“It’s all my fault,” she cried. She couldn’t stop the confession now. It rose like bile up her throat. “It’s all my fault. I only meant to explore the house. I always thought it was so lovely and mysterious from the outside and my chaperone was so lazy. It was so easy to slip away. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
“Hurt anybody? Who have you hurt? I don’t understand you, darling,” he said. He was trying to direct her toward a large flat rock near the water for her to sit down, but she stood firm.
“It was dark upstairs. I only saw the lamp. I didn’t see that the oil had spilt onto the table. It all happened so quickly. Suddenly the whole room was on fire, and I couldn’t get out.”
Jeffrey’s concerned expression changed slowly into something else. It was that hard, blank look he had given his mother. Almost. She couldn’t bear the scrutiny of it, and she tried to bury her face in his shirt again as tears streamed down her face.
“What room? Barbara? What fire?”
“The fire. The only fire that matters. It was me, Jeffrey. It was me.”
“No,” he said darkly. “That can’t be.”
“It is! It was me you saved from that burning building! It was me who set the fire! I didn’t mean to. I was young and stupid.”
He pushed her away from his body, grasping her shoulders and holding her at arm’s length. She cast her eyes to her feet, not bearing to look at him, to see the anger in his face.
“Look at me, Barbara,” he demanded.
She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t.”
He shook her shoulders. “Damn it, look at me, woman!”
She sobbed, forcing herself to meet his gaze. His expression broke her, and she swayed as her knees grew weak. She had never loved him more than in that very moment, when she feared that he would snatch his love away from her.
“Why did you run away?” he asked. He pleaded. She tried to remember what he had looked like that day, a young man surrounded by the wavering atmosphere of an inferno. Had his eyes looked like this? So deep and frightened?
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I was afraid.”
“You didn’t wait to see if I made it out.”
She shook her head again. “I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. I thought I would get in trouble for breaking into the house.”
Jeffrey scoffed, his chest heaving with what had to be disbelief. Or hatred.
“You left me to die,” he said. His voice was too calm for such a sentence. It seemed that the natural world around them had gone silent, as if time had stopped. “After I saved you, you didn’t even wait to see if I lived. All this time I have wondered who you were. I’ve wanted to know your name.”
“I’m sorry,” she cried, clinging to his sleeves. “Don’t you think I’m sorry? I’ve lived my whole life wondering if you survived. I wish I had been braver then, and less selfish, but I wasn’t thinking. I was just a child. I didn’t know…”
Jeffrey dropped her shoulders suddenly, stepping away from her so quickly that she swayed on her feet to regain her balance. He turned away from her, looking out at the lake.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, following him and trying to wrap her arms around him. She felt compelled to cling to him, as though if she just held him tightly enough he would not be able to get away from her.
He shrugged her off. “Please,” he said shortly. The how dare you touch me now was implied by his tone.
Barbara let her arms fall heavily to her side.
“I told you that you wouldn’t love me anymore,” she said softly.
“I need to go home,” he said, still not looking at her. “I need to think things over.”
Barbara had often heard the expression about a heart breaking, but she had never expected it to feel so real, so physical. The ache in her chest was not an emotional creation, it was a true pain. It frightened her, but she couldn’t stop it. It felt as though all of the necessary processes of living, the pulse, the breath, the creation of thoughts, had all come screeching to a halt. As he walked away from her, not even looking back at her one more time or saying goodbye, she longed to chase after him. She wanted to throw herself at his feet and cling to his legs pathetically, begging him not to leave her.
But she couldn’t move.
Haven’t you troubled him enough?
She collapsed onto the grass where she had been standing and watched him walk away. All of her hopes and dreams, her childish fantasies, her greatest desire, it all walked away from her on that mockingly sunny spring day.
She sat there for hours. Dumbfounded. She stared unseeingly out at the lake whose surface was broken occasionally by jumping fish. Her only company was the indifferent birds and insects that stirred the blades of grass around where she sat.
What will I tell Father?
She had never told anyone about that day in town, about the fire. As soon as she had gotten free from the flames, she had run. She ran back to the shop where she had abandoned her chaperone. She made an excuse about having seen someone she knew. Her heart had been racing so fast that she thought she might faint, but she had never breathed a word of the event to anyone. The shame at having caused such destruction with her wayward curiosity was too great.
How would she explain to her family that Jeffrey wasn’t going to marry her after all? Would she tell them the truth? It seemed the only option, and yet the idea of it was too gruesome to imagine.
