“But he wanted you.” The old story, Kylemore thought bitterly, but that didn’t make it any more palatable.
He could imagine Verity at fifteen. Good Lord, she must be nearing thirty now and she still took his breath away. Just emerging from girlhood, she’d have been exquisite.
Exquisite and utterly defenseless.
She nodded, her silky, unbound hair sliding pleasurably against the bare skin of his sheltering arms. “Yes.” She took a shuddering breath. “I tried to stay out of John’s way once I understood what he wanted. I begged him to leave me alone. I asked the other servants for help. They did what they could. But—”
“But he was the son and heir and you were a penniless nothing.”
Kylemore wished the unknown John Norton was here so he could have claimed the privilege of beating him senseless. Ironic, considering his own behavior toward Verity.
“Yes. I was such a bumpkin then. My parents were strict Methodists, and I was as naïve a country mushroom as you could meet.” She gave a humorless laugh. “I had a foolish trust in the goodness of humanity I can’t believe possible now.”
“The bastard tricked you,” Kylemore said flatly. What she said hurt him, cast cruel reflection on his own behavior.
“He…he sent a note telling me he wanted to apologize. As if that cod-faced ninny ever lowered himself to such a thing. I was so stupid, I asked for what happened.”
Kylemore’s hold tightened around her. “No,” he said hollowly. “You didn’t ask for it.”
He meant every evil that had befallen her, not just rape from a thoughtless young scion of the gentry. Shame flowed black and acrid in his veins, and his belly churned with contrition and regret.
“He asked me to meet him one afternoon in the music room. And he…and he…”
She buried her head against him as if to hide from the old memories. Did she even realize the man who tormented her in the present held her safe against old ghosts? Did she guess how his heart contracted with pity and wonder when she turned to him in her extremity?
“He attacked you,” Kylemore said, sickened.
“Yes. I couldn’t fight him off.” Her husky voice was muffled in his chest. “I screamed for help, but no one came. He ripped at my clothes and he punched me. I fought, but he was bigger and stronger. He knocked me to the floor. As I fell, I hit my head. When I could see again, he was…he was on top of me and he was trying…he was trying—”
“He raped you.” How could he bear to hear any more?
“No,” she said unsteadily, raising her head and looking up at him. Her eyes shimmered in her pale face. “No, he didn’t rape me. Sir Eldreth Morse was a guest in the house. He heard the screaming and he came in before…”
She sucked in a shaky breath before she went on. “He pulled John away from me and refused to listen when the cur tried to blame me for what happened. It must have been clear he’d forced me—I was bleeding where he’d hit me.”
“So Eldreth rescued you only to debauch you himself,” Kylemore said austerely.
Why the hell was he so angry? He hadn’t behaved any better when faced with the temptation this one woman presented. The brutal reality was that he and John Norton were brothers under the skin. Kylemore might never have forced himself on the servants—he’d never had to—but his treatment of his mistress shone in no kindlier light.
“No, you misunderstand. Sir Eldreth helped me,” she said vehemently. “He was kind. He told Sir Charles about John. It wasn’t his fault I lost my position.”
“They dismissed you for the crime of attracting their son’s notice.”
“They believed John rather than Eldreth. They shouldn’t have. I wasn’t the first servant girl who took his fancy, and I certainly wasn’t the last—or the most unfortunate. I realize now he was a man who liked to hurt women. Sir Eldreth saved me from all that.”
“Christ,” Kylemore muttered under his breath.
Roughly, he tore himself from her arms and left the bed. The violence in his soul threatened to erupt. He needed to regain control before he shattered under the storm of emotions buffeting him. Guilt. Sorrow. Anger. Unwilling empathy for someone who had a past as tortured as his own.
Continuing to swear, he strode across the room and flung the curtains wide with a loud rattle. It was still dark outside. But not nearly so dark as the raging tumult within him.
