Chapter Twenty-Nine
Edmund watched her walk away. His body was aching with the effort it took to conceal his reaction to the weight of her across his thighs.
She never looked back. He knew she wouldn’t.
And once the door closed behind her exit, a smile tugged his lips upward.
He rested his head back against the high-back chair and closed his eyes, finally releasing the tension that had infiltrated his body after deciding to come clean.
She finally knew all of it.
He should’ve known the lady wouldn’t react to his perfidy in any common way.
She’d have been perfectly within her rights and nature to rail at him with tears and shouts of betrayal.
Instead, she’d engaged in a rational conversation while held in his arms, then threatened his windpipe before walking away as if he meant nothing more to her than a clock on the wall.
He chuckled. She was angry with him. And distrustful. But he could change that.
His brows furrowed. In truth, she should’ve been furious.
What if he hadn’t been the one chosen to seduce her? How many other unconscionable rakes would’ve done the deed without a second thought?
And now that he’d paid his debt in full, would they seek out another to blackmail into doing what they wanted?
He rose from the chair in a swift movement and began to pace the room.
Life was rarely fair and just. He knew that well enough. If it was, the earldom would’ve gone to a man far more worthy than he. And now, Lydia knew exactly how ignoble he was.
An honorable man would never have initiated a liaison with her. A good and noble man would never have considered the offer to seduce her in the first place. And the longer he continued as her lover, the more likely it would become that she would be ruined and her fate decided against her will.
He should stay away from her for that reason alone.
He snorted.
Stay away? In the back of his mind, he’d already been plotting a way to see her again.
Could he deny his desire to preserve her liberty?
His pacing came to an abrupt halt. Edmund gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to answer that. Didn’t want to think of it because the second he did, he couldn’t ignore his selfishness. So, he shifted focus to something else.
Namely, how he might go about discovering who was behind this plot against her.
*
Lydia was fuming.
When she got back to the waiting carriage, she considered going back to the garden party, but changed her mind. One look at her, and her mother would have a thousand questions. Bridget would have a thousand more.
She wasn’t ready to espouse on what she’d discovered just yet, so she asked to be driven home.
By the time her mother returned from the party, Lydia was in bed with a cold compress over her eyes. Gratefully, Bridget had covered her sudden exit from the garden by saying she’d fallen suddenly ill, so her ruse was only briefly questioned.
The rest of the evening, she paced her bedroom in a riot of disbelief and deep anger.
She didn’t want to think her suspicion could be true. Surely, her mother wouldn’t be so blindly determined to see Lydia married that she’d essentially blackmail the most infamous rake in town to compromise her only daughter.
But…
It was exactly the kind of thing her mother would do if she felt pushed to the wall with no other options.
She spent the next couple of hours going back and forth in her mind between believing her mother far too honorable to lower herself to such tactics and thinking the lady utterly capable of doing whatever she thought necessary to obtain her very intent and passionate goal of seeing Lydia properly wed.
Several hours after night had fallen, Lydia finally stopped striding back and forth across her bedroom. Standing in the center, she stared at the window, recalling in sharp detail the moment Edmund had first crawled through.
As if it were happening again, she relived the excitement, the doubt, the expectation, and that single breath in which she’d known her life would never be the same from that moment forward.
On that night, she’d waited for him, uncertain if he would come to her.
But…ignoring all sense and rational caution, he’d climbed the wall and through her window.
He’d reached past her resistance and shattered her distrust. In those hours—here in this room—she’d felt safe and free.
Despite her earlier suspicions, she’d believed in his desire for her. She’d accepted it as true and real.
Had it all been an act?
Her stomach clenched and a heavy ache wrapped around her heart.
Instinct told her it wasn’t. But could she even trust her own judgement anymore?
He claimed to have changed his mind about the agreement when he’d discovered her position regarding marriage. He’d said he had no desire to force her into something she didn’t want. Could she trust in that?
She sighed.
In truth, it might be the only option she had.