She stood up slowly, the blood rushing to her head as she did. She closed her eyes against the dizziness. When the world felt firm beneath her feet again, she began to walk home. She was in a daze, placing one foot blindly in front of the other without a thought in her head.
“How was your walk?” her father asked over his newspaper as she passed in front of the drawing room on her way to her chambers.
“Fine, Papa,” she said.
I’ll tell him later.
First, she had to regain her sense of reality. In the privacy of her room, she stared at herself in the mirror, meaning to wash her face and refresh herself. But all she could see when she looked into the reflective glass was the face of a frightened child who had ruined a man’s life with her own selfish folly.
Chapter 32
Jeffrey wandered back to his townhouse in a daze. He couldn’t bear to look at her, to be next to her for a moment longer while this wave of emotion washed over him, but at the same time it was agony to be away from her. She had become his greatest comfort; he had come to depend on her to be there to soothe him any time he was rankled. He had never dreamed that she herself would ever be the cause of his distress. Not like this.
When he opened the door to his home, he was greeted by cool, dark silence. The servants were not expecting him back so soon, and no one noticed him come in. He stood in the foyer for a while, just gazing blankly around the house. This had once felt like a refuge for him. Now it just felt like an empty space.
He wished Gibson had not left for home early that morning. At least then he would have some distraction from the revelation that had shocked him.
Quietly, he removed his hat and coat, hanging them on the hat rack near the door. Just then, Alfred passed through the corridor.
“Oh! My Lord!” the man said, visibly taken aback. “Forgive me, I did not expect you back already.”
“It’s all right, Alfred,” he mumbled. “Will you send for tea to be brought up to my room?”
“Ah…yes but—”
“But what?”
“Your mother has sent a note while you were out. She says she will be here this afternoon. I think she meant to be here before you arrived and she should be arriving any minute now.”
Jeffrey felt himself grow cold. His mother was the very last person he wanted to see. He wanted to be alone, to wallow in his confusion and anger.
Anger?
Was he really angry at Barbara? It was hard to say. It was difficult to put a name to what he was feeling. No, he wasn’t angry. He never really had been angry at the g
irl he’d saved who had run away, as his mother had been. He’d spent his whole life defending the girl, in fact, any time his mother brought her up.
She was just a child. Just a frightened child. I’ve always said that.
So why was it so unnerving to find that girl again? Why did he want to punish her for ruining his face when he had never had that urge before?
“I’ll wait for her in the drawing room,” he said darkly, stalking into that dim room.
He couldn’t forget the time that Barbara had showed up there without invitation. He’d been so shocked by her presence, by her nearness and the way her pale skin seemed to glow in the half light of the ill-cared for room. He had been so put off balance by her. He had wanted her. He remembered how his body had ached to hold her and kiss her and lay her down on the couch.
He'd hardly known her then, and yet the attraction had been so strong.
He remembered how, when she had left that day, he had berated himself for lusting after an innocent girl who would have been disgusted had she ever known what he had been thinking about her.
Somehow, in just a few short weeks, everything had changed. She had fallen in love with him. Miraculous.
It had been too good to be true.
No. It’s not too good to be true. She does love me. And I love her.
What difference did it make that she was the girl he had rescued from the fire? Could he not instead choose to feel relieved, that finally the mystery had been solved? Could he not forget all the years of pain and humiliation at being so disfigured because of her folly?
Bitterness rose in his chest at the thought. She’d cried that it was all her fault. She didn’t even know the beginning of the scope of the pain that that fire had caused him in his life. And it was her fault, wasn’t it? She’d started the fire.
Jeffrey walked over to the large globe and spun it gently, absently. It made a quiet whooshing noise as the world turned around and around. He’d traveled so far trying to escape that fire and all that it had caused. He had thought that, by falling in love and getting married he would be moving even further away from the darkness that had consumed him in that burning house. He’d thought he might be able to close the door on that part of his life, finally, and for good.
“Why don’t you open the curtains, it’s so glum in here.”
His mother’s voice came as no surprise behind him, even though he had not noticed her entering the room.
“I like it like this,” he said.
“I was thinking, why don’t you and Barbara move into the estate when you marry. I can take this place. I can certainly do a better job of decorating it. Barbara won’t be happy in such a dingy little place and she’ll want the big house to start your family in.”
Jeffrey listened to her blankly. It was as if their fight in the carriage had never happened. That was his mother, always able to shove down any hint of real emotion under a thick layer of propriety and manners.
“You said that she looked shocked when I told the story about the fire,” Jeffrey said. He was still staring down at the globe, there was no need to look up at her.
