Chapter 23 - Claire
After Claire had seen Sylvia safely deposited in the Rutheridge carriage with her mother, she went back to the ballroom.
She lingered long enough to be claimed for a dance by a man so boring she couldn’t remember a word they spoke all throughout the quadrille.
Afterward, she slipped back out to the gardens, looking for Michael.
Claire crept toward the garden room where she’d last seen Lord Nelson, pausing to listen for any sign that she wasn’t alone. All she saw was the same cobblestone enclosure ringed with shrubs. There was no sign of Michael or of Lord Nelson.
Claire had to know for certain, however. She began ruffling through the scratchy tendrils of the shrubbery. She just needed to see, to assure herself that Nelson wasn’t dead, that she wasn’t in danger of a hangman’s noose, or possibly worse—a one-way ticket to a prisoner colony.
“Were you just checking that bush for Lord Nelson’s corpse?” Michael laughed from behind her.
Claire whipped around, her cheeks heating. “No. I mean, yes. Maybe.”
He crossed his arms and grinned. “It would make more sense for you to be checking for fresh burial plots.”
She lifted her chin. “Certainly not. You don’t have a smudge of dirt on your person.”
“I assure you, Nelson left under his own power.”
“Oh.”
Claire wrinkled her nose when she realized she’d sounded disappointed.
Michael laughed, then examined her for several moments. “Thank you for the service you did my sister.”
Claire shrugged. “Of course. She would have done the same for me.”
“Not hardly.” He chuckled. “While you didn’t kill him, you did thoroughly break his nose. He’ll never be quite as pretty, ever again.”
“Perhaps it will remind him not to prey on young ladies. And perhaps it might help some less-discerning young ladies keep their distance.” Claire winced, realizing how her words might be construed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No apologies needed. Truly. Sylvia is intelligent, but she’s always been a bit impulsive. Nevertheless, she learns from her mistakes. I doubt anything of the sort will ever happen again.”
“I find it remarkable you’re so level-headed about the entire ordeal.”
Michael chuffed a laugh. “I was far less so when discussing the matter with Nelson.”
“It’s probably embarrassing for Sylvia that you and I know the truth of one of her greatest mistakes.” Claire frowned down at the shrub which had concealed an entire person only a half an hour before. “Then again, perhaps it’s better for it to be out in the open so it can be dealt with.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Michael smiled. “That being said, are you finally ready to tell me what it is that I did? To make you not speak to me for nearly four years, I mean.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Haven’t we been through enough this evening?”
“So there is something.” He cocked his head and frowned. “You know, sometimes you make it very difficult not to be angry with you, Claire.”
She blinked. “Pardon me?”
“You’ve been holding something against me for four years, and this is the first time you’ve admitted that there actually even is a something. I thought our relationship meant more to you than that.”
Her forehead wrinkled as a dart of hurt speared her. “Of course it does. You’re my closest friend.”
“I was your closest friend then, too,” he said, his eyebrows raised. “But you wouldn’t even tell me what I had done.”
“It’s a sensitive subject.”
Even now, Claire felt her cheeks heating. Her stomach clenched in remembered pain. It had taken her years not to feel sick about it. Years not to have the image appear every time she closed her eyes.
“Well, we all know that I’m the biggest gossip in all of London,” Michael said sarcastically. He shook his head. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Beatrice and I were angry at you for the same reason?”
“Which is what?” Claire’s head was swirling. How had they gotten on this topic? Hadn’t Michael just been thanking her for saving his sister from Nelson’s clutches?
“You never let anyone in,” he said. “Even when they ask you. Even when they damn near beg. If you hadn’t needed my help this Season, would you even have spoken to me?”
Claire’s jaw gaped. She didn’t have an answer for that, and he must have read the truth of it on her face. His eyes flashed anew, and a storm of anger rolled across his features.
“And what happens the next time I displease you in some mysterious way?” He waggled his fingers in the air. “Are you just going to disappear again if I don’t live up to your invisible, perfect standards?”
He turned abruptly.
“Where are you going?” she stammered.
“I’m going to go home and regain my temper before I say something I’ll regret. Or perhaps I won’t talk to you for the next four years and see how you like it.”
“Michael, please don’t go,” she cried.
What if this was the end of it all? What if he followed through on his threat and they never spoke as friends again?
“Then tell me,” he demanded.
A desperation clenched at her heart. She didn’t want Michael to go. Not like this. Not angry. And perhaps he was right. It wasn’t fair of her not to be honest, especially after he’d asked.
His voice was low and urgent when he said, “Tell me now, Claire. I’m serious. I deserve that, don’t I? Don’t I deserve the chance to answer the charge that you have against me?”
Claire nodded, tears pricking at her eyes. She feared she was losing Michael, losing his friendship once and for all. And hadn’t that been what she was trying to prevent in her misguided attempts? She had been angry with him, yes, but deep down, she was more afraid to lose him than anything else.
“That night,” she croaked. “Four years ago, at the Whittakers’ ball. I told you I saw my brother and Dahlia, but I saw you, too.”
“What?” He blinked and rocked back on his heels.
“I saw you with Lady Berkshire, kissing her.” Claire nearly choked on the word, but Michael had asked in such a way that she felt duty-bound to answer. He was her friend. He deserved the truth.
Michael stared at her, eyes wide, for several moments. “You saw that woman mauling me, you didn’t stop to help, and that is the reason you didn’t speak to me for four years?”
Claire’s mind reeled. “She kissed you?”
