Chapter Twenty-Six #2
She inclined her head. “I know. I just wanted to.” She gazed into his eyes. Hers were the deepest blue he’d ever seen. Like cornflowers or the sea in summer. He could drown in them if he wasn’t careful.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you for staying with me.”
She smiled. “It seemed the only way for both of us to get a good night’s sleep.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
She leaned forward and for a moment her nightgown and peignoir gaped, giving him a tantalizing view of her soft white breasts. His arousal threatened to raise its head again and he had to fight to think of something other than caressing those breasts. At least he was sitting down and in a banyan.
She smiled, a compassionate, gentle smile. “Tell me what it is you dream about that disturbs you so much.”
He’d been fearing that question. What to say? He could confess. She was his wife and could never be caused to testify against him. Why not tell her? She seemed to have taken his killing of Teesdale in her stride, after all.
“I dream of the day my father died.”
Her eyes widened. “Go on.”
He swallowed. Where to begin? “The story doesn’t start there, however.”
“Where does it start?”
“You’ll keep my secret?”
“Of course I will. You have no need to ask.”
“Then I’ll tell you.”
Verity caught his hands in hers. How very sad he looked.
“Tell me what it is that makes you cry out in the night like that.” She wanted to wrap her arms around him and tell him everything would be all right, but she didn’t.
He was very much the hurting little boy and nothing like the Black Earl at all.
He began with his meeting and friendship with Mary, and how their relationship had transformed to become that of lovers. She nodded him on, unshocked.
“Unfortunately for me, my father had a penchant for pretty housemaids. Pretty everything, in fact. He wasn’t bothered by a woman’s status in life, nor whether she was married, widowed, or a maiden.
He turned his attentions to Mary.” He looked down at his hands, almost as though he couldn’t meet her eyes.
“He was an enthusiastic exponent of what could be called droit de seigneur.”
“Oh no.” She could see what was coming. A stolen love. A boy who couldn’t compete with an adult male, his own father, a girl who wouldn’t be able to say no to the master of the house.
“He tried to take her from me.”
“I guessed.”
His hands gripped hers in a vice. “I had to stop him.”
What had he done? The sudden fear that it was something terrible arose, making her heart pound afresh.
“It was early morning but still gloomy in the house. The servants were at their work but my father was up and on the prowl. I heard cries. I came out of my room and found him at the head of the stairs. He had her by the wrist. He was hurting her. She was terrified.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
“I had to stop him. He was taking her to his room, and she was mine. Not his.” He paused.
“And I was hers. She was…she was…” He put his hand on his own stomach.
“I couldn’t let him. He was going to hurt her. ”
Suddenly, Verity understood all his secrets. Kitty wasn’t his father’s bastard at all, she was his own daughter. And his father hadn’t died in an accident, Jonnie had pushed him down the stairs in order to save the girl he loved. “Oh my goodness.”
Silence again. This time a long one. “You think badly of me for my actions,” he said, his voice low. “You have no need. I think badly enough of myself.”
“I don’t. Jonnie, I don’t think badly of you.” She squeezed his hands. “You were only a boy yourself. A child, even. Your father was going to hurt someone you loved. I—I would have done the same myself, I think. You’re not to blame.”
He raised his eyes to meet hers. “I must have done wrong, else why was Mary taken from me when my child was born?”
He thought he’d been punished. His nightmares, when he slept alone, must every night be full of how he came to push his father down the stairs.
That was why he’d become a rake. Because he wanted to never sleep alone.
He was afraid of doing so. Did the ghostly specter of his father invade his dreams? Did he see the girl he’d loved in them?
“So you refused to let Kitty be given to some foster parent. You kept her here in the house to remind you of Mary.”
He nodded. “I did. I loved Mary and I love her daughter. I had to keep her.”
“At the expense of losing your own mother.”
He nodded. “She blamed me and Mary and through her, Kitty, for causing my father’s death.
She refused to live under the same roof as the child she claimed had led to my father’s death.
She thinks we fought because my father had taken the girl for whom I had a schoolboy’s love.
She doesn’t know the child she thought my father’s is mine.
I couldn’t tell her the truth.” He paused. “You’re the only one who knows.”
And now she did free her hands and stretch out her arms to him and he came into them in relief. She put her arms tight around him and held him close, his head on her shoulder, the bulk of his splint against her breasts. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered in his ear. “It wasn’t.”