Chapter 6
Letitia used a borrowed handkerchief to wipe tears from her eyes.
Her things — including her monogrammed handkerchiefs — had arrived from the house she’d maintained during her tenure as Sir Francis’s mistress, courtesy of Anthony’s kind Buck friend, but Letitia hadn’t felt ready to sort through the only things she had in this world.
The only things to show for years of suffering.
Luckily, the doctor had been prepared with a snowy square of fabric the moment she’d unburdened herself to him.
“That’s a good girl; better tears out than stored inside,” he said, his expression fatherly as she cried over what she’d experienced.
“Wouldn’t want to imbalance my humors?” she asked, trying to play the part of a clever denizen of the demimonde despite just having sobbed into her pillow while struggling to relate how difficult life had been.
“It’s almost a new century, my dear! Humors are the old way; I’m told that the new science centers on the mind. Heal that, and the body will follow.”
Letitia regarded her limbs warily.
“Well, in your case, rest your body,” said the doctor, turning serious. “You’ve been through enough for a lifetime, and I wouldn’t want you to exacerbate the pain. Some rest, and you’ll be as good as new.”
“Will I?” Letitia asked, her eyes brimming with tears. It seemed impossible that anything would feel right again, not after she’d taken up with a series of increasingly cruel protectors.
The doctor placed his hand on her head in a fatherly way and brushed her fringe aside so he could look into her eyes.
“You’ll be well again. But give yourself time to rest. I won’t leave herbs or seeds since you do plan to follow my orders?
I’ll give your protector the same speech I gave you about a temporary cessation of those activities. ”
“Oh, he’s not my lover,” she rushed to say, anxious that Anthony might be lumped in with a host of men this doctor would now regard with extreme disapproval.
He regarded Letitia with a raised eyebrow.
“Really, Dr. Riddle!” she exclaimed, blushing. “He’s been a perfect gentleman.”
“In that case, would you like me to enumerate the ways you might enjoy his company without risk to your health?”
“I don’t think he wants me like that,” she said.
The doctor raised an eyebrow again. He was a little too perceptive!
She picked at the blanket on the bed, her conventional upbringing making her shy about hearing such things from the doctor. But curiosity won out. It wouldn’t hurt to hear the man, would it?
“Very well,” she said, settling in to learn how lovers might enjoy each other in less conventional ways.
***
By the time Dr. Riddle departed, Letitia was in something of a lather. She felt needy and wet — and all from thinking about how she might indulge in some sweet petting with a lover. As if she even had one!
Just as she resolved to slip a hand into the top of her chemise and stroke a nipple, hoping to experience some relief, the door opened.
She sat up a little straighter. Anthony was in the doorway, still wearing that ridiculous silk mask. She was tired of pretending she didn’t know who he was. But would he toss her on the street if she acknowledged she knew his identity?
“I saw the doctor on his way out,” he said.
“Oh?” she replied, uncertain how much the doctor might disclose to the man paying his bills.
“He looked sad,” said Anthony, looking back over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that the man was truly gone.
“He’s experienced great loss. Losses,” she corrected.
“I did not know,” said Anthony, sinking to the bed as if they were friends again. More than friends. When he recalled himself, his spine stiffened.
“Don’t rush away,” she said, a hand on his forearm. He regarded her elegant fingers on the dark fabric of his coat, then relaxed.
“I was wondering if you might brush my hair again?” she asked. A servant had trimmed her locks after the rough chop, and she’d discovered — after all of these years — that her hair curled when it wasn’t long.
Anthony took up the brush from the dressing table nearby and settled closer to run it through her hair.
“Do you like my fringe?” she asked, letting her fingertips run over the fashionable bangs now covering much of her forehead.
“All styles suit you,” he said. Was his voice hoarse?
He settled the brush on her scalp and dragged it down. This time, it ran smoothly through her short hair. She shivered.
“Are you cold?” he asked, repeating the stroke.
“No, merely…”
He paused.
Letitia turned to face him. She studied the black mask and found that she hated it. Hated it kept those secrets that were eating them alive.
“Anthony.”
He licked his lips, his eyes drifting to the thin chemise covering her pebbled nipples. Then his eyes flew to hers when he realized what she’d said.
“How long have you known?” he asked, his hand over his mouth as if his teeth had given him away. “It was a servant, wasn’t it? They told you—”
“I knew from the moment I saw you,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh, encased in fine trousers. “Your scar. I haven’t forgotten.”
“Haven’t you?” he asked, pulling back, his voice bitter.
“Of course I haven’t,” she said softly as Anthony rose from the bed.
He turned back. “Before I say goodbye for the last time again, I must ask you something. I won’t remove you from my home, so you may answer me honestly.”
Letitia held the doctor’s handkerchief in her hands so tightly she feared her fingers might stay permanently bent. What had the doctor said to Anthony?