“Let’s not talk about that anymore,” she said flippantly.
“Tell me exactly how she looked. What was her expression?”
He heard his mother moving through the room, her dress rustling as she crossed to the large chair near the window. She pushed open the heavy curtain before sitting down.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s difficult to say exactly. She looked pale. A bit sick, now that I think of it. Why?”
“It was her,” he said. Why bother hiding it from her? She would find out eventually. And he had no one else to talk to.
“What?” she asked, not in shock but as though she hadn’t heard him.
“It was Barbara. In the fire.”
He could hear her breathing. Her silence stretched out for what seemed like an age. In the passing moment he remembered all the ire that she had built up against the girl in the fire. He remembered how she had cursed her for ruining her son’s life. For ruining her life, by extension.
Jeffrey turned to look at her then, suddenly regretting saying it out loud. He couldn’t take it back now. He couldn’t protect Barbara from the bitterness that his mother would direct toward her.
“She…is the girl from the fire?” She asked.
All he could do was nod.
“I…I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s a first,” Jeffrey scoffed, crossing to the settee and collapsing onto it, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
“Jeffrey, you can’t possibly marry her,” she said.
“Why?” he asked, looking up at her. He felt desperate, as if he really thought that his mother would be the one to convince him that it would be all right to marry Barbara even after this revelation. He wanted to be convinced. He wanted to be reassured.
He felt like a child again, looking to his mother for support and comfort even while he knew that he wouldn’t find it there.
“Why can’t I? She loves me,” he repeated.
“But you can’t love her.” His mother rose to her feet, her soft slippers padding across the room anxiously before coming back. “She ruined you. She left you for dead. It’s because of her that your life has been…”
“Has been what? What has my life been?” he snapped.
“Like this! Like this townhouse! Like this room!” She was frantic now. Bright spots of pink appeared on her cheeks as she gesticulated wildly around her. “Dark and dingy and sad! You could have been so much more than this. You had everything going for you, Jeffrey. Everything! And then she ruined it, smashed it all to bits by disfiguring you. How can you even think of marrying her now?”
Jeffrey slumped further, wrapping his hands around the back of his neck and rocking himself gently.
Mother. Can’t you see that I need you to be kind now?
“What difference does it make? She loves me. She didn’t know it was me who pulled her from the flames until last night.”
“So she says!” She sat back down in her chair though she was no less agitated. “Shouldn’t it have been obvious to her? I mean, surely, she noticed the scars, for heaven’s sake. How many fires have there been in this town? She had to have an idea that it was you. Why, she probably thought it was romantic. To marry her rescuer.” She sneered, shifting her weight. “Her sacrificial lamb, more like. Imagine what marriage to a woman as selfish as that would be!”
“Why should you care?” he asked. “As long as she carries my babies. As long as our name and peerage gets passed on. Isn’t that all you’ve ever cared about?”
“It isn’t all I’ve ever cared about,” she cried. “Is it so hard to believe that I might give a thought to your happiness, Jeffrey? How will you be happy, living day in and day out with the woman who disfigured you and caused all of this pain in your life. Imagine what you might have been if not for her!”
Jeffrey groaned. He’d been a fool to hope that his mother would encourage him. As ever, she was merely a mirror of all his darkest thoughts of self-loathing. That was all she ever had been.
“Mother, I want you to leave now.” He rose up calmly. Her voice grated him, it felt so rough and familiarly unkind. He’d been fool enough to think that he had found a way to escape that damning voice.
“I won’t. Not until you swear to me that you will not marry that woman.”
“This is my home. I can kick you out. I’m giving you a chance to save yourself the embarrassment. I need to be alone.”
“Jeffrey.” She said his name like a plea, her eyes shining with…something. Pity? Desperation? “You may be blinded by her beauty right now, and you feel grateful that she says she loves you when the rest of the world has rejected you. But her looks will fade, and you will come to resent her. I am trying to save you, son. Can’t you see that?”
The rest of the world has rejected you.
Her words knocked around in his head, stinging him like a b
low all the while.
It’s all my fault.
Barbara’s words joined with his mother’s in his mind.
“I need to be alone,” he repeated.
“Promise me that you won’t marry her.”
He crossed to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, holding it open. He did his best to keep his expression steely and intimidating. He didn’t answer her, but she seemed to understand that his threat about having her forcibly removed from the townhouse was not an empty one. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and, with her chin raised, she walked out of the room and down the hall. He listened for the front door.
A Seductive Lady For The Scarred Earl (Steamy Regency Romance) Page 22
