Chapter 20 #2
Did she imagine the pain choking his utterance? Did she just want to hear it, and so did?
“When I told you I didn’t have any regrets about what happened that night at Lord Rutland’s, I wasn’t completely truthful. For so long, I railed at myself for having been so foolish as to cost me the possibility of what I really wanted—who I really wanted.”
“And who is that?” he asked hoarsely.
A tear fell free, followed promptly by others in its wake. “How can you not know, Henry? It is you. I love you.”
His chest moved hard as if he had just finished a race. He curled his hands tight at his side.
Fleur dampened her mouth. He wanted to run. She sensed it. She felt it in him.
“I know you are likely…uneasy about all of this. Lord Cassian shared with me”—she filled her hands with his—“what your childhood was like.”
“What exactly is it he shared with you, my lady?” he asked, in a silken purr.
My lady.
The sound of her pulse filled her ears.
She realized immediately the mistake she’d made—for her. For Lord Cassian. “He was not disloyal to you, Henry. He was trying to help and shared with me about your childhood and what life was like for you.”
She recognized her mistake too late. He was too proud to receive those words.
“What was my life like? I was raised in the lap of good fortune,” he said bluntly.
Did he believe that?
She peered for signs he did and found none in his implacable features. Whether he lied to himself or didn’t know, Fleur needed to speak aloud words he should have heard and heard often.
“Having a title and wealth and having the world at your beck and call is not good fortune. It’s just fortune,” she said quietly. “Your childhood was sad and lonely.”
“More pity. From you?”
She winced at that mocking emphasis, one that implied she was the one to be pitied.
He lifted another cool eyebrow. “On what have you based this? On what Lord Kilmartin told you?”
Guilt rooted around her chest.
Things were becoming discombobulated. This wasn’t how this meeting was supposed to go. She was supposed to tell him she loved him and had loved him long before. How she had wanted it to be him whom she gave herself to.
“You asked why I was late—”
“I did no such thing. I chided you for embarrassing me.”
“And it’s because I found out the name of the gentleman I was…with at Lord and Lady Rutland’s.”
That gave him pause.
“Did you?”
She nodded.
A muscle rippled along his powerful jawline. “And?”
Fleur stepped forward and traced that spasm with her fingertips.
That same muscle jumped under her touch.
“That night…” She caressed her palms over his chest. His heart pounded wildly underneath her hands. “At Lord and Lady Rutland’s, you were the man I gave myself to in the library. It was always you.”
Through the tears, a tender smile played at her lips. “It was you, Henry.”
His body stilled. He clenched his eyes tight.
She willed him to see. To believe her.
For a short moment, she thought he might. That’s what she got for hoping.
“You are saying it is me who claimed you at Rutland’s?”
Claimed her…
It was he who had made love to her…
“We met in disguise,” she uttered softly. “Neither of us recognized one another’s identity. But it was our destiny to be together that night.”
“Destiny,” he stated flatly.
She felt the fresh chill of unease, but reminded herself that all of this was new to him, the ideas of love and destiny and fate. She would teach him so much if he but let her.
“Madam, the only woman I took that night was a French courtesan who was no more a virgin than I was,” he said bluntly.
“J’ai parlé francais ce soir-là, Henry.” I spoke French to you that night. “Mon c?ur bat pour toi.” My heart beats for you.
Surely he remembered rasping those desperate words against her breast.
But his gaze stayed cold, unknowing, without even a flicker of recognition.
“Why don’t we play a guessing game, my dear?”
If he gave her the chance, she would have whispered she’d never play a game with him when he was this cold.
“You are with child.”
She froze. Her heart hammered painfully in her chest.
A cold smile crossed his lips.
Through the cloud of shock, she registered the hate in his eyes.
Fleur was already shaking her head.
“You’re not?” he sounded surprised.
“N-No.” But her protestation emerged as a whisper and was in vain. “That is…I…am…”
“Convenient.” Henry drummed his fingertips across his opposite arms. “You must say, the timing of it all is rather serendipitous, is it not?”
A fresh chill wound along her back. “I-I can see how it seems that way.” She hadn’t wanted to tell him like this, with him pulling the information out of her and making it seem like she was some sort of shameful schemer.
Henry chuckled. “Pointing out I don’t have any true friends. Reminding me that Kilmartin is my employee first. And Tremaine is my brother.”
Oh, God.
“I didn’t….that’s not what…” Fleur held a hand to her aching heart. She had hurt him. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Correction. It isn’t what you implied, madam. It is what you said. And on the heels of those reminders, you positioned yourself as my one true…” His lip curled into a derisive sneer. “Friend. Now it makes sense. To get yourself closer to me.”
Fleur clutched him by the arms and dug her nails in. “Never,” she rasped, trying to shake it into him, but he was as immobile and impenetrable as an oak. “I was trying to point out that we were the same in that our relationships are forged by blood and not choice. But—”
He shrugged off her hold. “It is all right, Fleur. Everyone wants something from me.”
“Not me,” she spoke quietly.
“Don’t you?” He put her through a punishing once-over that reduced Fleur to mere inches tall.
“I would say foisting your bastard off on me is the biggest ask anyone has put to me yet.”
