by Eva Devon
Unyielding, she met his gaze and held firm in his embrace. “Your response suggests that I’ve hit quite the nerve.”
He blinked. She was so certain. So determined. All his life, he’d taken on the role of the unforgivable son. Of the one who’d broken his father’s heart but underneath the surface there had always been the small questioning voice, the voice of a little boy desperately wondering why his father hated him so. That voice had whispered in the cold lonely nights, before and after the nightmares of his brother’s cold blue body. Why?
“You took the blame to save your father.”
“I didn’t save him,” he choked out. “I broke his heart. My father hated me. He knew what I was and I proved it time and again.”
She stared at him, unflinching. “You filled the role he needed you to.”
“Now, that is complete shite.” Something was happening. Something he didn’t understand and he had to stop her talking. Her words were not at all the ones he’d expected to hear and that fear, an emotion he wasn’t familiar with, snaked up through his innards, threatening to strangle him. “And I think I’ve listened to your mad ramblings long enough.”
Sadness filled her eyes and she shook her head. “Too close to the truth, that’s why you’re afraid again.”
He tightened his grip, focusing on the pulsing heat of her body mere inches from his, hating the sympathy he saw in her. He did not want her to feel sorry for him. “I am not afraid.”
“Then why are you driving me away?” she demanded.
“Because I don’t love you,” he snapped. “You are the last woman I could ever want. You are bookish, know nothing of making love, and you dress like a woman would if she could be a man.”
All that bravado, that beautiful confidence she had, crumpled under his words. Her shoulders hunched. “I thought better of you,” she whispered.
“I told you,” he said, his throat tightening, any hopes he’d fantasized over burning to a cinder. “This is who I am.”
“This is who you have to be. Who you’ve chosen to be,” she whispered.
“And why do I have to be,” he demanded. “Why don’t you think I want this?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re one and the same.” Her face paled, tinged with sadness.
“But if you didn’t let your brother drown, who did?”
“Cordelia. . . There was no one else there that day. There was no one else—”
“Your father.”
He gaped at her. “That’s—”
“Ridiculous? I don’t think it is. Your brother was your father’s responsibility. Not yours. He hated you so he wouldn’t have to hate himself, Jack. He was a grown man who blamed a little boy because he couldn’t bear it.”
Jack shoved her from him. Pain cut across his heart so deep he couldn’t draw breath. “Cease.”
“Why? Because that hurt?” she challenged. “I thought you hadn’t any heart.”
“You shouldn’t even know any of this,” he rushed, desperate to stop this conversation before it could go further. “You aren’t one of us.”
Tears shone in her eyes. “No. I am not. I never have been, even though when I was a girl, I desperately wanted to be. I kept waiting, hoping that someone would come to sweep me away from my life. To make everything stop that I couldn’t bear. But you never did.”
“I am no knight in shining armor, Cordelia.”
“No. You are not. And I am no lady fair. So stop insisting you have no heart or that I am a delusional child. We are neither of us these things.”
He did have a heart. A cursed one. One that was breaking with every word she spoke. With every nail of a word that slammed him harder into his coffin of loneliness. She wanted so badly something from him he could never give. If she looked only at his actions, he was a cad. The worst sort of selfish men. He had left her to rot. He hadn’t given a damn about her happiness and now that’s all he did care for and it was why he had to leave. Drawing in a slow breath, he lifted his palm to her cheek and gently pressed his lips to hers.
The touch of their mouths nearly undid him. If only he was not the man he was, he would wrap his arms around her and never let her go. But he was not the man she envisioned, so he pulled back from the kiss, his heart turning to stone as he did.
She smiled, clearly certain she had convinced him.
As she reached out, her beautiful fingers, fingers hardened from work and use, toward him, he strode around her. Without looking back, he opened the door and walked out into the night. Away from the only happiness he had ever known.
Chapter 24
Cordelia stared at the door. The painted blue panel still shook on its hinges, Jack had slammed it so hard. This couldn’t possibly be happening, could it? All the air vanished out of her lungs and her eyes burned. The colors in the room suddenly burned brighter, the cream of the walls blindingly white in the candle glow and the shade of the blue door vibrated. Even her heart beat with such an explosion of sound she was sure that Jack, now far out into the night, would be able to hear it. Surely, he would turn back, hearing that broken sound?
What had she done?
She’d been honest that’s what she’d done. She’d told him the truth. . . Except. . . Except she’d had the courage to tell him every little thing she’d seen about him and his father but she’d not had the bravery to admit she loved him. Him. In all his perfectly broken glory. She loved the man who had been betrayed by his family and his own heart.
A cry, loud and deeply unpleasant echoed through the room. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Good god, could she have made such a sound. Had it been her? It couldn’t have been.
But as her fingers slammed down over her lips, her ribcage began to shake with uncontrollable sobs. Sobs she had kept buried deep within her her entire life. They rolled through her, one after the other. Wave after wave of grief falling upon her.
