by Darcy Burke
He deserved more than that slap and still, guilt filled her at the crimson stain her fingers had left on his scarred cheek. “Uh, why thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment,” he mumbled, his words somewhat muffled by the edge of his palm as he still held his cheek.
She jabbed him in the chest with her pointer finger.
“Ouch!”
“How dare you?” she demanded. “You come here.” Another jab that forced him backwards. “And reprimand, me?” Another jab. This time he flinched. Good! “You, who have forgotten for the better part of fifteen years that I so much as exist,” A fourth jab drove him back another step. “dare to address my behavior?”
“Grace, will you excuse us?” She ordered, not even bothering to look back at her maid.
“Very well, my lady,” Grace called. The young woman’s tone indicated she approved of Emmaline’s outrage.
Emmaline redirected her attention on her betrothed. “How dare…?”
“I will not be subjected to another of your rants,” he muttered.
He kissed her.
Drake tugged the silly, too-large bonnet from Emmaline’s head. The hasty movement unsettled the precarious chignon in which her silken brown tresses had been arranged, and sent the chocolate waves tumbling to her waist. Had he really ever thought the color mousy? He tangled his fingers in the luxurious strands, angling his head to better avail himself to her mouth.
She whimpered, and her body melted against his like a Gunther’s ice on a summer day. He held tight to her so she didn’t dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Filling his hands with her gently rounded buttocks, he anchored her against his center.
“Drake,” she moaned against his lips.
Another groan tore from his chest and he stroked her tongue with his. He ran his hands over her body in an attempt to explore the subtly seductive flare of her hips, the delicate swell of her buttocks.
He cupped her breast in his hand.
“Ohhh,” she gasped.
The husky timbre of her voice drove him wild, and he ached to slide between her moist folds and stroke her with his length.
He wanted to take her here and now, right on the garden floor. He sat down on the bench and adjusted her on his lap which set the gardening tools clattering. That small tinkling of metal meeting metal penetrated his consciousness. Drake pulled away with infinite slowness. He placed one more lingering, kiss upon her swollen lips and rested his brow atop hers. His breathing labored and harsh blended with the loud beat of his heart and made thinking difficult.
What hold did Lady Emmaline Fitzhugh have over him? When he was with her all logic and reason fled. Enough of his life was riddled with bouts of lost control. But she was like a tonic he could not live without, and whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted it or not, he craved her with an intensity that bordered on physical pain.
Emmaline’s breathing settled into a normal cadence. He stroked the small of her back, grateful at the time she took regaining her composure for it afforded him the same opportunity.
She spoke first. “Waxham is a friend of my brother’s.”
Apparently his kiss wasn’t as powerful as he liked to think. She hadn’t forgotten the reason for his earlier upset, the reason he’d kissed her into silence.
She went on. “Waxham has been like a brother to me.”
In spite of her words, Drake felt that awful emotion, he was beginning to recognize all too well as jealousy, rise in his throat, and nearly choke him. Emmaline might view Waxham as a brother but Drake had recognized the very appreciative male gleam in Waxham’s eyes. There had been nothing brotherly in the way he’d eyed Emmaline. “I don’t care about your relationship with him. I worry about how it reflects on our betrothal,” he lied. A bloody pathetic lie.
That callously insensitive remark drove Emmaline from him and replaced all warmth in her eyes with a sheen of coolness. Drake regretted the transformation even as he knew he was the cause of it.
“You’re worried about our betrothal, my lord?” She mocked. “Now? After all these years? After three Seasons? Now, it bothers you who I converse with?”
Drake braced himself for another assault from her finger.
Then the fight seemed to go out of her. The sparks glimmered, flickered, and finally dimmed. She hugged her arms across her stomach. “I am tired of this.”
Drake’s brows dropped.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she whispered.
“Then stop dogging my every step.”
As soon as the harsh words left his mouth, he wanted to call them back.
The sad, detached expression she wore tugged somewhere in the vicinity of his chest and filled him with panic, a fear that he had said something irrevocable. He fished for another rejoinder, to rouse some other emotion than the defeated one she now wore. He wanted to redirect her thoughts away from… from…
From what?
Giving him exactly what he wanted?
Except of a sudden he realized he didn’t know exactly what it was he wanted anymore. He’d spent nearly fifteen years lashing out over the betrothal he’d been committed to as a child. It had redefined his relationship with his father, had resulted in Drake fleeing to fight on the Peninsula. He’d built up years and years of resentment toward Lady Emmaline, who’d herself been a victim of their circumstances.
In a short span of time, he’d come to the realization that nothing was or had been as it seemed for perhaps, ever—and it left him feeling off-balance. It was as if the world had been flipped upside down and he was hanging on by his fingernails.
Crash!
Drake flung himself on top of Emmaline, and knocked her to the ground, burying her body beneath his.
His breath came fast as he waited for the crack of the gunshots, the ensuing cries and screams. They never came. His mind remained embroiled in the hellish world of roaring cannon fire and the blinding thickness of gunpowder smoke.
“Drake.”
