‘Your honesty puts me to shame, Henrietta.’
‘That was not my intention.’
‘Which is why it was so effective,’ he said ruefully.
‘I hate having to think ill of you,’ she confessed in a whisper.
‘You want to think me an honourable man, is that it, Henrietta?’ Rafe countered harshly. ‘You want me to deny my past in order for you to reconcile your conscience? I cannot do that. I am no saint, Henrietta. My reputation as a rake is not unfounded.’
She swallowed hard. She felt as if she were shrinking inside.
Rafe pushed his fingers through his hair, casting his eyes up to the ceiling where a cobweb hung from the corner of the plain cornicing. ‘I can tell you the truth, if you like.’
Chapter Seven
Was he really contemplating this? ‘I can’t refute my actions, but I can explain them.’
It seemed he was. Rafe took a quick turn around the room. It mattered that she understood. Only now did he admit to himself how much her opinion of him counted, how hurtful had been her judgements. How had she come to be so important to him? He didn’t know. He just knew she was. Telling her would be a relief, if not a release. He wanted to tell her.
He took another turn about the room. Henrietta was still standing in the middle of it, in her brown gown with her brown eyes, watching him. He owed her the truth. He took her hand and led her back over to the bed, sitting down in the chair opposite once more. She looked so compliant, yet there was a core of steel running through her. It gave her a strength of purpose, a solidly grounded moral certainty at her centre that he envied. He might not agree with all of her opinions, but at least she had them and she meant them. She had integrity. He particularly admired that.
Settling back in the uncomfortable wooden seat, Rafe subdued a craven desire to extinguish the lamp and make his confession in the dark. ‘I was only nineteen when I married Julia,’ he said, launching into his sorry tale before he could think again. ‘Lady Julia Toward. She was twenty-three, the same age as you are now.’
Henrietta listened intently. Rafe’s voice was not much above a whisper, but the bitterness was there, like a rusty blade hidden in the petals of a flower.
‘She was very beautiful,’ he continued, ‘very beautiful and, though I did not know it, very unstable. She had been betrothed some two years before, but her fiancé died. I thought her over it when I met her. She said she was. I wanted to believe her. When you want something enough, you can persuade yourself of anything.’
Silence. Henrietta waited, biting back the urge to protest. She hated the implications of what he was saying. Despite the evidence—foolishly, she now realised—she had persuaded herself that he had not loved his wife.
‘I was just returned from my Grand Tour and was as green as spring asparagus.’ Rafe’s voice was stronger now. ‘My father had packed me off with dire warnings of the dangers of salacious Continental women, but in truth I was more interested in ancient history. I spent my time seeking out every set of crumbling ruins that Greece and Italy had to offer. Father died quite unexpectedly while I was still abroad. When I returned to England, it was to take up the title. I had always known it would be mine, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. I was not close to my father, but I was shocked and saddened by his premature death. There was no one else, you see. I have no siblings and my mother had died years before. There was just my grandmother, as there still is. She urged me to marry, saying I needed help in taking up the reins, and there was Julia, ideally positioned to do so. The perfect doyenne, was Julia, it was what she had been raised to be. And she was beautiful and claimed to love me. And I was ripe and ready to fall in love myself. I couldn’t have been more primed. So we married.’
‘Were you happy?’ Henrietta asked. It was churlish of her, awful of her, but she wanted him to say no.
Rafe shrugged. ‘At first. It’s hard for me to remember, it’s like looking back at a shadow play, but, yes, I suppose we must have been. Or I was. Julia was…’ He broke off with a heavy sigh. ‘You know, I have no real idea what Julia was. There were days when she seemed content, days when she simply withdrew into silence. She’d lock herself away in her bedchamber for up to a week, then she’d come out smiling and pretending nothing had happened. She would shower affection on me, then she would freeze when I touched her. She would drag me to every party we were invited to, wouldn’t let me leave her side, then she would take to ignoring me. If I so much as danced with another women, she would wreak havoc, yet she would not allow me to make comment on her coterie of gallants—and, believe me, it was a large coterie. She was terrified that her looks would fade. Actually, she was obsessed with how she looked. It was the source of her power.’