Fleur’s neck wrenched back. It couldn’t have hurt more had he cut her open and left her there to bleed.
He’d only just begun his assault.
“I have been a fool long enough where you are concerned. It all makes sense. You turning up months ago, wherever I happened to be—”
“I was at Chilton’s that day,” she gritted out, deriving strength from the stirrings of anger.
“Certainly, it would have been easy enough for you to ascertain I would be in attendance.”
“If I had known that, I wouldn’t have gone,” she snapped.
He snorted.
He snorted?
If Fleur weren’t carrying the lout’s child, she would have snatched his portrait square from the wall and brought it down over his stubborn head.
“How many times did you and I find ourselves somehow thrown together?” he flung like a barrister laying out the points that would lead to her execution, and in a way, it would.
Fleur closed her eyes.
Of a certainty, when he laid it out with all that cool, emotionless logic, it sounded damning.
“Henry, that is not what…”
With every point hurled, the damning nature of how it all appeared registered in her own mind. If she could see logic to his suspicions, how would he believe anything other than that Fleur was a harlot who was trying to pass her bastard onto him?
“And now it makes sense.”
Fleur rubbed at her throat. “Henry?”
He scraped an ugly assessing stare along her body. “How could I have failed to see before now? Your waist isn’t as trim as it once was.”
She flinched. Lower lip trembling, she looked down at her fuller form.
“Oh, no. I meant no slight. You are quite delectable. Even more so.”
How was it possible that a pleasantly spoken avowal hurt so much worse?
“Your breasts are much improved.”
Each unveiling was a blow to the heart.
Chuckling, Henry gave a wry shake of his head.
“What?” she said tersely.
Did she really want to know?
“The two parts of you I took as false, your ridiculous amount of tears and pretty swoons, turned out to be the only true things about you.”
Anguish scissored through her insides. Fleur searched a hand out to keep from falling, but there was nothing.
She swayed and would have hit the floor.
Henry shot a hand out, catching her by the arm, grasping her hard, keeping her on her feet, and punishing her with his cruel, unfeeling touch. He released her like her skin had burned him.
“Is it Kilmartin’s?”
So conversational, Fleur could only move her puzzled head side to side. “Kilmartin?”
“I…” She went hot and then cold all over. “I…” I’m going to be ill. “K-Kilmartin.” Her voice climbed to a pitchy octave. “Are you mad?”
He grew contemplative. “I never expected he would try to foist his bastard off on me.”
But he had expected Fleur might…
That deafening buzz filled her ears.
“Did the two of you think of making your bastard a duke?” He sounded more curious than enraged. “Kilmartin would know better than anyone just how much the boy would inherit.”
Or girl…
Fleur clutched at her throat. “Why are you saying these things?”
He advanced on her so quickly that she gasped and couldn’t back away.
“Do you know why, Fleur? Because you are a liar, just like every other woman. You believe I don’t know who I took that night? That I am stupid enough to empty my seed into just anyone? I’m meticulous. I used a French letter with my partner.”
A French letter? Her brow puckered. Then she recalled him fumbling between them that night, affixing something, but he’d done it so quickly and returned to caressing her…
“Unfortunately, your lover wasn’t as careful since you’ve been left with a burden to—”
Fleur shot a palm out, catching him hard in the face; her flesh burned and throbbed.
Henry opened his mouth and closed it several times, flexing his jaw, testing out the pain she had caused him.
Good. The lout should hurt.
“I already anticipated how cruel the world would be for my child, but never that his father would be the first to slander him.”
The blood leeched from Henry’s cheeks. Sorrow seized his features and then was gone.
“We are done here, madam.”
Somehow, Fleur found the strength to bring her shoulders back and march toward the door.
He wouldn’t be so kind as to let her off that easily.
“You had been curious to know about my childhood, Fleur. Kilmartin portrayed the previous duke as cruel. But the reality is, he was correct in every lesson he delivered. My mother was a whore. She came to him bearing some other man’s child, and fortunately, she lost that babe.
From a real union, I was born. And after that, she went back to her whoring ways with her lover. ”
Listening to him talk so, hearing the disdain he carried for women and the respect he had for his father… He had never had a chance. She had just…hoped.
Fleur turned back. “Henry? Did you ever consider the mother you refer to as a whore found love from a man capable of loving her and not some empty ancestral title and the power it brought him?”
He started.
She didn’t remember if he replied. Or if any other words were spoken. Or how she left, or how many steps she had taken before she crashed into a solid wall.
“Woah.” Lord Cassian caught Fleur by her shoulders with a gentleness Henry had lacked.
Henry…
She clamped her lower lip between her teeth.
How was she still standing? How was she holding herself together? “I am afraid you were mistaken about the duke,” she said, thickly. “We both were.”
Lord Cassian’s face darkened. “What—”
“Please,” she begged. “Don’t. I cannot.” If she spoke about what had passed, she would crumple up like a collapsing sun.
His expression grew shuttered. “Of course, my lady. Let me help you make your escape.”
After he’d seen her bundled up and loaded into a carriage, Fleur sat and stared out the window at the passing landscape.
What did she do now?