With shaking fingers, he fastened the breeches he hadn’t even bothered to remove before he’d taken her. The air was cold on his bare shoulders as he glared out the window.
“Kylemore?” she asked in bewilderment from the bed.
“Eldreth saved you for a life of vice and degradation,” he said with difficulty, scowling through the bars at the mountains outlined against the night sky.
“It was better than going on the streets,” she returned with equal heat. “Which is where I’d have ended up. And what would have happened to Ben and Maria then?”
God help her, God help him, she was right. His hands crushed the rich brocade of the drapes. She’d begun her story to divert him from his nightmare. Little did she know that what she described created its own nightmares.
This was a confession, but a confession made to a priest cast into hell for his own vile sins.
“Sir Eldreth found me in the village. When he saw my destitution and that I had the little ones to look after, he asked me to be his mistress.”
“And you said yes,” Kylemore said bitterly.
Mixed in with his other corrosive reactions, jealousy gnawed like acid in his gut. Jealousy over the elderly baronet’s physical possession of her, but even more over the affection in her voice when she spoke of him. She still admired, respected, liked Sir Eldreth.
Had she loved him?
Why did the question even arise? Love wasn’t part of any bargain he’d ever made with Soraya. Or Verity.
“It wasn’t what I wanted,” she retorted, clearly stung, although he hadn’t implied she’d sold herself gladly. “He said he’d support Maria and Ben. He told me I could use my advantages. Or else allow myself to become their victim.”
Kylemore turned away from the view to light a candle, and only then did he look at her. She braced herself high against the pillows, and her eyes were cloudy with turmoil.
“He told you men would always want you.” He heard the cynicism in his voice.
“That’s a crude approximation,” she snapped. “He offered me shelter and security. Luxury. A world I’d never known. A chance to learn and experience and develop.”
“In return for which he took your innocence.”
Verity bestowed a worldly smile upon him that was a brief reminder that she’d once had all London at her feet. “Kylemore, you more than anyone know men don’t take care of women without asking something in return.”
He wished he could deny it. He wished he could claim he was different, but they would both recognize the lie. It was too late for him to become Verity’s white knight even if a vile miscreant like him could play that role with any conviction.
With piercing sadness, he mourned all the lost innocence, his own as much as hers. Unlucky circumstances and human evil had forced them both into adulthood long before they’d been ready.
When he didn’t speak, she shrugged and went on. The gesture was so much the notorious Soraya’s that the breath caught in his throat. “At least Eldreth kept his side of the arrangement faithfully. With exceptional generosity, in fact. He took me to Paris, he hired tutors, he created the famous courtesan. Believe me, a grand personage such as the Duke of Kylemore wouldn’t have spared the Yorkshire farm lass a moment’s notice.”
Except he would have noticed her.
Yes, she now had the gloss of sophistication. But what drew him, what had always drawn him, was some indefinable essence that was purely her. What she told him might answer his abiding curiosity, but nothing tempered his fascination. He was coming to accept nothing ever would.
He didn’t tell her this. Instead, he a
sked something that had always intrigued him. “Where did the name Soraya come from?”
Then he was sorry he’d voiced the question. A fond smile crossed her face, and his doubt hardened into certainty. She’d loved Morse.
It made him yearn to smash something. Violence might ease the tempest in his soul, a tempest he had no right to feel.
“You must know about Eldreth’s collection of naughty books. It was famous.”
“Yes.”
During his investigations into Soraya’s background, he’d ended up learning as much about her rich protector as he had about her. More, in fact. The celebrated collection of obscure erotica had befitted a man with a beautiful young mistress, a great fortune and no troublesome responsibilities to home and hearth.
“Soraya was the heroine of one of his favorite stories. He used to read it to me—she was a young captive in the seraglio who restored an aging sultan’s vitality. Eldreth started calling me Soraya as a joke shortly after we arrived in Paris, and the name persisted.”
