Chapter 39
It was utterly horrid. Mortifying! Humiliating! I cannot think that I will ever be able to speak of it should anyone dare ask.
––––––––
Their dinner arrived, allowing Fiona a few moments to gather her thoughts and composure, as Ilona joined her at a small table near the fireplace to dine. “Well, as I said, Aylesbury had been ignoring me,” she prevaricated as she dipped into her soup.
“Studiously. Yes, you said that part,” Ilona reminded, ignoring her meal with a grimace. “Then what happened?”
“Well, he had been diligently avoiding me all night, so when I saw him slip out into the gardens, I followed him,” she told her between spoonfuls.
“That was very bold.”
Fiona laughed then, lifting her napkin to her lips before tossing it aside.
“Considering all I had already done to gain his attention without much success, I thought it quite tame, really. But I was so damnedly, dementedly in love with him that I refused to accept that somewhere deep down, he didn’t feel the same.
I decided to take my one last chance. I went out there to prove to myself—perhaps to us both—that I was right, and he did love me more than he ever loved Moira.
Ah, Ilona, I was such a foolish child, wasn’t I? ”
“I don’t know. I might have done the same with Colin if he ignored me. I was quite determined to have him. Much the same as you.”
“Yes, I was. There he was in the garden. The night was warm for spring, the music drifting from the house. It was such a romantic setting, and he...he was so bloody handsome, damn him,” she recalled.
“I couldn’t help myself. I went to him..
.ha! Oh, Ilona, I ran to him. I threw myself into his arms before he could say a word about it, yea or nay. ”
“There you are, Harry!” she had exclaimed, lacing her arms around his neck. “I’ve been looking for you!”
* * *
“I assure you, I didn’t invite her to join me there.
I certainly didn’t encourage her. Bold as brass, she threw her arms around my neck without so much as a by-your-leave.
She was...well, shall we say there before I had a chance to put together any sort of defense, saying something about me looking lonely or some such nonsense.
I had enough presence of mind to try pulling her off me, but she was like a barnacle, and as I said. ..”
“You were fairly deep in your cups,” the earl supplied dryly.
“Quite so.” He nodded crisply, rocking back on his heels.
“She said something like, ‘There you are, Harry’, and naturally, I told her she should not address me so familiarly. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Abby does. Moira does.’ To which I promptly reminded her that while that might be so, Lady Glenrothes certainly did not address me so. Do you know what she said to that?”
Her brother shook his head.
He swirled his whiskey around the rim of the glass, fondly recalling her words. “I remember it quite clearly, despite my inebriated state. She said—ever so saucily, mind you—‘Ah, but then you never courted Eve, did you?’”
“I should hope not.” There was just a hint of humor reflected in Glenrothes’ eye, though.
“Impudent piece of baggage.” He chuckled into his glass as he tipped it up.
“She is that,” Glenrothes agreed, taking another long drink as well. “Then what? Surely that cannot be all?”
* * *
“Then I kissed him,” Fiona confessed. “I had tried to before, of course...”
“Fiona!”
“Humph, like you never kissed Colin before you wed!”
“Not until we were engaged,” Ilona replied primly, though her lips were twitching.
“In any case, I kissed him, and the next thing I knew, he was kissing me back. Not just a mere peck, either.”
Fiona lifted her fingers to her lips, lost in the memory.
Harry had kissed her then, her first real kiss.
Deeply. Sensually. His fingers threaded through her hair, forcing her head back so that he could devour her more thoroughly.
He had wanted her, even then, she realized.
The way he had pressed her up against that tree. ..
“Fiona?”
“The way he kissed me, as shocking as it was, was the most thrilling moment of my life,” she told her with some understatement.
In fact, she had been desperate with yearning, taken about by the force of her ardor.
Had Harry felt the same? “It was rather earth-shattering, really. I felt it to the tips of my toes. And the way he held me! His arms nearly crushed me against him. I was...”
* * *
“...simply appalled with myself,” Aylesbury confessed.
“But not so appalled that you stopped,” Glenrothes ground out tightly, his fingers whitening around his glass.