Slowly, she lowered herself to the floor, her knees thunking on the wood floor. Never, in her recollection, could she recall a time when a solution had not immediately made itself clear to her. But struggle though she may through the tears making a complete mess of her face, she couldn’t think of one.
She’d not even had a week with him. Not one. Just a few days. And now he was gone.
“Madam?”
Cordy whipped towards the voice and spotted Harris peeping out from the hallway, his shoulders bent and a slightly embarrassed expression folding his brow into a myriad of wrinkles. She dashed her hand over her eyes, and then shockingly her nose.
“You look all of five years old my lady.”
“Do I?” she asked, her voice completely unrecognizable to her own ears.
“You mustn’t let him do this.”
She let out a shuddering sigh, which made her feel surprisingly better. “Do what, Harris?”
“Run from love, Your Grace.”
Cordy contemplated the short little man, wondering if perhaps this wasn’t another delusion the fellow had, rather like his certainty that Boney was still about, ready to take England by storm. “I rather think you’re mistaken.”
“Am I? I’ve known the lad for over a decade. Can you say the same?”
“Hmm. I cannot,” she conceded.
He nodded, satisfied. “You can’t give up on him so easily.”
“Easily?” She groaned, her own heart aching in a way she’d never known. “That was not easy, Harris. I’ve not cried in my life that I can recall.”
The older man tsked. “And isn’t that a tragedy in itself.”
She sniffed, tempted to wipe her nose with her sleeve but she wasn’t that far gone. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, it seems to me you both need love.”
“I suppose, but Harris,” she swallowed, loathing to admit her deepest fear. “I don’t think he loves me at all.”
“But you love him?”
She bit down on the inside of her lower lip, horrified that she was about to admit such a thing at all, let alone to a man she’d known
about three days. “Yes. Yes I do.”
“And I bet when things get tough down there in Africa you let your father handle it or mayhap your brothers.”
Her jaw dropped at outrageous assumption. “The very idea—”
Harris blinked, wide eyed. “You don’t run when things are a bit uncomfortable then, pretty lass like you?”
“I’ll have you know, that I pitch in with the best of them. Why just last winter I—” She stopped herself and a slow grin suddenly defying the remnants of her tears. “I see.”
He nodded. “I knew you were a quick one. Just imagine if we’d given up on the continent in those first years of the war. Looked like we were going to be beaten and beaten good, but old Wellington, he never shirked. He didn’t give up.”
“Are you comparing me to Wellington?” She had a feeling the fellow couldn’t give her a higher compliment.
“You love Jack don’t you?”
She blinked. It was astonishing but she knew the truth without a doubt. “Yes.”
Harris nodded, clearly pleased with her honesty. “It would take a general to survive his family.”
“But. . .” Her throat tightened. “He doesn’t want me.”
Harris rolled his eyes, crossed the room and offered his cracked and creased old hand. “Oh Aye, he doesn’t want you at all.”
She studied that gentle, offered palm, before taking it. He hoisted her to her feet and then, confident as you please, Harris headed into the drawing room. The clink of glasses drifted towards her, her feet still rooted in her own little puddle of most unbecoming tears.
“Come on then,” Harris called. “You’ll be in need of a drink.”
A spot of brandy did sound most appealing and she truly could use a medicinal restorative. . .Blast. If she would just admit it, she wanted to grab a bottle and do as Kathryn would have suggested; drink the lot.
Sighing, she followed Harris into the small room she’d spent next to no time in.
Harris held out a glass, shockingly full.
She took it and gulped down a swallow of whiskey, ready to fortify herself for the forthcoming battle as no doubt Harris would proclaim it.
“Flowery lasses who give up and don’t make a fuss, don’t drink whiskey.”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked before she took another healthy gulp.
He arched a shaggy brow. “I can see what’s turning around in your head, like I can see a storm comin’ in off the sea.”
“Can you indeed?” She gave him a tired smile.
“You’re thinking, how could such a staunch and no nonsense about her girl, be felled by love.”
“Well, yes. That was rather what I was thinking as I made a wet blanket of myself.”
Harris took a drink, handling the snifter with a good deal of ease, drinking the bandy as if he were born to it. “Look here, His Grace needs a special kind of love.”
“I’m listening.”
“He was the younger son of a duke, a duke what couldn’t keep his pants on, and got his jollies from being the most superior man in the room, if you get my meaning.”
“I think I do.”
“Well, Jack never lived it down. Not with his da. And it’s going to take more than a few words to bolster him up and make him see that he needs you.”
She gaped. “Needs me?”
“Aye, needs you,” Harris proclaimed. “I’ve not seen him come alive once in the years I’ve known him, not even on the battle field. He were just going through the motions. But these last days, he’s been alive. Do you understand that, my lady? You’ve woken him up and he’s trying to go back to sleep because its what he knows.”
She took another big drink and nodded, swishing the brandy about her mouth, savoring the delightful burn. “I see. But how do I go about such thing.”
“Hie yourself to London. Make a splash. Make it impossible for him to not encounter you. Make him see he can’t bear for anyone else to have you. That you belong to him.”
Belong to him.
