The earl’s voice was a thready murmur. “What I did was wicked, I know. How many times in the past thirty years have I told myself that?” He wheezed a moment. “But I thought you would live, damn you. You were not supposed to die so young. I thought, Once the old earl dies, Leonard will be earl for his lifetime, but after Leonard dies, any son of mine will be earl. That is fair.”
Swanlea began nodding as if agreeing with himself and his twisted thoughts. “I told myself, he stole Georgina from me, so our families should share the title. By the time Leonard dies, his son will be well situated. What will he need with a title?”
“But he was not well situated!” Griff hissed. “He was left with no money, a mound of debts, and a mother to support!”
“I know!” The earl gasped for breath a moment, then went on. “I tried to send Georgina money, but she would not take it.”
“Liar!”
“ ’Tis true! You know it is true! And there was little enough to send. What more could I have done, Leonard? By then, I had my own wife and daughters. To admit I had stolen the title would have meant ruin for my family. And you had a son, for God’s sake!” He wheezed, his body shaking. “He could make his own fortune, and he did! He made you proud. I only had daughters, and I could not be sure of their future.”
“You didn’t need a son, damn you! You were a healthy man. You could have made your fortune yourself. But you were too cowardly for that. You preferred to let a poor twelve-year-old boy suffer instead.”
The bitterness of remembered pain laced all his words. “You stood by and watched while the other boys called him ‘bastard’ unjustly. You did nothing when he was forced to consort with smugglers and thieves to stay out of debt. And you sat in your comfortable estate ignoring him while he withstood the contempt of men who by rights were his equals, because that was what it took for him to gain his success!”
“But he did succeed! That boy is richer than I have ever been!” The fervent protest sent the earl into a fit of coughing, which Griff watched with a strange mixture of anger and concern. He wanted to blot out the earl’s words, ignore them, belittle them. Yet he couldn’t.
Because despite all Griff had endured, he’d indeed achieved success, so much that the earl had been forced to come to him for help. It was hard to hate a man whose fortunes had fallen so far that he had to ask aid from the very person he’d wronged. A man who was dying a slow, painful death.
Yet it was no more than the man deserved. After all, Griff wasn’t the only person the earl had wronged. “What about Georgina?” Griff asked cuttingly when the earl’s coughing subsided. “If you cared for her, how could you have let her suffer? How could you have had me…my son proclaimed a bastard when it brought her such heartache?”
A pain too deep to be merely physical spasmed over the earl’s face. “I was young and foolish. I believe I did want her to suffer some of my torment. She chose you over me because you would be earl. I had few prospects, but until you came, she planned to marry me. You know she did. She still loved me on the day you married. She told me.”
Rage exploded through Griff. “You lie, old man!” He strode into the light with fists clenched. “You lie! My mother never loved you! Never!”
The earl gaped at him, then paled to a sickening white. Slowly, he surveyed the room as if to catch his bearings, his breath coming in sharp, hoarse gasps. Then he lifted a shaky finger to point at Griff. “Y-You’re not Leonard! You’re flesh and blood! Who are you? Tell me who you are, blast it!”
A weary female voice answered from behind Griff. “He’s Leonard’s son, Papa—and he’s very much flesh and blood.”
No! Griff thought, the blood draining from his face. No, she can’t have heard!
Slowly he turned to find Rosalind standing in the doorway, but she wouldn’t look at him. She stared past him to her father, her soft features trembling with pain.
Oh, God, how much had she heard? How much? His stomach roiled.
As she entered, she clutched an iron box to her chest. She’d obviously come from her bath, for she wore a less formal gown, and her pinned-up hair glistened. It was like looking at heaven from the ferry to hell.
Then she swung her gaze to his, and the clear betrayal in her eyes told him she’d heard far too much. It pierced him to the center of his heart.
“This, Papa, is your cousin,” she went on. “Marsden Griffith Knighton. I’m afraid this is the real Mr. Knighton.”
