Chapter 6
MADDIE
Maddie’s attempts at sleep proved futile.
She tossed and turned for hours, her mind a traitor that conjured John’s face whenever she closed her eyes.
Even her pillow conspired against her, growing warm and uncomfortable no matter how she arranged it.
With a frustrated sigh, she threw back the coverlet and slipped from her bed.
If sleep would not come to her, perhaps a book would provide a distraction from the infuriating man who had reappeared in her life.
There was a time when that was all she had wanted—for him to return. And now his presence had shattered the pieces of the life she’d reassembled in his absence.
She slipped a long dressing robe over her night rail, tying it tightly around her waist. The silk felt cool against her overheated skin. After she departed from her chamber, she moved silently. Her slippered feet made no sound as she attempted to navigate the house unnoticed.
Maddie still couldn’t believe she had allowed him to affect her as much as he had.
John occupied her thoughts with the persistence of an unwelcome tenant who refused to vacate.
His sudden appearance at the house party had thrown her mind into disarray.
Even Louis’ steady presence failed to anchor her when John was in the room, especially when, for some idiotic reason, she felt guilty for being intimate with Louis.
Which was absolutely ridiculous, when she could only imagine how many women John must have lain with during their years apart.
And that thought did nothing to help her sleep.
The library door stood ajar, and Maddie pushed it open wider.
Her heart stuttered in her chest when she saw the figure in the room.
A single candle burned on a desk in the far corner, illuminating the sharp angles of John’s face.
He sat motionless, his gaze was fixed on the candle, seemingly lost in thought.
Maddie froze, hoping to retreat before he noticed her, but the door hinges betrayed her with a soft creak. John’s head jerked up, his gaze narrowing on her.
“Maddie,” he said, her name emerging rough at the edges. “Are you all right?”
She should leave. The sensible part of her brain screamed at her to turn around and flee back to her chamber. Instead, she stepped fully into the library, pulling the door closed behind her with a soft click.
“I might ask you the same,” she replied, proud of the steadiness in her voice despite the way her heart hammered against her ribs.
John’s lips curved into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m merely plotting another ghost story. It’s far better than allowing my thoughts at present to take over.” The firelight had turned his thick hair to burnished gold.
“And what thoughts are those, my lord? Plans for your next disappearing act?” Her words were sharp, intended to wound. And she wasn’t certain why that had been her response. Self-preservation to keep from falling into his arms, perhaps?
John winced, the barb finding its mark. “I deserved that.”
“You deserve far worse,” she said, moving deeper into the room despite her better judgment. The pull he exerted over her was magnetic, drawing her closer even as her mind urged retreat.
“I won’t argue the point.” The defeat in his voice stirred something unwelcome within her. She had a dangerous impulse to comfort rather than to condemn.
Maddie hesitated, taken aback by the somber, defeated tone in his voice, then moved toward one of the bookshelves. She trailed her fingers along the leather spines, deciding that her snarky banter was childish and unnecessary. “I couldn’t sleep,” she admitted, not looking at him.
“That makes two of us.” He released a long sigh. “Though I suspect our reasons differ.”
She pulled a book from the shelf without reading its title, needing something to occupy her hands. “Do they?”
John rose from his seat. His cravat hung loose around his neck, and his waistcoat was unbuttoned, making him appear dangerous in a way that sent a shiver of awareness through her.
“Do you long for someone when you know they will never feel the same?” he asked. His eyes held hers, unflinching in their intensity.
Maddie’s breath caught in her throat. The book trembled slightly in her grasp as she fought to maintain her composure. “Not exactly,” she replied, swallowing hard.
“Then you’re fortunate indeed,” John said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He moved closer, close enough that his familiar scent of sandalwood and bergamot threatened to consume her good sense.
She steadied herself, deciding she was done dancing around the matter. “Perhaps if you had never left . . .” she started, and then her voice trailed off. The words she’d rehearsed countless times evaporated from her mind.
“You don’t think I wish every day of my life that I had been stronger? That I had been better prepared to be the man you needed me to be? The man you deserved?” He released a rueful laugh and ran his fingers roughly through his hair. “I am doomed to that torment until the end of my days.”
Maddie’s breath caught in her throat. The raw pain in his voice reached into her chest and squeezed.
For years, she had imagined this confrontation—had rehearsed cutting remarks designed to shred him into pieces, the same way he’d left her when he had disappeared.
But faced with his vulnerability and the darkness she’d seen in his eyes that week, those practiced barbs dissolved on her tongue.
“Why?” The question escaped her lips before she could contain it, laden with five years of wondering. “Why did you leave? I would have helped you. We could have gotten through it all together.”
In the firelight, the shadows beneath his eyes became more exaggerated.
“Ryan’s death . . . it broke something in me.
He was my brother in all but blood, and I watched him slowly die before my eyes.
I couldn’t save him.” John’s fingers raked through his hair again, leaving it disheveled in a way that made him look younger, more vulnerable.
He drew a deep breath, and tears welled in the corners of Maddie’s eyes against her will.
“I couldn’t think,” he continued, his voice raw with emotion. “I couldn’t breathe. I was a shell of myself. And I was afraid of shackling you to a life of misery, or worse. What if I also became ill and left you despondent the way Rosina had been?”