He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I can see all that now. At the time it was a different matter entirely. At the time, I grew tired of her tantrums and tears. I grew tired, too, of her blowing first hot and then cold upon the physical side of our union. I stopped going to her room. I stopped wanting her. I stopped caring about her moods. I stopped loving her.’
Silence again, a deeply uncomfortable one filled with ghosts and spectres. Rafe gazed blankly into the past, forcing himself to relive those days, slowly easing the tattered bandages from the wounds he had garnered, testing to see how much they had healed. ‘It was my fault, most of it,’ he said bitterly. ‘I didn’t care enough and she saw that. She didn’t love me, but she was terrified of losing me, and she could see that I was by this time—two years or so into our marriage—she could see that I was quite indifferent in the way that only callous youth can be. So she tried to get my attention in the only way she knew how, by making me jealous.’
He had been stroking the back of Henrietta’s hand, a rhythmic caress back and forwards, but now he stopped. ‘She took a lover. When I found out, she wept and pleaded, begging forgiveness, but when she saw I would not be moved, things turned vicious. She told me she’d never loved me. She told me she married me only for the title and the money. She told me she’d only ever loved one man and he was dead. She told me I could never satisfy her, that she’d taken countless lovers to our marital bed before this one, that I was not man enough for her. That I was not man enough for anyone.’
Rafe’s voice was shaking. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running. A cold sweat prickled the small of his back, but now that he had started, he needed to finish, no matter how much it pained him. A flash of the humiliation that had engulfed him at the time struck him with an immediacy which took him aback. It was quickly followed by shame as he remembered how Julia had made him feel. He had forgotten the vicious sting of her barbs that had so effectively lashed his youthful ego, flaying his more innocent self, for a brief time quite destroying his confidence. It had been so long since he had vowed to prove her wrong, so long since he had stopped believing he had any point at all to prove, yet for a moment he felt again as if he did.
He plunged on, eager to conclude now, his words spilling out, staccato-like. ‘I know now that it was mere bravado, designed to wound, but I didn’t know then. I hated her for what she said. I ended our marriage then and there. A formal separation, but discreetly done. No notices in the press, nor any to her creditors. Julia was banished to an obscure estate, given an adequate allowance to live on, but it was punishment enough for her. Banishment from society and all the vanities and admirers who fed her ego. I punished her because I believed what she said. Then later, to my eternal shame, I continued to punish her because I felt guilty. I hadn’t ever truly loved her. I shouldn’t have married her, any more than she should have married me, yet we were stuck with one another, married but not married, in a state of limbo. I kept us there because I felt guilty. Because I had failed. I punished myself as well as Julia. I felt I deserved the misery as much as she.’
‘Couldn’t you have divorced?’
Rafe shook his head vehemently. ‘No. God, no. An Act of Parliament, to say nothing of becoming the latest crim. con. for the gossips
. No, that would have been a step too far for both our families.’ He sat down heavily on the chair, dropping his head into his hands. ‘You have to remember, I was young. I’m not excusing what I did, I’m just doing as you ask, telling you why. I was loaded with guilt at not having made Julia happy and humiliated by her jibes. I couldn’t make any woman happy, she said. I was hurt. I vowed I’d never let anyone hurt me again. And I—I set out to prove her wrong.’
He faltered here. Having for so long refused to allow himself to remember, he had never questioned the actions he had taken to remedy his sense of humiliation. Having made the decision, he had acted and continued to act without reflection. But now, in the retelling, under Henrietta’s clear-sighted, innocent gaze, he did reflect, and found himself on less solid ground than he ought to be. ‘It was not so much revenge as—as—I don’t know, I suppose it was shoring up my defences, rebuilding my ego. I swear to you, Henrietta, I have never once hurt anyone in the process. I have never seduced any woman who was not a willing partner and I have taken every precaution to ensure that I would not leave her with child, but I cannot deny that there have been very many such women over the years. I have learned to use sex as an emotional shield. I’ve learned to use it as a release mechanism, to stop me feeling.’
