She slipped her hand into his and gave an encouraging squeeze.
Taking that silent support, he continued. “Christian and Tristan and I were closer than brothers.” Even his own brother, George, now dead and gone, had been more of an aloof stranger since he’d stepped from the nursery into his father’s fold, to learn his responsibilities as a future duke. “We were sought after and full of our own self-worth.” How many years had he spent carousing and womanizing? He’d been no different than the nobleman who’d seen a beautiful woman, a desperate woman, and thought of nothing but his own desires. He’d brought those women to heights of great pleasure, but beyond that, he’d never spared them a thought. He’d never considered what had brought them to a place where they’d forsake marriage and a respectable future for his enjoyments.
“What is it?” she prodded.
He cleared his throat. “We were bored noblemen.” Just like that bastard who’d identified a girl alone—a younger, equally beautiful version of this woman before him. “All second sons at the time.” A wry grin turned his lips. “And, of course, all ladies desire a strappingly attired soldier, don’t they?” He gave his head a shake, disgusted at the initial thoughts that had first held a tantalizing appeal to his pair of friends.
Lily forced him to unclench a fist he didn’t recall making. She brushed her fingers over his palm and that butterfly soft caress filled his chest with warmth. “You were young.”
“Yes.” He dropped a kiss atop her black curls. “And idiotic.”
“We all are at that age.” Her and her first love. Derek tightened his grip reflexively about her. God how he despised the man who’d robbed her of her innocence and right to a joyous future. But then, I’d never know her… And he was just that selfish of a bastard that he could not imagine never knowing her. Unnerved by that staggering truth, he continued with what were suddenly safer talks of his past. “We went off to fight Boney’s forces.” Cannon fire echoed through his mind and the piercing screams of men as they died alone on a field of chaos.
Lily unfolded herself on his lap and he made to gather her back but she only wrapped her arms about his waist. With strength radiating from her delicate frame, she hung on tight, and he took that unspoken offering. It eased the tension in his shoulders and the battlefield cries faded to a distant hum. “Christian was…an unskilled soldier.” Where he and Maxwell took to battle as though that had been the purpose they’d been born to, Christian had been too human to be what Derek had too easily transformed himself into—a ruthless warrior. “Maxwell and I made a pledge to keep him alive.” In the end, Christian had returned unscathed and Derek had been carried off in shame.
Then, was anyone really unscathed by life? The tortured marquess he’d visited some months ago had given no evidence of being unscathed.
“You are both blessed to have one another as friends.”
He didn’t have friends. By hell, he didn’t even have family. Derek pressed his eye closed. No. That was not altogether true. There was still Flora, his sister’s daughter. “We are no longer friends.” He’d severed any possibility of that former relationship when he’d sought to destroy St. Cyr’s reputation and marriage.
“Of course you are,” Lily said with a matter-of-factness that brought his eye open.
“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice thick. “I blamed Christian.”
She shifted in his lap and he wrapped his arms about her. “Don’t you see? We always blame someone. Some blame themselves and some blame others.” Who was Lily Benedict? Was she one of those latter individuals? Did her hatred belong to the cad who’d ruined her and thrust her into an uncertain future, reliant on the whims of bored nobles? Or did she take on guilt she should not feel for the circumstances presented women in an uncertain world? Her gaze fell to his chest and when she spoke, her words were so faint he strained to hear. “It is easier to take the hatred we carry for ourselves and turn that sentiment on someone else.” Then, she gave her head a hard shake and looked up once again, with a firmed jaw. “Your friend, the marquess, he understands.”
