Chapter 15 #3
A harsh, dry laugh erupted from his throat. “I doubt that. Vincent despised me, and he had every right to.” He turned away from the fire, his face shadowed with torment. “I killed him, Genevieve, as surely as if I had been holding that goddamn pistol myself.”
“I don’t believe that and neither should you.
” Her protectiveness of him instantly overwhelmed her own feelings of anguish.
“Vincent was going to kill you, Haydon, as he had been planning to for months, or perhaps even years. But when he realized you were not the monster he had envisioned you to be, he could not bring himself to do it—”
“So he killed himself instead,” Haydon finished harshly, “because I had destroyed his life.” The words were raw with self-loathing.
“You injured him terribly by creating a child that Cassandra convinced him was his own,” Genevieve acknowledged.
“But you didn’t destroy him, Haydon, and you certainly didn’t make him kill himself.
It was Vincent’s choice to erect a wall between himself and Emmaline.
Perhaps at the time he felt he had no choice, but I believe he did.
We cannot control much of what happens to us in our lives—we can only control how we allow ourselves to react to it.
” Her voice softened as she continued, “Vincent was devastated to learn that Emmaline wasn’t his daughter by blood, but no one forced him to withhold his love from her.
That was his choice. And the consequences of that choice were insufferable, both for Emmaline and for him. ”
Haydon shook his head, unconvinced. “If I had never fathered her—”
“If you had never fathered her then Vincent might never have known the precious love he experienced for her during those first five years,” she interjected, “and the love he continued to feel toward her afterward. Or Cassandra may have become pregnant by one of her other lovers and that child would have been presented as Vincent’s own.
It is impossible to speculate upon what might have happened, Haydon.
Our lives have unfolded as they have, and we have both made choices in response to the situations we have been faced with.
When Jamie was born and his mother died, I raged against God for creating him, because I was given the impossible choice of having to either take responsibility for him, or close my eyes and walk away. ”
“But you didn’t walk away, Genevieve.”
“No, I didn’t. And everything that has happened in my life since then has been inextricably tied to the choice I made that day.
It awakened me to the plight of unwanted children who exist so tenuously in the dark corners of our society.
It brought me my children and Oliver, Eunice and Doreen, who have become my family and filled my life with unparalleled joy.
And finally, incredibly,” she finished, her voice beginning to break, “it brought me you.”
She stopped abruptly. She could not bear the thought of him knowing how much he had come to mean to her. Not when he was going to leave her. She could suffer almost anything, but she did not think she could endure his pity.
Haydon regarded her with surprise. She looked away, avoiding his gaze, her hand clutching desperately at the arm of the sofa. In the span of a heartbeat she had gone from being strong and sure and full of fire as she defended his life and his actions to him, to being achingly fragile and uncertain.
And finally, incredibly, it brought me you.
He closed the distance between them in two strides.
Kneeling down, he took her chin between his fingers and gently tipped her face up.
Her eyes were shimmering with tears as she stared at him, a glaze of agony that cut through his soul.
Slowly, tentatively, she grasped his hand and held it hard against her heart.
And then her teardrops began to fall, glittering upon her cheek like diamonds.
Haydon stared at her in awe, feeling the warm softness of her heart beating rapidly against his palm.
And suddenly he understood. Genevieve did not condemn him for the dark transgressions of his past, any more than she condemned any one of her children for the lives they had led before coming to the sanctuary of her home.
Somehow, she believed that deep within him there was actually good.
That was why she had helped him to escape from prison and then risked everything to protect him from the authorities and his kidnappers.
It was also why she had permitted him to become part of her closely guarded family.
But it was not the reason she had given herself to him, sharing a magnificent, reckless passion that he had never known with any other woman.
Nor was it why she now sat drowning in pain, his hand clutched tightly against her heart.
The reason for that was far more bewildering and glorious.
She loved him.
A brilliant shaft of joy blazed through him, obliterating the leaden shadows of his tortured past and replacing them with healing light.
“I love you, Genevieve,” he managed hoarsely, leaning into her until his lips were but a breath away from hers.
“More than life itself. I have loved you from the moment I first laid eyes upon you in the bleakness of prison, and I have grown to love you more every day since. And if you give me the chance, I will spend the rest of my life surrounding you with that love.”
Genevieve stared at him in silence, unable to accept what he was telling her.
“I will also cherish and protect each of our children to the very depths of my soul,” Haydon pledged, wanting her to understand that he would never again fail a child the way he once had.
“And I will happily welcome any other children you bring into our lives, whether from the prison or the street, or as a result of our devotion to each other.”
“But—you are a marquess,” she protested tearfully, still clasping his hand tightly against her heart.