Chapter 19
Though those that are betrayed
Do feel the treason sharply,
yet the traitor Stands in worse case of woe.
William Shakespeare, English playwright, Cymbeline
Why did I have to be right? Rosalind thought. Why couldn’t it all have been just as Griff said—a simple, foolish masquerade that he regretted now that he wanted to marry her?
Of course, he didn’t really want to marry her, did he? He wanted something else. And having heard most of his conversation with Papa, she knew he had every right to it.
She dearly wished she hadn’t come to Papa’s bedchamber, or stayed when she’d heard Griff’s voice. Ignorance would have been such bliss. Yet once she’d caught the drift of the conversation, she couldn’t have left it her life depended on it.
On legs that threatened to give way beneath her, she walked to her father’s bed.
“How long have you…been standing there?” Griff asked hoarsely.
She cut her gaze to him only long enough to see the bloodless cast to his features that nearly mirrored her father’s. “Since Papa started talking about ‘making it right.’”
Then she faced Papa, who was scrutinizing Griff’s features in bewilderment. Hard to believe her ill father could once have been so heartless. He’d always been a gruff, cantankerous old fool, but she’d never thought him cruel. Yet she knew his tale was true, for it made sense out of all the other odd pieces of this bad play.
Now she knew why Griff had responded so angrily whenever she’d called him bastard. Now she knew why he’d even bothered to indulge her father’s request, why he’d masqueraded, and what he’d been looking for.
Icy fingers gripped her heart. And yes, now she knew why he wanted to marry a great, ungainly spinster like her.
She approached the bed before her tears could spill out and betray her. “Papa, give me the key to the strongbox.”
His gaze swung to her. “Knighton said he would marry you.” He coughed fitfully, then shook his head. “But…but it was that other Knighton—the blond one.”
“Rosalind is marrying me,” Griff bit out. “Not ‘the blond one.’ And I am Knighton, as your daughter says.”
“You needn’t keep speaking of marriage, Griff,” she whispered, not daring to look at him. “You’ll have what you want. I’m sure it’s in this box.” She glared at her father. “It’s in here, isn’t it? Give me the key. Now!”
“Rosalind, darling—” Griff began.
“Please don’t,” she begged, his endearment torturing her. “This is difficult enough as it is. Don’t make it worse by pretending.” As she tried not to cry, she tightened her arms about the strongbox, not caring how the sharp corners snagged her gown. Turning her face away, she dashed a few wayward tears from her face. She wouldn’t fall apart in front of him. Blast it, she wouldn’t!
“Pretending?” Griff echoed. “Pretending what? That I want to marry you? Damnation, that’s no pretense!”
She shook her head wildly. “Don’t you understand? You can have the certificate! You needn’t marry me for it. I’ll give it to you. It belongs to you. If I’d known Papa was offering it to induce you to marry one of us…if he’d told me what was in here when he asked me to keep the strongbox safe…”
Tears choked her, pooling in her throat. She cleared it as best she could, then stalked up to the bed and glowered down at her father. “Give me the bloody key, Papa!”
Her father blinked, but meekly reached beneath his nightshirt and withdrew a thin chain from which hung a key. She
didn’t even attempt disentangling the chain. She snapped it with a jerk, then took the key and shoved it into the lock of the strongbox. Her fingers shook so badly it took her a second to get it open.
In that second Griff came to her side and laid his hand on her arm. “Please, darling, leave it be. I don’t care about it right now.”
“Don’t care about it?” She twisted away from him, clutching the unlocked box to her chest as if it alone could keep her afloat in this sea of deceit. She met his stricken gaze with her own. “Don’t say you don’t care about it, Griff Knighton, because you lie! You cared enough to come here and switch places with your man of affairs. To spend every waking hour searching the house. And when I was suspicious of your activities, you cared enough to use every possible trick to rid yourself of me.” Even seduction, she thought, though she didn’t dare say it in front of Papa.