“I tried to destroy his marriage,” he said bluntly, hating the way she stiffened. Remorse twisted inside, having nothing to do with this humbling moment and everything to do with the shameful actions in the cold of winter. “My friend found love and I was,” am, “alone.” With no one and nothing. Or so he’d believed. Except… He skimmed his gaze over the room, to where the pile of St. Cyr and Maxwell’s notes littered the floor. He’d not truly been alone. Not in the ways he believed, but in other, deeper, more isolating ones for the self-imposition of that solitary state. What of Lily, however? Who had she had? He continued in quiet tones. “I read the papers of his and Maxwell’s triumphs. They returned the conquering heroes, sought after by all…” A dull flush burned his neck.
“And you were shunned by all,” Lily correctly finished for him. She trailed the tip of her index finger over the puckered flesh of his chest.
Derek flinched. He’d never grow accustomed to any person looking upon him and touching him as she was. Even in knowing she did not so revile him, he made to pull away, but she persisted.
“I had Harris,” his too-loyal butler, “find out about Christian’s circumstances. He was in need of a fortune and a wife, but he found something more than that.” And how Derek had sat cloaked in the shadows of this very room hating him for that happiness. Why should his friend know light when he knew dark? Why should Christian know love when Derek knew loneliness?
Lily looked questioningly up at him. “What did he find?”
“Not what.” The shame grew and continued its cancer-like spread through his being. “A woman. He found a lady with a fat dowry and that lady was…is,” despite my best efforts, “madly in love with him.” Memories flitted in of Derek’s first foray into the living. And where had he gone? To taunt and goad the newly wedded Marquess and Marchioness of St. Cyr. He spoke, his voice made hollow. “I crafted lies that made Christian out as a ruthless fortune-hunter.” And though the newly minted marquess had, indeed, been a fortune hunter, he’d possessed the same honor marrying where his heart willed it. And out of his own jealousy and self-hatred, Derek had tried to rob the other man of that gift. “I shared secrets of St. Cyr’s past with his wife.” He winced. Moments in his past that St. Cyr, no doubt, flagellated himself for.
Lily threaded her fingers through his hair and tenderly played with those tresses. “Oh, Derek.”
Bitterness ate at his tongue like acid. “That is the man I am. The monster.” A beast for not the marks he wore upon his person, but the crimes against his friends…and sister.
Lily pulled him back from the abyss of guilt threatening to swallow him. She clasped his face between her hands and looked him in the eye. He wanted to turn away but she tightened her hold upon him, not allowing him to pull free. “Oftentimes it is easier to feed that hatred and anger. Because the alternative is allowing life to destroy you, and for the struggles that go with living, there is something very grand and beautiful in life, anyway.” The dark glint in her eyes sucked at him so that he wanted to delve deeper into the story of Lily Benedict. That regretful glimmer in her aquamarine gaze spoke of someone who knew and this connection between them grew all the more, terrifying him with the intensity in this needing her.
“It does not undo what I did.” There was no atonement. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. Especially not when one’s plan nearly resulted in that former friend’s death.
“It does not. I know that better than anyone. But he is still your friend,” she said. She touched her lips to his and she tasted of forgiveness and hope and new beginnings. He wanted those new beginnings—with her.
How could she not know that as she spoke, he’d lost his heart to her? There was no fear in that. Just an absolute rightness; a sense of being whole, when he’d been empty for so long.
“You were blessed to have those friendships.”
Yes. He had been. Derek winced. In the end, he’d gone
and made a muck of everything with those men. Guilt sliced away at his conscience, even as something in her words gave him pause. “And what of you, what of your friends?” Please say there was someone you had all these years. Please say you were not alone in the ways I have been.
She gave him a sad, pitying smile as though he spoke with a child’s naiveté. “Women who are mistresses to noblemen do not have friends.”
His chest tightened painfully as with that handful of words, she confirmed what he’d already known. His exile had been self-imposed. Yes, he’d been shut away and scorned by Society but had he given the words, St. Cyr and Maxwell would have taken down the Tower of London with their hands, for their strength of friendship. Even his sister had not been deterred by the ugliness of his soul and continued to come day after day, with her young daughter in tow. And how had he embraced those kindnesses? By shutting out the only people who cared. And in his sister’s case, he was too late.