“I was hoping you would not hold that against me.”
“You could marry anyone,” Genevieve clarified.
“I’m flattered that you think so. Shall I take it, then, that your answer is ‘yes’?”
She shook her head in misery. “You cannot want to marry me, Haydon,” she told him with painful certainty.
“You only think you do because you have been away from your home for so long. My children and I don’t belong in the society in which you live—surely you can see that.
They would never be accepted by your friends and family, any more than they have been accepted here by those who once welcomed me into their homes as a guest and an equal.
” Feeling as if she were tearing out her own heart, she slowly released his hand.
“I could not bear to see you scorned because of me and my children, Haydon, just as I could not bear to see my children despised by narrow-minded people who are blinded by the trappings of their titles and wealth.”
“Then I’ll give up the bloody title,” he swore fiercely.
“I’ll sell my estate and my house in Inverness, so none of our children ever have to go there and endure being the subject of idle gossip.
We can live here, or we can move somewhere else and begin anew.
I don’t give a damn about any of it, Genevieve,” he assured her with harsh finality.
“Not the title, or the holdings, or what people think about me or my choice for a wife. The only thing that matters is that we are together, as a family. Marry me, Genevieve,” he finished in a raw, pleading voice.
“Marry me, and let me spend the rest of my life loving you.” He brushed a silky strand of hair off her face, capturing a silvery drop of her anguish on his hand as he did so. “Please.”
Genevieve bit her trembling lip, staring at him in awe.
Firelight was playing across the chiseled planes of his face, etching his grim expression in shadows of gold.
There was determination in his eyes, the granite-hard resolve of a man who was accustomed to having his way in virtually every challenge he undertook.
But there was fear there as well, like a ragged, bleeding gash from which his very soul seemed to pour as he tensely waited for her answer.
And suddenly she knew that she could never let him go.
With a little cry she wrapped her arms around him and crushed her lips to his, kissing him deeply as she sank to her knees on the floor and pressed herself against him.
“Yes,” she breathed, feeling joy flood through her, washing away her fear as it filled her with newfound strength.
And then, because she had no wish to force him to relinquish his title and turn his back on his family and his heritage in order to win her hand, she added with just a hint of playfulness, “I suppose I will marry you, Lord Redmond.”
He laughed and kissed her hungrily, cradling her against his body as he lowered her onto the carpet before the hearth. He pulled the pins from her hair and let it spill in silky waves around her, fascinated by the dance of coral light against the creamy skin pouring from the neckline of her gown.
“There is something I feel I must bring to your attention,” he murmured, nuzzling the tender hollow of her throat as his hands roamed the lush hills and valleys of her breasts. The tiny round buttons of her gown
were quickly released, enabling him to free her from the confines of her corset. Haydon ran his tongue over the claret tip of her breast before drawing it deep into his mouth.
Genevieve sighed and twined her arms around his shoulders, enjoying the hardness of his arousal pressing against her as he worshiped her.
Honeyed heat began to course through her veins, causing her to shift restlessly beneath him.
His hand trailed up the length of her thighs and into the opening of her undergarment.
“Did you hear me, Genevieve?” he asked, slipping his fingers inside her.
“Yes!” she gasped.
“Given your penchant for rescuing urchins,” Haydon reflected, languidly stroking her as he rained kisses across the warm satin sheet of her skin, “and the amount of time I intend to devote to showing you just how much I love you, we are apt to have a ridiculously large family.” He paused in his ministrations and gave her a teasing grin.
“Fortunately, I adore large families,” returned Genevieve, unfastening his trousers. She peeled them down the sculpted muscles of his legs, then slid off her hooped petticoat and her drawers before lying back down before the fire. “Does your estate have a fair number of bedchambers?”
Haydon shrugged out of his coat and shirt and stretched naked over her, pushing the froth of her skirts up to her hips as he positioned himself between her legs.
“I believe it has enough to suffice for a time, should you decide you would like to live there. Once we have them all filled, we can always look for something larger.”
“How many bedrooms does it have?”
“Eighteen.” He smiled as her eyes widened in astonishment. “Thirty-four if you count the servants’ quarters. Do you think you can fill all of them?”
“I can certainly try.” She raised her hips and pulled him down into her, sheathing him tightly within her hot clasp.
“Jesus.” His face contorted with effort as he fought to regain his control.
“Come, my lord,” said Genevieve, flexing impatiently beneath him. “I do believe I shall require your assistance in this matter.”
Haydon managed a strangled laugh. “As you wish, my love. I am, and forever will be, your prisoner.”
He lowered his head and kissed her deeply, feeling his heart grow whole and the scars of his past fade as they pulsed together in the amber flicker of firelight.