Maddie took a step closer, trying her best to harden her heart. “So you made the decision for both of us? You decided I wasn’t strong enough to help you through your grief? Or that I didn’t love you enough to spend whatever time with you that this life might grant us?”
“No,” John said, his voice breaking. “I knew you were strong enough. It was I who was weak.” He looked away for a moment and when he looked at her again, in the flickering light, she could see the unshed tears in his eyes.
“After Ryan died, I became someone I didn’t recognize.
After I left . . . I drank far too much, woke up with women in my bed—”
“Stop,” Maddie said, holding up her hand. The thought of him with other women sent a sharp pain through her chest, a pain she had no right to feel after what she’d done with Louis, but it felt unbearable nonetheless. “I don’t need to hear about your . . . conquests.”
John looked stricken. “They weren’t conquests, Maddie. They were desperate attempts to feel something—anything—other than the pain of leaving you behind. The pain that life had become. I realized what a fool I had been and knew you would never take me back.”
Maddie said nothing. She couldn’t. What would she even say? She had waited and hoped for months that he would come to his senses and return. And she would have taken him back. She could have understood. But now? After so many years and so much hurt?
“Someone helped me. And I turned to journaling,” John said softly, breaking the silence. “After two years of . . . that life, writing helped me find myself again, to process what happened with Ryan. To understand what I had done to you.”
“And yet you didn’t return until now.” Her accusation hung between them, sharp as broken glass.
John crossed the distance between them, stopping just short of touching her.
“I tried,” he admitted, his eyes pleading for understanding.
“I appeared outside of your home more times than I care to admit. But each time, I convinced myself you were better without me. That you had moved on. That you should move on from me.”
“I longed for you for so long,” she said, finding strength to speak the words she had held inside for years. “And I couldn’t find it in my heart to consider marriage to someone else for the longest time. But I can’t deny that I haven’t been without . . . certain attention. ”
John stiffened, his jaw tightening. “Viscount Ashworth?”
The way he said Louis’s title—with such thinly veiled contempt—sent a flare of defiance through Maddie’s veins. “Yes,” she admitted, lifting her chin. “Louis and I have been . . . intimate.”
A muscle worked in John’s throat as he swallowed hard. The pain that flashed across his face was so raw that Maddie almost regretted her honesty. Almost. But the man had just admitted he’d been with countless unnamed women. She had nothing to feel sorry about.
“I see,” he said, his voice strained. He took to pacing before her. “So you have affection for him, then?”
“He’s been my closest friend since we were children.”
“Is that all he is to you?” John’s voice had dropped to a dangerous whisper, the kind that made the fine hairs on Maddie’s arms stand on end.
“I don’t owe you explanations,” she replied, wrapping her arms around herself, suddenly aware of how thin her night rail and dressing gown were in the chilly library. “You forfeited that right when you walked away.”
John’s eyes darkened as they traveled from her face down to where her arms crossed her body. “You’re right,” he conceded, his voice raw. “I have no claim on you. Not anymore.”
The sadness in his voice made something twist painfully in Maddie’s chest. At one time, she had wanted him to hurt as she had hurt, but now, faced with his pain, she found no satisfaction in it.
“He wishes to marry me,” Maddie blurted, immediately regretting the words. Why had she told him that? What purpose could it serve except to hurt them both?
The words hung in the air between them, as John went completely still. Only his eyes betrayed him—a flash of something so primal and wounded that Maddie had to look away.
“And will you accept him?” John asked, his voice unnaturally controlled.
Maddie’s heart thundered in her chest. She hadn’t a clue what to do.
“I haven’t given him an answer,” she admitted softly, the fight draining from her.
John exhaled, a sound caught between relief and anguish. “Why not?”
“Because I—” She faltered, unable to articulate the tangled mess of feelings inside her. “I don’t love him. Not in that way.”
Everything in her told her to run. To remove herself from saying anything else that would only make matters worse.
As if sensing her distress, John reached for her hand before she could retreat, his warm fingers enclosing hers. The touch sent a jolt through her body, awakening sensations she had tried desperately to forget.
“And do you believe you could find love again?” he asked, his voice low and hoarse.
Maddie looked down at their joined hands, a feeling that was familiar and also foreign. How many times had she dreamed of his touch during those first lonely months after he’d left?
“I don’t know,” she whispered truthfully. “I want what you and I . . .”
Her gaze met his, and the intensity she found there stole her breath. His eyes bore into hers with such naked longing that she couldn’t bear it. She felt exposed, as if he could see past her carefully constructed defenses to the part of her that had never stopped loving him.
The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow. She still loved him. She hated him, and she loved him. It was the most maddening feeling, but her heart couldn’t let him go.
The knowledge terrified her.
Ripping her hand from his, she sprinted away. Hurrying from the room before she did something she would surely regret, like falling into his arms and begging him never to leave her again. Women around the world would call her a fool.
Instead, she fled down the darkened halls, not stopping until she reached her chamber.
As she closed the door behind her, leaning against it with her heart pounding, she realized she was still holding the book she’d taken from the library.
Maddie sank to the floor, the book clutched to her chest, and let the tears flow. She cried for what had been lost, for what might have been, and for what pain would ensue if she allowed herself to imagine what could be.