Who were the people important to Lily? Surely there was a friend for her somewhere in this world? Someone who knew the strength of her courage and beauty of her spirit. A desperate need to know all he could about her filled him. “Who are your letters to?” he asked, wanting those notes to be from a friend who cared for her and not some man who’d mattered to her.
Lily paused and, for a moment, he thought she’d withhold that knowledge he craved. Then she pulled away from him and he mourned that loss as she took the distance she now clearly required. She climbed to her feet, leaving him cold for reasons that had more to do with the loss of her body’s heat. Except, unashamed of her nudity, she strode over to the forgotten box she carried about his house in the earliest morning hours. She ran her palm over the top. Her lower lip quivered and she caught the trembling flesh between her teeth. “They are to my family.”
To. Not from.
Silence echoed through the room as this revelation made her more real and her loss all the greater for that realness. It had been easier when they’d been notes to amorphous strangers and he’d been left to speculate as to the person’s identity. In this case, it was a number of persons.
“I have two brothers and a sister,” she murmured. The person who should have protected her above all others had turned her out. Lily sucked in a jagged breath. “They were but children when I left Carlisle,” she said, her tone stronger for that breath.
Derek sat and stared through his lashes at her. “And do you still write them?”
The muscles of her throat moved. “No.”
“Did they ever write back?”
He held his breath, but her silence served as her answer. A black curse slipped out on a hiss at the coldhearted man who’d sired her, who’d deny her family. A man who’d left his child at the mercy of a merciless world. Then…was his own mother’s defection any different? Blood did not kindness or love make.
“He did not have a choice, Derek,” Lily said quietly, correctly interpreting the path his thoughts had traveled. “Your mother threatened to have the bishop strip him of his vicarship.”
The air left him on a swift exhale. God, his mother and brother had been the same kind of ruthless to rival the Devil himself. Guilt twisted his insides into vicious knots. “I am so sorry,” he whispered. How empty. How very meaningless those words were. Words that could never right George’s and his mother’s wrongs.
“It is not your fault,” she said so simply it ravaged him all the more. “Just as it was not my father’s. He had his other children to consider.”
“You were a child.” And she’d been cast out on her own. Insidious thoughts slid in, of a young, scared Lily, forced into the role of mistress by an old, lecherous gentleman. Rage descended over his eye momentarily blinding him so that he wanted to choke the life from that bastard’s body.
“But so, too, were they,” she said pulling him to the moment.
“They aren’t any longer,” he gritted out and came to his feet. He strode across the room and scooped up his previously discarded garments. With a growl, he tugged his shirt overhead. “You make excuses for them.” Her family had failed her in the worst possible ways. Nay, his family had failed her and her life had been one of hell for that cruelty. Grief contorted the scarred muscles of his face. To keep from descending into madness, he collected his trousers and struggled into them; when the stricken look in her eyes froze him.
“Sometimes excuses are necessary,” she said, as she set her box down and came over to collect her own garments.
Derek retrieved her night-rail and drew it over her head. It slid in a soft rustle over her slim body, shielding her resplendent nudity from his gaze. What a tragedy to cover up such beauty. He brushed his knuckles along her jaw. “But not always. Just as some crimes cannot be forgiven.”
The color leeched from her cheeks and she took a staggering step backward. “I should go,” she said. Averting her gaze, she quickly gathered her box.
He opened his mouth, but before he managed any words, Lily raced across the room, pulled the door open, and fled. Derek furrowed his brow and stared at the entrance of the room. With the speed with which she’d taken flight, she may as well have been a fey creature of fantasies; equally elusive and imagined. He stood there a long while after she’d gone.
In this past hour he’d learned more than he’d ever known about Lily Benedict. And yet, oddly it felt as though he knew nothing about the lady, all the same.
Chapter 20
The morning sun just peeked over the horizon. At the early hour, Lily appreciated the quiet that blanketed London’s streets.