It hurt, his confession, and it pained her soul to see him so raw, to think of him as once so vulnerable, to see the glimpses of that vulnerability still. She loathed the beautiful woman who had spoken so cruelly, but she was not so blind as to think Julia solely to blame. The most painful part of what Rafe was saying was hearing his judgement—his flawed judgement—upon himself. No one could be more ruthless, more self-condemnatory.
‘I have my own rules, my own form of morality, if you will,’ Rafe continued harshly. ‘I have never had any problem in playing by them. I don’t engage with women who expect any more than a physical relationship. I don’t sleep with the innocent or the vulnerable. I don’t allow any real intimacy. Don’t look like that, Henrietta—believe me, it’s very possible to share your body with someone and feel nothing. It is possible to give and to receive physical pleasure without feeling real desire. I am a rake, Henrietta, but not the kind of rake you think me.’
‘Oh, Rafe, I so much wish you were not any kind of rake.’ How much she wished that she had not acknowledged to herself, until now. She had not appreciated how much she had longed for an explanation that would eradicate his past until Rafe made it crystal clear that he could not.
She was torn, moved to tears by the pain and suffering he had endured. There were angry tears for the wanton destruction of Rafe’s innocence by Julia, but also for the route to retribution he had chosen. ‘I know it is trite, but it is true, none the less: two wrongs don’t make a right. I wish you had not behaved so.’
‘But you understand, Henrietta, why I do? Did.’
Did she? He had trampled a ragged path through her preconceptions, that much was certain. He was not a rake. Yet he was. He had good reasons to feel as he did, but were they sufficient to justify his actions? ‘I’m sorry. I do understand, but I can’t condone your behaviour, Rafe. I know it’s not for me to judge, I was not the one married to Julia, but still.’ She shook her head. ‘You’ve been so honest with me, I can’t lie to you. I just— I don’t know. Tell me what happened after you separated? To Julia, I mean, what happened to Julia?’
The sorrowful look in Henrietta’s eyes made him experience something remarkably like remorse, though he suspected it was more for the pain of disillusioning her than wishing his past undone. Bitter experience had taught him just how pointless that was. ‘We lived apart for three years. I gradually eased the terms of our separation. I didn’t love her, but I cared enough to wish her happy, so when she suggested a reconciliation, vowing it was what she wanted, I was not entirely against it. My instincts were to refuse, but Julia was persistent and my guilty conscience was persistent and so, too, was my grandmother. There was still the issue of an heir, you see. So we were reconciled and then…’
Once again, Rafe got to his feet. He wrenched his neckcloth from his shirt and tossed it on to the floor. ‘It was a mistake from the start. To end a sorry tale, she died tragically. Almost exactly five years ago. And despite my grandmother’s renewed and extremely determined campaign for my re-entering the matrimonial stakes, I will never marry again. The whole thing was too painful. I don’t want that kind of pain again. I am much happier and better off alone.’
And now she did understand the real punishment he was meting out on himself. Not just cutting himself off from pain, he would not think himself deserving of feeling. She understood that now and so much more of it made sense. ‘Are you sure you are happier?’ she asked softly, already fairly certain of the answer.
Rafe hesitated. ‘I was. At least, I thought I was until you waltzed into my life,’ he admitted with a rueful smile. ‘I sometimes feel as if you have picked me up and thrown me into the air and I can never be sure if I have yet landed, or where. I hate it and it makes me furious, but it also makes me laugh and it makes me want more. You were honest with me, Henrietta, let me be completely honest with you. I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you make me want to break my rules. You’ve made it damned difficult not to, if you must have the God’s honest truth. There, now you have it all. I wish I could be the man you want me to be, but I’m not and never can be.’
