it difficult to swallow.

  He took a step toward her, wanting to be the one person who’d been there when others had not. How many years had she spent hating herself? As one who’d spent the past seven despising himself so, he recognized that self-loathing in another. “It was not your fault,” he said quietly. “You survived.”

  She stilled like a doe tracked by hunters. “But it was my fault,” she shot back, her eyes stricken. “I threw away my virtue. That was my decision. I gave myself to Sir…” She bit her lip hard and looked away.

  “Because you were young and scared,” he said quietly. How could she not see that a vicar’s daughter in the ruthless streets of London could not be condemned for the feelings she’d carried?

  Grief contorted her face. Derek closed the distance between them. He took Lily in his arms and drew her against his chest.

  She stiffened. “What—?”

  “Shh,” he whispered against the top of her head. He rubbed his unscarred cheek over the crown of black curls.

  “I did not want to like you,” she said, her voice wary with the years of hardship she spoke of. “I hated you,” she said into t
he fabric of his shirt, the words muffled, but no less powerful. “I hated you without even knowing you not because of who you were but because of who he was.” A sob ripped from her throat and then she collapsed against him, weeping. Her body shook like a slender willow in a mighty storm. She cried until her tears soaked the front of his shirt and seeped through the fabric, hot and agonizing. Drops of her despair, guilt, loneliness, and fear.

  Derek rubbed small circles over the small of her back, allowing her the cathartic healing of her tears. It was a healing she greatly deserved, after the ways in which she’d healed him. When her body stilled and nothing more than a shuddery hiccough escaped her, he reluctantly set her away. Her eyes swollen red to match her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, met his. Derek reached inside his jacket and withdrew his handkerchief. Wordlessly, he turned it over to her.

  Lily hesitated and then took it. She blew her nose noisily and there was an innocence to that action that filled his heart with lightness, when everything in this walled in garden had previously been dark. “So that is the truth.” She stared down at the fabric. “That is who I am.”

  Derek stared at her with her head bent like a repentant sinner. That certainly was how the lady saw herself. “You define yourself by the actions of a girl who was but fifteen.” And yet, didn’t I define Christian by his actions as a boy of eighteen? He started as that staggering realization slammed into him, momentarily sucking the breath from his lungs. Why should Lily have confided in him when he’d proven unbending where his former friends were concerned?

  Lily spoke and her soft, husky contralto righted his unsteady world. “That was who I was, though, Derek. I was impulsive and rash. And desperate.” She fiddled with the edges of the soiled fabric in her hands. “I’m still that person. There is nothing noble in such a figure.”

  He imagined her more girl than woman alone in London with nothing but her shame and fear, and was stunned by the hungering to drive back the sadness from her eyes. Why should he care about her, this stranger he’d known for a handful of days? Why should he care when the world had ceased caring for him? Because she was different than all the others. She saw him as a man and that shattered the safe walls he’d resurrected about his heart. “You expect I’d judge you?”

  She turned her palms up. “You are a duke.” What a low opinion she carried of the nobility. Given her treatment at those unnamed gentlemen’s hands, however, entirely warranted. And she saw him as belonging to their ranks.

  Only, he’d been cast out of that cold fold long ago and did not want back in. Derek strolled over to his sideboard and fetched a bottle of brandy. “I am a beast,” he corrected. He held up a glass and she waved a hand dismissively.

  “You are a duke,” she corrected once more, with the scolding adamancy befitting her station as governess. “As such, these things matter.”

  He poured a snifter full of brandy and the tinkling chime of crystal touching crystal filled the space. “If I did not know better, Lily, I would suspect you are seeking to be dismissed from your post?” He paused mid-pour and looked up. “Is that it?” Derek winged an eyebrow upward. “Are you looking to be discharged from your responsibilities?” An odd pressure settled in his chest. For when she left, there would be no others to speak with him as though he was any other man.

  “No!” Her exclamation bounced off the walls, the urgency in her tone serving as testament to the truth. She wanted to remain here. The tightness in his chest eased and with it went the hatred he’d carried these years; sentiments, which had sustained him, but not comforted.

  He poured another glass of brandy and held one out.

  “I do not drink spirits.”

  He paused. …I was a vicar’s daughter… How innocent she’d been. How trusting. She could never have known the black vileness that was the soul of a gentleman. Men who took their pleasures where they would. Women who desired wealth and power, and craved nothing more than the glossy surface of perfection. Hopeful and trusting, she’d have been no match for a polished rake intent on stealing her virtue. “Spirits are occasionally good for you.” He urged her with his eyes to accept the liquid fortitude.

  Darting her tongue out, Lily trailed it over the seam of her lips. She crossed over and then stopped with a foot of space between them. “Do you think because I’m a whore, I should drink spirits and…and…” Patches of red blazed across her cheeks. “And do scandalous things.”