This recollection of laughing intimacy provoked another surge of churning envy. It hinted at a relationship richer than anything Kylemore had ever achieved with her.
What did he and Verity really share? Sex, which he now had to exact from her. Suspicion. Dislike.
He stared sightlessly out the window and tried to stifle his turbulent emotions. He had so many reasons to thank her dead protector. Morse had saved her from assault and poverty. He’d recognized her qualities and fostered them. Few men would have done so much.
A vivid memory arose in his mind of the moment he’d first met Soraya.
When Sir Eldreth Morse had presented his mistress to that crowded room, Kylemore had read only gloating ownership in the baronet’s face. Now he looked back with the eyes of experience, of six years desiring that same woman. And he saw something else.
Pride. Morse had been openly proud of the perfect jewel he’d produced to dazzle society.
Without the old man’s intervention, this incomparable woman would never have moved into Kylemore’s orbit. Any sensible man would curse Morse to hell for that fact alone.
Without Morse, he would never have endured years of frustration and misery. Soraya was the only thing that had ever come close to destroying him. She was his torment and his peril.
She was his only hope of salvation.
The predawn light let him make out the bruised fullness of her lips and the wary expression in her beautiful gray eyes. Surely, she couldn’t fear he’d condemn her for what she’d done. Her dilemma had been impossible, with other people’s survival hinging on her actions. She’d had the courage to use the beauty and wit God had given her to forge a future. A brilliant future, at that.
“Where’s John Norton now?” He focused on her story’s least ambiguous element.
“Kylemore, it’s too late to call him out for what he did to a servant girl over ten years ago,” she said quietly, her gray eyes not wavering from his face.
He knew she was clever and perceptive. But even so, it surprised him she saw so much. He’d tried to hide the full extent of his reaction to what she’d told him.
“It’s never too late,” he said grimly.
He broke the wordless connection between them and turned back to the window. Without pleasure, he watched the pale light gleam on the loch. The bars had been on the window so long that he hardly noticed them.
He heard the rustle of bedclothes as she rose, then the soft pad of her feet as she came toward him. She stopped behind him and her scent drifted around him, urging him, as always, to sin.
But for once, he found the will to resist temptation.
“It’s too late for John,” she said, still in that soft voice. “He was killed in a tavern brawl in York. He fought over a wench. He hadn’t changed.”
So the bastard burned in hell and was eternally out of his reach. Kylemore tamped down his rage. Then unbelievably, he felt two slender arms encircle his waist and a sweet pressure as she leaned into his back.
Soraya had never touched him in affection, until that last betraying kiss. And Verity never wanted to touch him at all. Yet here she embraced him without coercion. He felt lost, as though he’d been snatched into some alternative world while he’d slept. How had they moved from the bruising, turbulent passions of their last coupling to this strange truce?
“You can’t defend my honor,” she murmured into his left shoulder. Her breath brushed warm upon his skin, a sensual contrast to the cool air of the new day. “Anyway, we both know I’ve had no honor to defend since I was fifteen.”
Perhaps because he meant what he said so intensely, he didn’t look at her. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the shining surface of the loch. “Verity, you have more honor than anyone I know.”
She made a stifled, unhappy sound and tried to pull away, but he caught her hands and drew her around so she faced him. “You gave up everything you believed in for the sake of the people you love. Then you were brave enough to seize the opportunities your new life offered.”
The eyes she lifted to his were bleak with self-hatred. “You haven’t always thought so highly of me.”
“Hell, Verity, I wanted you and you ran away. I was angry. I always admired you. Now I realize your true quality.”
She flinched and tried to withdraw. “Stop it.”
He kept hold of her. “I never despised you—although I tried my damnedest when you left me. You sacrificed yourself to keep your family safe, yet you can’t forgive yourself for what you did.”
This time when she pulled free, he let her go.