Drake’s heart hammered wildly in his chest and under any other circumstance he would have luxuriated in the feel of Emmaline’s lean, lithe body under his. In that particular moment, however, mind-numbing terror gripped him in a tight vise. It sucked the air from his lungs.
Emmaline wrestled a hand from between them stroked back the hair that had tumbled across his brow. “It was just the tools,” she whispered, as though speaking to a fractious mare. “They fell. All is well,” she assured him.
It wasn’t Emmaline’s words that reached through his tortured remembrances and wrenched him back to reality, but the soft, soothing cadence of her voice that penetrated the devil’s unyielding hold.
She stroked his cheek. Drake leaned into her touch. His eyes slid closed, needing her touch. It was like a balm on his wounded soul.
Please, don’t stop touching me. In Emmaline’s embrace he felt…whole. Drake swallowed painfully and through sheer will forced himself to pick up his head. Emmaline’s troubled eyes caught and lingered on the vivid scar traversing his cheek. He flinched under her scrutiny.
She spoke again. “Are you all right?”
His mind conjured a trail of blood beneath her fingertips as she traced the mark.
“I-I am sorry,” he stuttered and climbed to his feet. He helped her up from the ground. “Have I hurt you?” Of course you hurt her, you bloody monster.
Emmaline shook her head. “No, no, I’m not—”
“Please, forgive me.” In his haste to be free of the nightmare unfolding before him, he stumbled backwards, and tripped over the metal gardening tools.
Emmaline reached for him but he recoiled.
He mustered a hasty, distracted bow and fled.
SEVENTEEN
My Dearest Drake,
I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt the war had ended and you forgot to come home. You were wandering about an empty field. If you forget how, promise you will write me…I will help you.
Ever Yours,
Emmaline
On any other day, the small patch of nature, awash in the glow of the sun’s bright slanting rays, would have soothed her. She pressed her forehead against the cool pane and stared down. Not this day.
With all of the hurts Drake had unknowingly inflicted, it should be easy for her to go to Sebastian and request he terminate the betrothal contract.
Except this morning in the gardens with Drake changed everything.
Resting her chin on her knees, she rubbed it back and forth over the smooth fabric of her dress. Funny, the greatest concern she’d had upon waking had been the neglect she’d shown toward the gardens.
How could so much change in the span of a few hours? Her earlier concerns about the weeds and her garden sanctuary now seemed so trivial. She didn’t think she would ever be able to see her garden as any sort of refuge again. Not when it had revealed the inner Hell that gripped Drake.
When Drake had been on the Peninsula, she had penned him a note each day he’d been gone. She’d signed every letter. Sealed them. And stuffed them into the bottom of her trunk.
Reflecting back on the contents of the notes, she cringed. In her unsent letters she’d blathered to him about the mundane. She’d gone on and on about her aggravation with her brother and lamented the boredom she felt in the country. There had never been a moment when she’d truly stopped to think about Drake’s time on the Peninsula. She hadn’t stopped to consider that Drake had been a young man who would be irrevocably changed by his experience.
That wasn’t to say she hadn’t worried over his safety or thought about what he was seeing and doing—she had, every day. But she hadn’t thought about war in the graphic sense. Instead, she’d seen it as more of a grand adventure. Why, he’d had the opportunity to travel and see different landscapes and meet exotic individuals, who were most definitely not the prim, proper members of English society.
She hadn’t been able to think about the violence and death that went with war…until she’d confronted the soldiers who’d returned to London Hospital. Still, even visiting the wounded soldiers, Drake had somehow seemed removed from those men who’d lost limbs and eyes. The physical scars they bore were very obvious. Drake however, had returned physically intact and yet, how hard it must be for him to move about Society scarred, but in ways that only he knew. How very lonely for him.
Her fingers distractedly toyed with the copy of Glenarvon in her lap, fanning the pages, and absently thinking about her unsent notes. All those years ago, she’d written letters but had been too much of a coward to send. After all, why would a man who’d sought out a war to avoid her, ever welcome any words from her?
Now she wished she’d sent them. Perhaps she would have made a fool of herself and he would have continued to view her as an empty-minded young child, but it might have brought him some comfort to receive a note from the world he’d left behind. Instead, she’d waited for him to return, so selfishly focused on what his arrival meant for her life and her happiness that she hadn’t thought about his happiness—or worse, his lack of happiness.
She’d only been capable of a girlish self-centeredness. It hadn’t been until mere hours ago that she’d truly understood Drake was no longer the boy who’d sat across from her when their betrothal documents had been signed.
She snorted. No wonder he hadn’t wanted a thing to do with her then, or even now. To Drake, she had been a child with childish interests.
The realization shamed her. She was humbled with the extent of her self-absorption.
Emmaline laid her cheek on her emerald muslin skirts, staring unseeing out the window. The fabric’s deep rich hue bore a similarity to the color of his eyes. She had never before seen eyes as haunted as Drake’s had been that morning—and with the time she’d spent in London Hospital she’d seen her fair share of misery.
A spasm wracked her heart and she took a deep, shuddery breath. She yearned to hold him close, soothe his hurt.