  Derek snapped his eyebrows together. “You are no whore,” he bit out, abhorring her self-flagellation. How could she not see the strength of her spirit and her will to survive was what defined her and not the actions she’d been forced to take?

  She dropped her gaze to the tips of her bare feet. “But I am,” she whispered. “And you insisting I not speak the words and not speaking them yourself does not make them less true.”

  The blazing hearth cast shadows about the room, and danced upon her modest nightshift, rendering it nearly see-through. The sight of her froze him. She stood before him with an ethereal beauty that drew him, that made him forget the monster he’d become. “We all have done things we wished we’d not in order to survive.” It was a lie. Most lords and ladies of the ton lived for their pleasures. The realness of life, and the ugliness of it, escaped most of them who dwelled in a fabricated world of glittering perfection. “Take the drink,” he urged and pressed it into her hand.

  Lily gripped it with such intensity her knuckles went white. She looked into the amber contents. “Why are you being so nice to me?” Her whispered words reached his ears and into the soul he’d thought long dead. “Why will you not turn me out, when I’m not fit to care for a child?”

  “Do you see a beast when you look at me?”

  Lily yanked her head up. “No.” The denial exploded from her lips and lit her eyes with fiery emotion “You are no beast.”

  “Why?” he said with dry humor. “Half of my face has been burned off, ladies turn in disgust. Even my own mother could not stomach the sight of me. How is that not a beast?”

  “You wear the marks of honor for battles you fought.” Her passionate defense lent her words a tremor. “That is what I see.”

  Ah, she saw a hero; just as so many were wont to do. Yet, even when the papers had honored those fallen soldiers and the men who’d rushed off to battle Boney’s forces, they’d been less forgiving when those men had returned maimed. Derek swirled the contents of his glass. “You fought your own battles, too, did you not?”

  Her frown deepened. Then said, “It is different.”

  “Ah, but is it?” He spread his arms wide. “This is how the world sees me and this is how I see myself, and yet you should see differently? Why is that?”

  Lily pursed her lips. “Because there is more to a person than their physical perfection. It is the goodness of their soul.”

  So she thought her soul dark and long past redemption? A familiar vise tightened once more. “You do not see the beast. You see the man.” He held her gaze with his. “Just as I do not see a whore,” he said quietly. The long, graceful column of her throat moved. “I see a woman and a survivor. And perhaps that is why we two can move along in some harmonious rhythm when I despise all who cross my path, because we are not unlike.”

  Her chest rose and fell with the force of her deeply drawn breaths and then, for the first time since he’d stumbled upon her this evening, her bow-shaped lips tipped up, ever so slowly at the corners, with an allure Eve herself could not have rivaled. “Thank you.”

  He snorted and waved his drink. “I do not want your thanks.” I want you… I want to possess your body and soul, binding mine with yours until we heal one another’s brokenness. His hand shook so badly, liquid splashed over the rim and stained his fingers. He quickly set the snifter down on a nearby table.

  Lily held out his handkerchief and the ghost of a smile pulled at his lips. “It is yours,” he murmured.

  “Of course,” she said quickly and balled the white cloth in her hand. She stood before him
uncertain and doubting. Doubting him and her self-worth and it made him hate his brother all over again.

  “Oh, Lily.” Derek scrubbed a hand over his face. “I hate that my brother knew you in ways that only I want to,” he said quietly. She stilled, looking like a skittish colt, one wrong word from bolting. To give his hands something to do, he grabbed his cane and thumped it upon the floor. “And I detest that another used your fear and desperation to take from you as he did. And I despise even more that both of those men knew your lips and the feel of your skin and the lavender scent that belongs to only you.”

  Her lower lip quivered and a single teardrop slipped down her cheek. Followed by another. And another. She made to turn, but he shot a hand out, folding his larger fingers about her delicate wrist.

  Emotion wadded his throat, making it nearly impossible to draw forth words. “But they did not know you. They didn’t truly know you in the ways I do. They knew your body, but they didn’t know the strength of your character or the beauty in your soul. They didn’t touch you in the ways that matter. In that, you belong to only me and I’d have it remain that way.” He braced for the terror of that admission, but instead, there was a freeness that buoyed him, lifted him at last from the darkness he’d been mired in for so long.

  Chapter 17

  In the following days, Lily and Derek had settled into a natural, harmonious rhythm. During the day, she was governess to Flora, meeting with him now daily about the girl. He would both listen and ask questions, and in his questioning he revealed a deeper and deeper regard for the child.

  During the nights, they sat in a companionable silence within his office, reading and talking. And in those moments, she could make herself believe that this was real. That they could be more.