She was beautiful, very nearly perfect.
And he most definitely was not, but somehow she did not see what was too obvious. The bright blue eyes of Lady Claire Glastonbury gazed upon unique truths and reflected different facets of light. In all these years he never considered such a strange possibility, and wondered what he ought to do about it.
Well, he knew what he ought to do. Even though she was a widow, he thoroughly compromised her, and rather spectacularly so. He did not need his Aunt Adelaide to tell him he should marry the lady. But why would she wish to marry him? And what if it was pure curiosity and not desire that drove her to undress him here on this bright, open field? What if she only wanted to see his freakish scars?
So, he was back where he started, but for the pleasure they briefly shared. Well, it was not all that brief.
“What are you thinking?” Lady Claire asked. “Am I proving to be tiresome company, sleeping away the afternoon on your shoulder?” Once again, she trifled with the line of his collarbone, pausing for just a moment on a ragged scar bisecting it.
“Not at all. You can sleep on my shoulder anytime, my lady.”
“Yours is a tempting offer, though I imagine the situation might become a bit awkward. Whatever I imagined for this afternoon, it was not to find my arms and legs entangled with those of a naked man.”
Max took several deep breaths. This lady knew how to provoke him with nothing more than a few casual words.
He brushed her hair back from her forehead.
“Whatever else comes of this day’s adventures, you need not fear that we have been observed. The areas around the Hall are quite abandoned, and have been for years.”
“They most certainly are not, Max.”
“I do like the sound of my name on your lips, dearest Claire.” He pulled her closer and she stretched along the length of his body.
But she would not be distracted. “Lord Wentworth,” she said, quite intentionally. He was beginning to understand her moods very well. “Do not deny what is patently obvious. The grass has been cut, the fruit trees pruned and the flower beds weeded. There is a fairly new rowboat sheltered by the lake. We know Camille comes here, and I doubt she is the one with the pruning shears.”
“It seems I have a most disloyal staff,” he said, knowing what she would say to that.
She did. “It is quite the opposite. Because they love you and Camille, they are protecting your property as you protect her.”
“It appears I have not been very successful in that, either,” he said.
Claire raised herself on one elbow, and her breasts pressed again his shoulder. “Is it not possible to spend one blessed afternoon without covering yourself in a hair cloth? Must your guilt about nearly everything put a damper on all that you do and say and feel?”
“Yes, it must,” he said, and wondered if he had gone too far. Her blue eyes gazed into his for a moment before she abruptly pulled away. With her back to him, she started pulling on her garments, saying nothing. He suddenly felt ridiculous, exposed and vulnerable, so he sat up as well. Their afternoon idyll was over.
Claire turned suddenly and caught him as he was pulling up his smalls. She glanced at his midsection, and looked away. “I am returning to London. I have said as much before, but this time I intend to make good on it. Your sister may wish to accompany me.”
“And if I accompany you both?”
She took in a deep breath. “Then your sister will not need me.”
“You are wrong about that. Camille needs you.” Max could not bear the thought of Claire with anyone else, apart from him. “I need you.”
She looked back at him in an oddly threatening way, her arms uplifted as she stuck pins in her hair, creating something that looked as fashionable as a bird’s nest. He thought she was splendid.
“You can prove that by doing something for me,” she said appraisingly.
“In a heartbeat.”
“Get dressed . . .”
“Is that all?” he asked, feeling some of the tension leave his body. “Though I quite prefer things as they are at the moment, I can easily oblige.”
“And come with me,” she added.
He knew what she wanted then, and the tension returned in an instant. She did not speak metaphorically before, when she mentioned revisiting places in one’s past. She truly meant it. Max glanced across the great lawn, to the ruins of his old home, and felt the terror return.
But still he dressed until he looked as rumpled and disheveled as the lady. It did not matter what story they concocted upon their return to Brookside Cottage, for everyone would know precisely what they had done, and possibly where they did it.
“Come,” she said simply, and held out her hand. “I am curious about several things.”
“Were you also curious about my scars and injuries?” he blurted out, unable to contain himself.
Her hand moved from his and traveled up the sleeve of his jacket.
“Oh, yes,” she admitted and then smiled. “But not nearly as much as I was curious about everything else.”
***
Claire held out her hand to Max and saw the deep lines of worry scoring his cheeks. She asked a lot of him, but she believed he trusted her as he might not have trusted anyone in years, and the time had come for him to open his eyes to the truth. He smiled briefly when she made light of his scars, and she knew she had already convinced him, in the most intimate ways, that they mattered little to her.
Pulling him along the great drive towards Brook Hall was another matter altogether. Indeed, it might not yet be her place to bully him into confronting his demons, but she hoped some day it might be. She decided she wanted this man, and she wanted him whole.
“I suppose carriages would come up this drive to the front door? The beech trees must have been half their size twenty years ago,” she said.