If anything, her answer seemed to infuriate him more.
“Of all the things you could have said—” He shook his head. His eyes were like flint. “My lowest moment and it wasn’t even of my doing.”
She didn’t understand. Claire’s mind was full of arguments—all of the things she thought she knew, versus the possibility of this new reality that Michael claimed was true. She shook her head to try and clear it. Was it true? Had Claire thought wrongly of him all these years?
“But I thought…” she started lamely.
Michael shook his head, his hands on his hips. “If you had just told me.”
“I…I didn’t know.”
“All it would have taken was a single honest conversation.” Michael struck his hands together to drive every word home. “I could have told you the truth. Do you know that this entire time, I thought that something terrible had happened to you?”
“What?” Her forehead creased.
“I thought that was why you wanted a loveless marriage—in order to avoid…” He shook his head again, then a hollow laugh rang from his throat. “So this whole time, you thought I’d been unfaithful.”
“I wouldn’t say unfaithful—” she began.
“Oh stuff and nonsense, Claire. You and I both know I was courting you seriously. We both know where that would have eventually led. No wonder you’ve called me a rake! No wonder you wouldn’t speak to me.”
He buried his hand in his hair and turned his back to her. Claire didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know if it was the bleak passion in his voice or the fervor in his eyes, but she believed him. Heaven help her, he was telling the truth.
“That was the first time I’d ever been kissed by a lady,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it? That you witnessed that loss of innocence and determined that I was the biggest rake in all of London.”
Good heavens, she had done that. Claire choked for a moment on her grief.
“I loved you, Claire.” He stepped forward, his eyes blazing.
Loved, she thought, the meaning nearly strangling her.
Had there ever been more devastation contained within the past tense of a word?
“No,” Michael continued, his eyes a bit wild. “I was not a rake then or after, though I have learned some things since.”
“What?” Her mind was still filled with all that she’d have to get rid of, all she’d held on to these four years—the foremost being her belief that Michael was a rake.
And the falseness of it meant that she had to rewrite their history completely, this time casting herself as the greatest villain of all.
“I’m just angry enough to show you, Claire.”
Before she could feel more than a thrilling terror at the glint in his eyes, Michael did the last thing she ever could have imagined—he strode to her, took her firmly in his arms, and captured her mouth in a kiss.
Claire found it beyond disorienting, to go from the depths of despair to the heights of happiness and pleasure in half a second.
Michael’s lips started too firm to be called gentle, but he quickly softened his hold on her, one large arm anchoring Claire firmly to his chest, the other hand tracing an agonizingly slow path up the center of her spine and back again.
The initial fire of Michael’s fury burned out the instant their lips met.
Instead, he gave a low sort of sound—half groan, half grumble—that Claire felt reverberate into her very being.
Had she thought she knew what sensation was, before that moment?
Had she claimed to have ever truly felt something before?
Claire’s shock ebbed away beneath his gentle ministrations, the deep sigh of his breath, the stark chafe of his cheek against hers.
She’d never thought his face looked rough before—Michael was always clean-shaven—but it was.
Of all the delights swamping her senses, this was the one that captured her utmost fascination.
She lifted a hand and cautiously brushed it against his cheek—featherlight touches that he somehow felt, even in the midst of their private storm. Claire lay her hand against his cheek and he made a low noise in his throat again.
It was about at this time that Claire realized, with no small amount of surprise, that she was kissing Michael back, and had been for some time.
The warmth of his lips had somehow coaxed a response from hers.
Improbable, because she’d certainly never kissed anyone before.
Nor, she realized, did she ever want to kiss anyone other than him.
Claire was drunk on the feel of his frame pressed close to hers, on every single part of the devastating kiss. Anyone might have happened upon them in the garden, and she would have welcomed the scandal.
If it meant she got to do this every single day for the rest of her life, scandal would have been a paltry price she would have gladly paid.
It was several more aching moments before Michael pulled back from her. Though her head was swimming with what she could only have described as swirls of sparkling light, Claire was certain that it was Michael who drew back, for she pressed herself forward onto her toes to chase him as he went.
“Claire, my dearest Claire,” Michael murmured, brushing several more soft kisses against her lips before he leaned back to study her half-lidded, stupified expression.
Whatever he saw there had stormclouds roiling across his features.
Claire couldn’t hope to think of the cause—she was still swimming in the delight of the past minutes and couldn’t have been depended upon to remember her own middle name.
It was very hard for her imagine there could be anything wrong.
But Michael certainly seemed to think so. He set her back by the shoulders so abruptly that she had to jerk to keep herself upright. She blinked, then blinked again, stunned by all she’d learned that evening.
Firstly, Michael wasn’t a rake.
Secondly, he was excellent at kissing.
And thirdly, he was so good at kissing, Claire might have readily forgiven him even if he had been a rake.
Fourthly, she wanted to go pull out Lady Berkshire’s hair by the roots.
Fifthly, she wanted to kiss Michael again, as soon as possible. Preferably now.
While Claire organized her thoughts with all the dexterity of drunken squirrel, Michael watched her and his frown only increased.
“I never should have done that,” he said grimly. “I never should have…”
Michael looked at her, at the confusion plain on her face while she tried to muster up the fortitude to ask him why.
But before Claire’s kiss-swollen lips could remember how to form the word, Michael shook his head and cursed lowly. “I never should have done that. Forgive me, Claire.”
He was off through the shrubbery before she could utter so much as a whimper of protest.