Her voice dropped to an anguished whisper. “And when you finally realized you’d never find it on your own, you cared enough about it to accept Papa’s terms and ask one of the pathetic Swanlea Spinsters to marry you. So don’t tell me you don’t care about it, because you lie!”
“For the love of God, surely you don’t believe—”
“Here it is!” she cried, yanking open the box. She pulled out a sheaf of papers and flipped through them until she found the odd-looking one from Gretna Green. Tossing the rest of it aside—box, papers, and all—she strode up to Griff with the only one that mattered. “Here it is,” she repeated, waving it madly at him. “It’s yours. Take it! Then leave, blast you!”
“I’m not leaving!” He ignored the paper. “Not without you!”
“He don’t have to leave, gel,” her father put in, “ ’specially if he takes that paper. Once he’s got that, it isn’t our estate anymore. Don’t you understand? He’s the rightful earl. He’ll take that before the College of Heralds and the House of Lords, and the title and this place will be his.”
“I understand that perfectly, Papa.” She shoved the certificate against Griff’s chest. “But unlike you, I don’t care. Because it was his from the beginning. You just stole it from him for a time.”
Though shame flushed her father’s features, he didn’t give up. “All the same, I must consider you gels. If he marries one of you, he’ll have reason to wait until I die. If he don’t marry one of you and he’s got that in his hands, he’ll drag me into court. We’ll all be shamed publicly, and that’ll be the end of any future for you three.”
An ugly realization made her belly churn. She stared at Griff incredulously. “Is that what you’d planned to do with it if you’d found it during your search? Is it?”
Griff hesitated just long enough for her to read the truth in his stark features.
“You bloody, heartless ass,” she hissed. Dropping the certificate on the floor at his feet, she whirled toward the door.
He caught her by the arm and jerked her back. “Damn it, I would never leave any of you destitute. I’d already decided to provide for you. I have no quarrel with the rest of you, only him. Ask Daniel, if you don’t believe me. But I need that proof of my legitimacy, and yes, I intended to find it on my own. It’s exactly as I said this afternoon—when I came here, I didn’t plan to take a wife.”
“Until you were forced into it because you couldn’t find the blasted thing!”
“No! I may have come here with other intentions, but that changed. I proposed to you because I want you as my wife!” He swung her around to face him, gripping her arms painfully tight. “You can’t let this keep you from marrying me, damn you!”
“Listen to Knighton,” her father put in shakily from his bed. “You know your duty to your family, gel.”
When she stiffened, Griff shot her father a black look. “Shut up, old man! Can’t you see you’re making it worse? Don’t you know anything about your daughter?”
With a low oath, he faced her again. The candlelight left most of his features in shadow, but that seemed appropriate since the scoundrel had left his entire character in shadow until now. “Listen to me, darling. If you heard our entire discussion, then you heard me describe you as an angel to your father. You did, didn’t you?”
Bits and pieces of the conversation trickled into her head. Yes, she’d heard it, but reeling from all the other revelations, she hadn’t paid it much heed.
When she said nothing, he went on. “Does a man say that about a woman he’s being forced to marry? Don’t you think if I’d wanted to marry you only because of the certificate, I’d have chosen the daughter who was most willing to marry, the one easiest to convince? Don’t you think I’d have chosen Juliet if that’s all that mattered to me?”
“You knew I’d never let Juliet marry you,” she retorted hotly. “And Helena wouldn’t marry you or anybody else, so that left only me.”
“By God, woman, must you always be so damned stubborn?”
“Yes! That’s what I am! I thought you knew it when you proposed. I even thought…maybe you liked it a little.”
“I did! I do! I like that and a score of other things about you.” Shooting her father a furtive glance, he drew her close and dropped his voice. “I thought I made it very clear this afternoon what I felt for you.” His heated gaze fixed on her lips. “Do you think my lovemaking was all a role? That I could pretend to desire a woman, pretend to be jealous over her when I felt nothing at all?”