A warm drop landed on her hand, then two, and absently she realized she was crying. She swiped her hand across her cheeks. Emmaline cast a despondent stare up toward the sky. She squinted under the brightness of the sun’s rays that reflected off the glass panels and shot prisms of light around the parlor walls.
If today Drake had walked away from her the same man she’d come to know these many years, detached and indifferent, then it would have been easy to march into Sebastian’s office and request that he dissolve the betrothal contract.
Drake, however, was far more complicated than she’d ever known. He was scarred, hurting, and it surely explained much of his distantness. She could no sooner walk away from her lifelong commitment to him than she could cut off her own arm.
It wasn’t pity that held her to him. It was something more, something deep that defied years of bitterness and resentment. When she’d witnessed him reduced to a near shell of the man he was, she had wanted nothing more than to cradle him in her arms and take away his fear, make it her own.
“You were missed at breakfast, my dear.”
Emmaline started at the intrusion. She sat up and swiped her hand discreetly across her cheeks. “Mother,” she murmured, keeping her eyes averted.
The robin’s-egg blue seat cushion dipped under her mother’s slight weight. “I understand you had a visitor this morning.”
Emmaline again rested her ear upon the cradle of her knees.
“And that he left rather hastily and seemed to be quite upset.”
Emmaline chewed her lip, her heart tripping painfully at the horror Drake had worn blanketed across every crease, every line of his face. The horrified jade pools of his eyes were testament to the fact he’d stared down the bowels of Hell and lived to speak of it.
Except he didn’t speak of it.
Society had no idea that the carefree, elegant lord sought after by every lady, was in fact tortured, and battling demons no one could ever suspect.
“Emmaline, my dear. What happened today?”
Emmaline opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. This was her mother. The woman who had given her life, who’d cradled her close after numerous scrapes. She wanted to discuss the scene in the gardens, but even as the words were poised on the tip of her tongue, she bit them back. To air Drake’s secrets would be a betrayal. He’d spent these past years cultivating an image of himself for Society, and she’d not rob him of that—not even for her mother.
Her mother wrinkled her brow. “Emmaline?”
Emmaline settled for a meager explanation. “I believe there is more to Lord Drake than anyone truly sees.”
Her mother’s probing stare bore into Emmaline and she resisted the urge to fidget like a little girl who’d been caught sneaking away from her governess.
“Does this—” her mother paused, “more, merit your waiting for him to finally make you his wife?” Her mother continued. “I spoke to Sebastian. He only wants you to be happy. I am of like mind.”
Surely her mother wasn’t saying what she thought she was? “Mother?”
Her mother stroked the crown of her head. “You know my dear, even as I respected your father’s commitment to the betrothal contract, there has always been a part of me that has ached for all the opportunities you missed.”
Emmaline made a dismissive sound. “I haven’t missed anything.” She strove to reassure her mother, but they both knew Emmaline wasn’t being truthful.
Mother went on like Emmaline hadn’t spoken. “Oh, at the time, the arrangement between our families made tremendous sense, and I respected your father’s meticulous planning of your future. It had seemed right at the time, safe…” She paused. A sigh escaped her. “I have watched as the years slipped away, Emmaline. Watched you grow and mature and have felt a longing for you to have a real, un-entangled Season. I’ve wanted the pleasure of seeing you courted, of seeing suitors arrive with bouquets of flowers,
and penning sonnets lauding your beauty. How selfish is that of me, my dear?”
A wave of guilt swept over Emmaline for silently agreeing with her mother’s words. Nonetheless, she shook her head emphatically. “You have never been selfish.”
Mother’s throat worked, bobbing up and down.
Oh, please don’t cry. I cannot bear it when you cry.
“I have deprived you of those experiences that by rights should have been yours. And should you so desire them, I will see that they are made available to you.”
In other words—her mother would support a termination of the contract. The thought of her betrothal being severed caused Emmaline’s chest to constrict painfully in a way that made breathing difficult. “Thank you, Mother. I—I am not yet certain.”
Her mind steeped in logic told her to simply state the words her mother had given her leave to speak. Her heart, at that precise moment, called them back, froze them on the tip of her tongue.
Soft hazel eyes caressed her face. “Just say the words. You will be freed.” She pressed a kiss to Emmaline’s brow, stroking back the tendril that had escaped its chignon and dangled over her eye. “Shall I remain with you?” The strand again sprung loose.
Emmaline shook her head, brushing it back behind her ear. “I am fine, Mother.” The last thing she wanted was company.
So of course at that moment Sebastian strolled into the room.
“What’s going on here?” he drawled lazily. He dropped into the mahogany rose-velvet sofa adorned with winged lions and stretched his legs out in front of him.
God, she hated that sofa; those nasty lions were all the rage. The beastly piece of decor rather ruined her favorite room in the house. In fact, she might have sought out another room, if it weren’t for the view of the gardens.
“Are you almost ready? We’ll be late to the hospital.” she asked, desperate for escape. Scrambling to her feet, she tried to hurry him out. “Let’s go.”
“We were discussing Lord Drake,” their mother explained.
Emmaline wanted to stamp her foot. She handled them quite well on her own but when Mother and Sebastian were together, they were quite grating. “Can we do this later?”