Chapter 15
Panting as if she’d just climbed a mountain rather than walked down one floor to the kitchen, Verity leaned both hands on the scarred old table and bent her head. For a long moment, she stood there, hunched and shaking. Her body still ached from the vigorous sex hours before, and she was light-headed with fear, fatigue and too much emotion.
Reliving her past had hurt, but it was Kylemore himself who had cut through her every defense and harrowed her heart.
She muffled a sob. She had to get away from here. She had to get away even if it killed her.
If she didn’t, she was lost.
The handsome nobleman who dispensed rubies as though they were apples was no threat. The seductive rake who drew shuddering pleasure from her body touched her senses but not her heart.
But she couldn’t fight the man who cried out in the night and clung to her as if she was his only hope.
Nor could she fight the revelation that she and the duke weren’t so very different after all. A sneaking empathy for him had always undermined the emotional distance she struggled to maintain. Now to her wrenching sorrow, she knew why.
When faced with an impossible choice, she’d created Soraya. In a similar fashion and for similar reasons, the terrors of the duke’s childhood had forced him to become Cold Kylemore. The hairs rose on the back of her neck when she recalled how his long-dead father revisited his dreams.
Soraya and Cold Kylemore. Both necessary masquerades. Both requiring deception and lies. Both requiring a desperate, silent courage to keep the curious, spiteful world at bay.
His soul was dark and twisted and tormented.
His soul was full of evil and pain and regret.
His soul was twin to hers.
No, she wouldn’t let it be so. She was a common strumpet. He counted among the kingdom’s most powerful men. Nothing linked them other than a past liaison and his endless thirst for revenge.
The light brightened as day advanced. She lifted her head and wildly looked around the empty room. This cursed place made her doubt herself. If ever—please, God, let it be so!—she made it back to Ben, she’d forget this insanity. The isolation made her question what she’d always known was true.
The Duke of Kylemore was a self-centered autocrat. Shallow, cruel, thoughtless.
She was a whore who raised her skirts for any man who paid her. Her heart was ice.
Her han
d bunched into a fist and she pounded the table, beating those harsh facts into her brain. Pain throbbed up her arm and dragged her back to the present.
She sucked in a deep breath and looked up. Summer dawn filtered through the high windows to reveal the astonishing truth that she was completely alone.
No Hamish Macleish. No giants. Not even the little giggling maids, Morag and Kirsty, who, she’d worked out, were Hamish’s nieces. The duke was in bed upstairs, almost certainly sleeping after his long, disturbed night.
This empty kitchen presented a chance to escape. If she ran away, no one would seek her for hours. Her heart started to gallop with nervous excitement and fear.
She didn’t have long. The servants started work early. With full day, the walls of her captivity would close around her.
Meanwhile, she stood in the nightdress she’d borrowed from Morag. She was desperate, but she wasn’t a fool—she needed clothing and supplies if she hoped to survive the mountains.
A quick search of the kitchen unearthed a basket of clean laundry and her half boots, polished and ready. Swiftly, she flung off her nightrail and tugged on one of Kate Macleish’s kirtles. It was worn and far too large, but it was warm.
Thick stockings. And a coat—Hamish’s, she suspected—hanging from a hook by the door. She plaited her heavy hair into a long braid and tied it with a scrap of rag.
A check of the pantry turned up a loaf of bread, some cheese and a few late apricots, a fruit for which the duke had a particular fondness. She filled a flask with water and tied her bounty in a cloth.
If heaven had been kind, a couple of coins would have been scattered on the bench, but thrifty Highland servants didn’t leave money lying about.
Oh, what she’d give for just one of the gorgeous baubles Soraya had amassed in her long and scandalous career. But she’d sold her jewelry when she’d left Kensington and used the money to fund her futile dreams of freedom.
Perhaps not so futile after all, she thought on a rising tide of optimism.
Her plan was shaky. She recognized this even as she let herself out of the house. The weather could turn, she could get lost, aid mightn’t materialize.
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