“But I did,” he insisted. “Perhaps not as promptly as I should have.”
Not promptly at all. He had been so hungry for her, ravenous after weeks and months of cumulative desire.
Months of telling her no. Of telling himself no.
He had kissed her in a manner quite at odds with her lack of experience, but she had met him kiss for kiss, urging him on until he had been ready to take her up against a tree with all the urgency that had been accruing in him.
The comprehension of what he had been about and with whom had hit him like a cold bucket of water.
He cleared his throat. “Admittedly, I should have never let it go so far. Finally, I pushed her away and told her rather rudely to return to the house.”
Like a good little girl, he had said and perhaps even patted her on the head. It was a lowering memory, how he had hurt Fiona to save himself.
“She told me then that she was in love with me.”
His throat tightened unexpectedly, and Aylesbury lifted his glass again to soothe the burning at the back of his throat with something more fiery. She had laid her heart before him, gifted him with something so precious, and he had tossed it back at her like so much garbage.
* * *
“What did he say?”
Fiona closed her eyes, recalling her desperate confession, rashly declared after he had already pushed her away from him. Scolded her like a child. Her chest clenched, reliving the heartbreak of that moment. So terrible, but nothing compared with what was to come.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No, not straight away.” Her voice constricted with the painful memory. “He just stared at me with such an appalled expression on his face...”
* * *
“I was dumbfounded by her confession, of course,” he admitted, the words nothing compared to the emotion of that night.
“Disbelieving. You have to understand that I had convinced myself that she was too young to have anything greater than an infatuation for me, that she was merely flirting with me all along. Practicing, as it were. Honing her skills. So I said...”
“She told ye that she loved ye and ye said what?”
The threat was back in Glenrothes’ voice, but Aylesbury couldn’t find it in himself to be wary any longer. “Much that is regrettable,” was all he offered, sparing them both the embarrassment of recounting what had followed.
Sparing Fiona from having even one brother possess the intimate details of how gravely he had humiliated her.
What had come next...what he had said to her!
He hated himself for those words. Words born from the desperation to make her flee before he did something he would really regret. Instead, he regretted it all.
Even more now, knowing how deeply her emotions had truly run.
* * *
She had first tried to kiss him again, to renew his unexpected passion, but Aylesbury would have nothing of it.
From there, things had gone from bad to worse.
Instead of walking away and managing to retain even a shred of her dignity, she had clung to him, confessing her love again, begging him—begging him! —to love her back.
He couldn’t possibly love her, he had scoffed.
But he had kissed her, she protested. Had kissed her like a woman...
“He pushed me away, said it was nothing. That it was just a kiss, like a hundred before. Even then, I could not leave the matter alone. I argued that it was not. That it was so special and that I loved him so dearly.” Her face flamed at the mortifying confession.
“Oh, Fiona.”
“His words became even more brutal then. He said that I was nothing more than a child, far too young for him. Far too spoiled.” She turned Harry’s ring around her ring with her thumbnail.
He’d said his marchioness would be a woman of polish and sophistication, not a child in the nursery. A spoiled little girl who knew nothing of the love of a person, only the love of a novelty. A child who needed to grow up. How could he possibly love a child like that?
Fiona swallowed hard as the old pain welled up in her once more.
“Oh dear.” Ilona patted her hand consolingly. “That must have hurt.”
She agreed with only an abrupt nod. It had been devastating and should have sent her to her knees, but oddly enough, even after having her heart trod upon so cruelly, it had only served to anger her. Her Scots temper had exploded.
* * *
There was nothing he regretted more in his life than the cold-hearted bastard he had become that night.
He’d been drunk but not drunk enough. Desperate to escape temptation, but even all that could not excuse his reprehensible words.
It would serve him right if Fiona could never forgive him.
If she could never bring herself to love him again.
“That was about it,” Aylesbury said. “She slapped me—quite hard, I might add. She’s got a hell of an arm on her—and then I walked away with her cursing me as I went.”
* * *
“...slapped him with all I was worth, instead.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Ilona gaped. “You hit him? And what did he do?”