She put her fingers to his mouth. ‘You are always telling me not to think in black and white—you should take a lesson from your own book. You are much more than you think you are, Rafe. I wish that you were not quite so determined to see yourself in the poorest possible light. Whether you will admit it or not, you are my knight errant, and whether you will admit to them or not, you have some extremely chivalrous qualities.’
Kneeling up on the bed, she wrapped her arms around his neck. He was not the man he ought to be, not the man he could be, but he was Rafe, and she would not change him even if she could, any more than she would change this moment. An intense need to provide succour swamped her. She was overwhelmingly relieved to be able to explain her own feelings, to have them almost legitimised. Mentally exhausted by the process, she became intensely physically aware. Rafe’s pulse was beating at his throat. The scent of him, so achingly familiar, was in her nose. She wanted the taste of him on her tongue. Rafe was not the only one who was finding it difficult to keep to his own rules. She wanted his kisses. She longed for his touch.
Desire! His word, but it rang true. That is what she was feeling. Unconsciously, she nestled herself closer, feeling the rise and fall of his ribs against her breasts. Desire. Was it really so very wrong? She knew the answer, but chose to ignore it.
‘Henrietta, if you keep doing that, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.’
She didn’t want him to be. She didn’t want to think. She wanted to feel. She wanted him to feel. She pressed herself closer and looked up at him.
Eyes slate-blue, piercing, seeing too much, more than she was prepared to look at herself. Henrietta tried to look away, but he tilted up her chin. ‘Henrietta, I don’t want…’
‘You do. You said you do. And I do, too. I know I should not, but I do. I can’t help it.’
‘Dear God, Henrietta…’
‘Rafe, just kiss me.’
He kissed her roughly. His mouth was hard on hers, but her lips were so meltingly soft, it didn’t matter. He kissed her and his doubts fled, too. This was right. This. And this. And this. His kiss deepened. He pulled her closer, wrapped his arms around her and found it. Sweet oblivion.
As Rafe kissed her, Henrietta’s senses whirled. He had kissed her before, tenderly, teasingly, with a promise of more to come, but this time it was there, right from the start. Passion. She had no time to think, she could only respond, melting into his arms as he enfolded her, his lips hard on hers, his tongue plundering her mouth, thrusting into it in a way that made her body tremble, heat and shiver all at once.
His hands were on the laces of her g
own. Knowing, expert hands—she wouldn’t think about that. He kissed and he unlaced, and the gown fell open at the back; he pulled it down over her arms and she helped him—she didn’t care that it was wanton, she wanted to be free of it as much as he wanted her to be. He discarded his own coat and waistcoat. She was in her cotton chemise and his hands were on the plain material, stroking, caressing, his lips tracing a path from her mouth down her neck to the valley between her breasts as his fingers plucked her nipples into an aching hardness that made her moan.
He said her name, breathed her name, his voice hoarse, his breath coming as fast as hers. He said her name as if she were beautiful; the way he touched her made her feel beautiful. The way he touched her made her feel hot. Made her feel restless. Made her feel as if there was something delightful waiting for her, if only he would kiss her more, touch her more. She ran her hands feverishly up his back, feeling the heat of his skin through his shirt, but it wasn’t enough, so she tugged his shirt free from his breeches and felt his skin.
He kissed her again, his mouth drugging hers, hot and dark and full of promise. Forbidding and enticing and dangerous, just as she had known from the beginning he would be. She kissed him back just as deeply, just as passionately; she shivered more violently as he pulled her closer and she felt the thick weight of his arousal press solidly against her thigh.
She was sprawled on the bed now and he was looking down at her, his eyes glittering and stormy. His cheeks were flushed. His shirt was open at the neck. A sprinkling of dark hairs. She couldn’t remember when he had lost his neckcloth. Or his boots. He knelt down on the floor and untied her garters, delicately peeling down her coarse woollen stockings as if they were made of the finest silk. He kissed her ankle, the faint pulse at the bone. It was as if he had kissed her innermost self.
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