The very words sent a shiver of anticipation down her spine. She did belong to him. She did and despite her fear that Jack would give her the cut or laugh at her attempts to win him, she was going to try.
Cordy raised her glass to Harris. “Cheers and thank you.”
“Not at all, my lady. You just needed to see it.”
Oh, she saw it now. Those silly tears were gone now, replaced by a clarity bestowed on her by an old soldier. For after all, was she not a woman who pursued what she desired at all cost? Indeed she was. And now it was time for battle. A thought that couldn’t cheer her more. After all, nothing was going to stand in her way. Not when love was so close to hand.
Chapter 25
One month later
The Rapier Club
Evening
London
It had never occurred to Jack that his wife would play dirty. She’d seemed so honorable, so sporting, so above it all. He’d been so mistaken.
A gorgon. He’d married a merciless gorgon who wouldn’t accept what was best for her. And as a result, Jack Eversleigh, The Duke of Hunt was cowering. . . Yes, cowering in his brother’s rapier club because it was the one place she could not track him down.
The blasted woman was a bloodhound. She’d followed him from ball to ball, party to party. She’d attempted to meet him on morning rides and had even had the gall to try to intercept him on the way to his club. The determination was terrifying and he’d only narrowly avoided being engaged in conversation by a hair’s breadth.
His family was also in cahoots. His sister, his mother, and god help them all his grandmother, were all attempting to get him into the same room as his wife and he was having none of it.
It didn’t matter that he longed, yes longed, to speak with her. To hold her in his arms and to allow himself to have her.
Jack cradled the bottle of brandy in his arm, like a long lost child and desperately attempted to focus on the two men fencing. One, his brother, and two. . . A total unknown, but a fellow that was keeping up with Charles’ flying blade with admirable aplomb. Perhaps someone out there in the world was indeed Charles’ match for swords.
At that moment, the two men, sweating, but neither out of breath bowed, conceded the match a draw.
Charles strode over, the younger man in toe. The fellow was quite big really. Not quite as big as Charles, but he was a pup. In a few years, the black haired grey eyed man would no doubt be a veritable giant. “Meet your match?” Jack drawled.
“Possibly,” said Charles, as complimentary as he could become. He turned to his opponent. “Have you met my brother?”
“I’ve not even officially met you, sir. Someone simply pointed at you and said you were the best fight in the club.”
Charles smiled dryly. “So I am. . . Until now. I finally have someone to duel with, thank god.”
Jack lifted the crystal decanter. “Care for a drink?”
The young man smiled. “Don’t mind if I do.”
He was awfully familiar this pup. Jack narrowed his eyes, his brain slightly fuzzy, as he attempted to discern where he might have set eyes upon him.
Charles clapped the young man on the back. “Shall we proceed to one of the common rooms?”
Jack hauled himself up from the floor, staggered slightly and led the way, the two behind him speaking of ripostes and masters that his befogged mind couldn’t discern. Perhaps another drink would fill the hole in his heart? Heart. What nonsense. When had he started thinking so morosely?
Light poured in from the tall windows overlooking St. James Park and Jack plunked himself down in a leather chair, studded manfully with brass tacks. The entire rectangular gathering place was a refuge of all that was manful, point in fact.
Dark wood, green lamps, heavy furniture, and dead animals graced the walls. A woman would turn tail and run. Its why he’d chosen Charles’ club, he’d known there was no way Cordelia could inveigle herself into his brother’s sanctum.
And he co
uldn’t see her.
Charles and friend sat with a good deal more composure but before either could truly settle back, a butler had appeared out of nowhere, as all Charles’s staff did, immediately bringing two more glasses. The older man gave one look to the dwindling amber liquid sloshing around in Jack’s decanter, turned on his heel and marched off, no doubt to rectify the sin of depletion.
Charles cocked his head to the side and studied the younger man. “Now, why have we never met?”
“I’m new to London. Just arrived actually.”
“Indeed,” Charles drawled. “A virgin?”
The young man shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Hardly.”
“Good then.” Charles clapped the boy on the shoulder. “You’ll come out with us tonight. If you’re as good with your sword as you are with a blade my ladies will love you.”
Jack caught himself about to say that he was going nowhere. That he was hunkering down until he’d heard confirmed reports that Cordelia had taken off for parts unknown. He couldn’t risk seeing her again. He’d crack if he did. But before he could make such a declaration, the pup had leaned forward, excitement bridling his muscled frame.
“Your ladies?” the stranger asked.
Jack eyed his drink. Would it be bad form to continue drinking the dregs of the bottle whilst supplies were being foraged for? “Charles has a string of women at his command. Rather like a harem.”
“Harems aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” the young man said, holding out his glass.
Realizing it would be far better if he could get the young stallion sozzled, he poured the remnants of his decanter into the outstretched glass. Drinking alone really was the devil.
Charles leaned back in his chair, his body casual, but there was an undeniable spark of interest in his gaze. “And you know this first hand.”
A devilish smile confirmed that indeed their young visitor did have first hand knowledge.