“Why not? You pretended to be a highwayman’s son, a man of affairs, a former smuggler. You pretended to be half-Irish. If you hadn’t quoted so much bloody Shakespeare, I would have thought you’d pretended to know your Shakespeare. Just now you even pretended to be a ghost.” As all his lies hit her anew, she struggled to draw the breath to continue. “And…and the first time we kissed, it was only a pretense. You admitted as much.”
“I admitted that it began as a pretense. It certainly didn’t end as one.” He added in a whisper, “And making love to you this afternoon was the most wonderful experience of my entire life.”
She felt herself weakening. No, she wouldn’t let him do this to her! “Griff, I don’t know why you persist in this farce! You have the document—I give it to you freely. I understand why you did it, truly I do. I heard what Papa did to you.” Tears flooded her eyes. Dear God, how much Griff had suffered because of Papa.
“It was a terrible, awful thing to do to a child,” she went on. “As you told him, you have every right to hate him, to wish to ruin him. I don’t blame you for it. So there’s no need for you to marry me out of guilt or anything else. Just take the paper and let me be!”
“I’ll never let you be, do you hear? As for guilt, let me disabuse you of the notion that anything so selfless as guilt drives me to marry you. I’m being entirely selfish. I want you. I intend to have you. You won’t talk me out of marrying you.”
She read the determination in his face with shock. Dear God, could he truly wish to marry her? But why? He’d still given her no plausible reason other than desire. Yet he did seem in earnest.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t the same man she’d thought she was marrying. “What if I don’t want to marry you anymore?”
He looked as stunned as if someone had just struck his thick head with a hammer.
She tilted up her chin proudly. “I see you find it surprising that a spinster with no future would refuse an offer of marriage from a wealthy and handsome young heir to a title. Most people would think I’m daft.” Wrenching her arms from his grasp, she glared at him. “But then I am a bit daft, as you know, and I don’t really care what they think.” She ignored her father’s groan. “I’ve no desire to marry a man I understand so little, whose aims in life are so opposed to my own.”
Rage twisted his features into an ugly mask. “How am I any different now than I was this afternoon? You seemed perfectly happy to marry me then.”
“That was before I knew that your elaborate masquerade was designed to wreak vengeance on Papa by publicly shaming him as well as me and my sisters.”
&nbs
p; “Vengeance!” He whirled away from her. “You and Daniel with your narrow minds! This is not about vengeance!”
“Oh? Then what is it about? Why else would you have set out to steal that certificate and use it to strip Papa of his title? You have a fortune, a thriving company. What do you need with a title?”
For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer, for he stared away, his neck strained so taut she fancied she saw the pulse throb in it. “I have a thriving company, yes.” He fixed her with a defiant look. “But how long would it thrive if I didn’t seek to improve it and find it new markets? Next year a delegation is going to China to establish trade outside the confines of the East India Company. Every trading company in England wants a seat on that delegation, including me. As a bastard with a scandalous past, I have little chance of being considered. But as an earl in the House of Lords—”
Her heart sank. “Of course. You’d be in the perfect position politically to be included. That’s why you must establish your legitimacy as soon as possible, isn’t it? You must act before the decisions are made. I understand.”
She blinked back fresh tears. Yes, she understood only too well. Daniel had said Knighton Trading was everything to Griff, and now she realized just how true that was.
“It’s simply a practical matter, a business matter,” he explained in that terribly precise tone he always used when speaking of his unscrupulous methods on behalf of his company. “If I could have found another way to achieve it, I would have, but I couldn’t. I will, however, regain the title as discreetly as possible in deference to your family.”
“So when you proposed to me this afternoon, you still intended to use that certificate as soon as you got your hands on it?” When he didn’t answer, she took that for a yes. “What did you plan to do—marry me and then go drag my ill father to the House of Lords so you could publicly proclaim him the worst sort of schemer? I’ll admit he deserves it, but he’s my father, after all. Did you think I would champion you?”
Averting his gaze from her, he yanked restlessly on his cravat. She hoped the blasted thing was choking him.
A Dangerous Love Page 26