“My grandfather planted them after a disease ravaged the row of oak that once stood here. When the beech did not grow fast enough to suit him, he alternated them with white pines. You can see several near the kitchen garden, where they were transplanted once the beech took hold. Some were too large to transplant, and were cut down; one was used to make a cradle when I was born,” he said. And something subtly changed in his manner, for he was now pulling Claire along, and growing more animated as he spoke.
“A simple pine cradle for a future marquis?”
He glanced down at her. “Oh, I was not to be the marquis, you understand. Camille and I had an older brother, who died soon after she was born. But, in any case, there was nothing simple about that cradle, as I recall.”
“Your family has had a sad history,” she said cautiously. “Though not more so than others. When one considers the lost branches of the family tree, with some transplanted, and others cut down before their time, it remains for us to recall them with affection to preserve their memory.”
“You cannot make me philosophical about all that has happened here. My family has been trying to do so for many years, and my uncle has included a theological explanation, as well. But I know that what happened here is neither an act of God nor of nature. It is an act of man.”
“But you are not necessarily that man,” Claire said.
“My dear lady, please allow me some ownership of this dreadful business. I am that man.”
“You were a boy.”
“Boys of such an age are sent off to school, are sold off as apprentices to trade, go off to sea and are employed in great houses as this once was. Surely, I was old enough to be responsible for what happened.” Max paused and picked up a shiny disk embedded in the gravel. He rubbed his hand over it before pocketing it. “What do you know of it? Did my presence at Armadale’s ball presage a new round of gossip?”
“Not at all,” Claire lied. “I asked your sister.”
“I am sure her view holds no prejudice,” he said sarcastically as he stopped in front of what was once the grand entrance. It still was grand, though spots of peeling paint clung to the marble centerpiece over the lintel, where a coat of arms announced that this was a place of pride. “Two rampant lions and a justifiably terrified unicorn,” he said, reading her mind.
“Of all people, she would have the most reason to be prejudiced, one way or another. And yet, I believe she told me a cool and rational story. The only point on which she was a bit vague was why you were so indebted to a servant, you had to do his job for him.”
“And neglected to do it. Well, it hardly matters now.” He narrowed his eyes, studying a window on the second storey. “It wasn’t until years later that I fully appreciated how stupid it all was.”
Claire said nothing, for she was nothing if not experienced in the art of conversation, and knew a prologue when she heard one. But Maxwell continued to gaze at the window, though whether it invoked a memory or he just watched a starling return to the nest there, she could not guess. Finally, she ran a gentle hand along the length of his arm to his shoulder, where she knew a white scar cut across his muscle.
“Have I not given you reason to believe you can trust me?” she asked quietly. “Have you not already revealed so much, knowing I will never share it with anyone else?”
“Yes, that was very much the matter at hand, twenty years ago,” he said. “I saw something that was intended to be private.”
“Did you know what you witnessed?”
Surprisingly, Max laughed. “Oh, yes, did I not already point out how mature some young boys can be? I lived on a large estate, and knew my way around the stables and tenant farms. I knew what animals did, and I recognized what one of our servants was doing to a lower maid on the billiards table.”
Claire gasped. “It was a rape.”
“No, I rather think not. To this day, I would swear that the sounds I heard were those of pleasure.” He patted her hand on his shoulder and looked down at her.
His meaning was clear, and this time he did not need to elucidate on his suggestion. Claire prayed no one saw or heard them in yonder field, but if it were so, the sounds they made were certainly of pleasure. Divine pleasure.
Claire blushed under his gaze. “And you left the room at once.”
“Not quite at once, and therein was the danger. I was a boy, and naturally curious. I am sure I made no sound, but Peters turned his head and said something to me.”
“What did he say?” Claire asked, innocently.
“I am trying to be honest with you, my dear, but I will not be as honest as all that. It was a word I never heard then, but have since become passing familiar with it, especially while on a ship. Suffice it to say, I ran out of the room as quickly as I could.” He looked back to the house.
“Did you tell your parents?”
“No. Between running away, and what followed, I came to believe the fault was all mine.”
“The fire, do you mean?”
“I have had nearly twenty years to dwell on that. This response was more immediate. I believed what I had done—spying on them—was wrong. And then Peters found me and told me so, in no imprecise terms. He made me understand I had done something I should not.”
“Oh, indeed. Walking into a room of a house in which your father was master? You are rather right in your assessment: It is all very stupid.”
“Claire, have a heart. I was only a boy,” Max protested.
She turned towards him and grasped both his shoulders, pulling his sights away from the house to settle on her instead. If he weren’t so large, she would have shaken him. “You cannot have it both ways, you know. Either you were a boy who ought to have the knowledge of a man of the world, or you were a boy who was just a child, and couldn’t possibly know the truth of the matter.”