“Dr. Riddle said that you sacrificed for my benefit, and I can’t help but wonder what he meant.”
“What a thing for him to say,” replied Letitia faintly.
Anthony sat down again, this time grasping her upper arms in that gentle but firm way she’d been seeking and never finding since she left him.
“Why would the doctor say that?”
“Perhaps he was confused,” she said.
Anthony still had that blasted mask on, that unneeded shield over his beautiful face. She’d thought acknowledging that she knew who he was would make him peel the damned thing off, but he still wouldn’t show her his face.
“I am the wounded one. You left me,” he said, as if trying to make sense of a house party puzzle. “Why would the doctor say that?”
Letitia said nothing, mindful of the promise she’d made to Anthony’s father that she’d never reveal to him the cause of her avowal of feelings and flight from the home they’d shared.
The man was dead; the least she could do was to allow him to rest in peace, knowing that Letitia Delemere didn’t have her hooks in his son.
“You left me on a Tuesday,” he said, his voice low.
“August 29th,” she said.
He glanced at her and released her arms at last. Letitia suddenly felt colder than she’d been in years.
“It should have been a lonely late summer. But it wasn’t.”
Anthony rose from the bed, his mask almost completely obscuring his expression. But Letitia knew him well enough that she could recognize the dawning horror on his face.
“My father found me at the club the next day,” said Anthony. “Well into my cups, I didn’t question his presence in Town.”
He stared out the window. “I should have. I should have asked why my father, who was battling gout and professed to hate Town, would descend upon me immediately after my lover fled our home. He was in a jubilant mood. I was far too drunk to realize that something wasn’t right.”
Letitia said nothing, mindful of her honor as a…well, not a gentleman or even gentlewoman, but as an honest courtesan who had truly loved that man’s son. Still loved him despite the mask he wouldn’t remove.
“What did he promise you, Letitia?”
She studied the ridges on her nails and hoped someone would interrupt this interview before she said something that exposed her.
“Was it money? Did he offer you money? Did you take it?”
“No!” she exclaimed, unable to contain her vehement response.
“He would know better than to insult a lady by offering money,” said Anthony. “No, he’d appeal to something else. Your sense of honor. Your profound decency.”
He didn’t say the rest, but she knew he was thinking the same thing: her love for Anthony. Yes, the man had appealed to all of that, and she’d been the one to pay every price while bearing his son’s hatred.
“I don’t know how he convinced you,” said Anthony, pushing a comb about the top of Letitia’s dressing table. “Had my mother been alive, I can imagine he’d have—”
“Your mother wasn’t alive then?” asked Letitia, all air escaping her lungs at once.
“Of course not. She’d been dead since I was but three years old. I recall nothing about it — why, I probably never even mentioned her to you.”
A sob escaped Letitia before she could master her feelings. That man had indeed begged and pushed her on the grounds that Anthony’s mother’s health was failing fast as reports of their romance reached her.
“Letitia, why—”
She couldn’t contain the wracking sobs as years of lies and hurt slammed into her body like a falling chandelier. Letitia had turned her back on the love of her life…because of a lie told by his father?
He was next to her in an instant, his arms wrapped around her as if that day had never happened. “Letty, tell me, tell me,” he begged.
She nodded and cried; the sobs seeming to come from her thighs as the truth punctured layers of grief. Letitia wiped her face with the doctor’s handkerchief and stilled just long enough to look at Anthony’s masked face.
Behind it, his eyes were red and wet, as if he understood the lie that had separated them without her needing to say what his father had done. He didn’t look away, just regarded her as sadly as he’d done the day she had departed their home.
This time, it needn’t be like this.
Letitia lifted her hands to his mask, moving slowly so he might jerk away should he wish to remain covered. But he let her untie the damned thing and pull away the front.
Below it, his face was streaked with tears.
“Anthony,” she breathed, placing her hand on his cheek for the first time in years.
“Don’t,” he said, jerking away. She drew back her hand sharply, not wanting to hurt the man.
Anthony took her hand in his own, studying both sides of it for a moment. Then he brought her palm to his mouth and kissed it.
“Don’t touch me unless you mean to give me forever.”
Letitia thought she knew what crying meant, thought she had wept before. But it was nothing compared to the wailing she couldn’t contain as Anthony pulled her close after all those years of estrangement.
She took his words literally and ran her hands over his face and hair, planting kisses on those wet cheeks and struggling to draw nearer to him.
He took mercy on her and pulled her into his lap, then pushed his fingers into her short locks so he might turn her this way and that as he kissed her face with abandon.
Her nose dripped, and she cast about for the doctor’s handkerchief. Instead, she felt another pressed into her hand.
“Take mine,” said Anthony, stroking up and down her spine as he had for hours in their youth. “From now on, take mine.”