From where she stood by her bedroom window, she shot her gaze across to the gilt-bronze mantel clock. The golden Pan cheerily fluted for a menagerie of animals alongside a golden tree and that bucolic simplicity momentarily froze her.
When Sir Henry had visited her chambers and slaked his base needs with her body, nothing more than a vessel for that lust, she’d lie abed staring up at the whitewashed ceilings. In those dark, lonely moments she’d hunger to return to the obscurity of that graceful, peaceful English countryside, where no one knew the crimes of her past, or present. The golden moment captured of Pan conjured memories of the simplistic country life she’d left. The one she’d dreamed seven years of returning to. The one she’d not thought of in days.
The clock ticked away the passing moments and she continued to stare. How could a week come to matter so? How could her hatred for a family who sustained her now throw her into this upheaval where she no longer knew up from down?
She buried her fists into the fabric of her taffeta cloak and it wrinkled noisily in the early morning quiet. With every day she came to know Derek, that emotionless land she planned on running away to was nothing more than a hollow, empty place that would never heal her hurts or right the wrongs she was guilty of.
“It is not enough,” she whispered. The Duke of Blackthorne had crumbled away at her defenses and in so doing, had proved her the same weak fool without a care for her future or safety or security. She squared her shoulders. Did she truly believe Derek would see her as an honorable woman of strength if he discovered the truths she deliberately withheld? A wry, humorless smile formed painfully on her lips. No. What man would feel anything but contempt and disdain for a woman who’d spread her legs for his brother and who’d then entered his own household with the most dubious of intentions, and now did the same for him?
Cloak pulled close about her person, Lily walked stiffly to the entrance of her room and braced for her upcoming meeting. Before her courage deserted her, she pulled the door open. The hinges creaked noisily in the quiet and she froze, her breath held. When no accusers came forward with their fingers outstretched, Lily slipped from her bedchamber. Drawing the door slowly closed behind her, she glanced back and forth down the hall.
Of course, at this early hour, the handful of servants on Derek’s staff would be thoroughly occupied with the preparations for the day.
Remorse twisted around in her belly as she padded softly down th
e carpeted halls through the townhouse. She made her way below stairs and as she approached the marble foyer, she braced for discovery. Heart pounding for the fear of discovery, she drew open the broad, heavy door and stepped outside.
The unseasonable chill of the early spring morn yanked at the hem of her cloak and, ignoring the early morning cold that penetrated the fabric, she all but sprinted down the steps. Her stomach twisted. These same steps she’d climbed years earlier and been thrown unceremoniously down, during a vicious rainstorm. With the street still echoing with her remembered cries and weeping, Lily now cast her gaze up and down the quiet streets in search of a hired hackney.
Biting her lower lip, she continued down the empty cobbled streets. Of course, hired hackneys had no place outside the lavish townhouses of these Mayfair residents. Each step she took away from Derek’s home, the tension and guilt weighting her shoulders lifted, so that she was left with nothing but the invigorating cleanliness of the crisp air. Each step carried her away, drew her farther away from the web of deception she wove upon that broken, lonely home inhabited by a very much hurting man and sad little girl. Only, when she returned, she’d resume her lying and scheming. Her throat worked. No, there was no escaping who she truly was and what evil she did. There was this temporary reprieve.
Lily drew to a stop, as her gaze settled upon a hackney. The wind continued to whip about her and she burrowed deeper into her cloak. She cast a glance back down the path she’d traveled. For the sliver of a heartbeat, she considered boarding that carriage and disappearing from Derek’s life and Holdsworth’s vile scheme and even darker threat. The ugliest memories of her days on the mail coach and approaching George crept to the surface. The cloying fear. The pain of an empty belly. Her breath grew ragged in her own ears. She could not go back to that. This time, it would ruin her in ways she’d not already been thoroughly destroyed.
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