He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “In this respect, I was a child. Peters came after me and told me I had sinned, and would need to pay for it. He promised to keep silent about the whole business if I but did his chores for a week, including disposing of the ashes in the downstairs gates. Among the things that are clear to me now is if he knew I was occupied on the ground floor, he could dally with the poor maid above stairs.”
“Why poor maid? Did you not say she seemed . . . ah . . . satisfied?”
“We found out later she was with child, and if Peters ever promised to marry her, it would not be possible. He died in the fire. His was the first body they found afterwards, and he was still clutching one of the family’s Gainsboroughs. This surely suggests he was not as selfish as he might otherwise seem, for he was saving one of the family treasures, and paid for that effort with his life.”
“How very noble of him,” Claire said. “He would have been more valorous to have saved another human being, as you did yourself.”
She regretted her words the moment they were out, for she saw the change in his expression and the slump of his shoulders. The emotional burden he carried was manifest in very physical terms; she supposed the general air of melancholia that surrounded him was what both drew people to him, and then made him rebuff their advances.
“Max,” she said. “I cannot pretend to truly know what you have suffered through these twenty years but you only deny yourself by continuing to dwell in sadness. Your parents could not possibly have wished this for you; to mourn them is natural but to forever blame yourself for what happened is not. And your sister is not only quite competent to go about her business, but is a joyful spirit. She did not need me, as your Aunt Adelaide imagined, and I have learned more from her than she has from me.”
“Aunt Adelaide,” Max said, still frowning. “Surely you do not think she brought you here—under completely dubious reasoning—for Camille’s education?”
Claire considered these words, and the circumstances under which Adelaide Brooks suggested Claire come to Yorkshire. Max had arrived at his cousin’s ball with no more intention of socializing with the company than he had of helping the cook bring out the great loaves of bread from her oven. He stood among the columns that night, apart from them all. And when he ungraciously bowed out of dancing with the one lady who had no designs on him, Adelaide began to regard Claire with a shrewd look in her eye. Dear heavens, had she fallen into a trap an anxious relation set for him?
“Well, in that case, she seems to have succeeded,” she said.
He did not pretend to be confused by her words. “Let us acknowledge that something has begun. I confess that I did not give a whit for what my Aunt Adelaide wanted when I felt you beneath me, lying in the grass and wildflowers. I prefer to think of you, of us, and that what we have already shared is but a start. If you do not already despise me, we shall consider what might come in the future.”
“Has no one ever told you, my lord, that ladies do not like to have their love affairs examined and studied, like some poor creatures stuck in a web?”
“No, no one has ever told me as much,” he said, “but I am willing to learn.”
And so was she. “And have I given you any reason to think I might despise you, or anything about you?”
The barest glimmer of a smile appeared on his lips and he shrugged back his shoulders.
“God help you, you have not,” he muttered, and pulled her close and covered her lips with his own.
***
Max considered himself a rational man of science, with some knowledge of the stars and heavens, and yet he knew that something shifted in the earth’s axis this day, nearly setting it spinning out of control. A week ago, he would have firmly maintained his position of never returning to the great lawn of Brook Hall, where the considerable damage he once did would be spread out before him, taunting and torturing his soul. And yet he somehow forgot all that, and with no greater purpose in mind than to follow a lady to
this place, she who was also capable of taunting and torturing his soul.
But then purpose changed, and it had nothing to do with the massive ruin or its tragic history. It only had to do with the lady.
She must have known what it cost him, for if he did not tell her explicitly, there were many in London who would have gleefully done so. He knew what his body looked like, for he always watched to see the look of revulsion on a lover’s eyes, as if to affirm what he, himself, saw each time he passed a mirror. He knew that while well-tailored garments hid a multitude of sins, a lover’s bed hid nothing. And an open field burnished by the sun hid even less, if such a thing were possible.
But Claire’s eyes and lips revealed no revulsion, unless she managed to hide it very well as she moved down the length of his body to places he could not easily see, but felt rather intently. She expressed curiosity, and even moments of surprise, but there was nothing she did that made him feel he was anything other than he should be—and perhaps a good deal better. For the first time in all these many years, he felt at home.
And here it was, not nearly so bad as he remembered it in the days immediately following the fire, and still stately and grand. The tattered remains of the draperies in his boyhood room still fluttered in the window on the second storey. The marble staircase was visible through the open portal where the door had been. He remembered pushing a little horse down its banister in the days before he abandoned it for Rembrandt, and smiled at the thought of both little creatures.
He smiled. How utterly incomprehensible that he should finally return to his home where all the sadness of his life began, and smile. Even more peculiar, when he stood here with Claire in the moment before he practically ravished her senseless, he believed he laughed out loud. For the first time in many years, he understood that while there was great sadness here, there was also the possibility of great joy.
His lady—for now he was determined that she would never be the lady of anyone else—walked up the marble stairs toward the portico, pausing to pick up one thing and another.
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