Chapter 12 #2
She did not want to be held, or touched, or soothed. She pulled away from him, shaking her head furiously and fighting tears. “Don’t, oh, don’t! Sloan—”
“Brianna!” He tried to interrupt: she would not allow him.
“How could you, Sloan? You have a wife, yet you determined to keep me too? You had no right—”
“You do not understand!”
“I could never have been anything to you but a mistress!” She was dangerously close to tears. “Never—there was never any chance! Oh, all my dreams! I believed that, yes, you did love me! That there could be a future—”
“I never lied to you!” Sloan charged, clenching his hands into fists at his side, fighting the urge to reach for her, grab her, force her to listen. “If you’d hear me out—”
“And what of your wife? Oh, poor wretched lady! She sits at home, always alone! Wondering, waiting, anxious—while you! A whore in every port!”
“Brianna!” His voice had taken on an edge of warning.
She could not take heed; she could not care.
Oh! It should have been so obvious! She should have realized.
But she had not, and the fantasy had so recently soared.
She did not know if she wanted to scream and shout, or dissolve onto the floor in tears.
“How could you?” she repeated. “How could you have done this to me? Surely you knew, you knew that I was falling in love with you, and you did not care! You knew that nothing could ever exist between us, and still you led me on—”
“Brianna!” He was aching so desperately for what was slipping between his fingers that he could barely think.
He came to her again, catching her shoulders, holding her fiercely against all her struggles, even when she pounded his chest with futile vengeance.
At last he shook her, firmly, and her head rolled back, her eyes met his—stark with hopelessness and bitter resentment.
“Let me go, Sloan. Fool that I am, I really did not know.”
“I cannot let you go—now or ever!” he thundered to her, shaking her once again. “For the love of God, will you listen to me?”
“To what end?” she demanded heatedly.
“It is not what you believe.”
“What I believe? You have just told me that you are married.”
“I am married, Brianna. But—”
“Let me go, Sloan!”
“Nay, because I cannot!” Despite her protests he swept her into his arms and pinned her to the bed. He had to make her understand.
“No, Sloan!” she shrieked, her voice breaking.
“Brianna—there is a future. I love you. I—”
“What of your wife?” she demanded, ceasing her struggles to stare at him with blunt accusation.
“If you would but give me leave, I would explain.”
Bitterly, she answered him. “I’ve no choice, it seems.”
His hold on her eased. She plummeted to the depths of despair, and he knew well that her fury came from the misery he hadn’t the power to erase. He could only try desperately to make her see, to hold on to what they had.
“Her name is Alwyn,” Sloan said, and then he swallowed. To say her name, the woman he had only alluded to, was perhaps one of the most difficult things he’d ever done. “Alwyn does not care—”
“Does not care!”
“Cannot care,” Sloan said, ignoring her interruption.
He did not know how to plead; he had never pleaded before.
But God help him, he had to make her understand.
“Brianna, we were wed fifteen years ago. Our estates adjoin. The match was arranged when we were both just infants and we were wed before my twentieth birthday. I was not against the marriage, because I had known Alwyn all my life. As a girl she was very lovely, and very gentle.” I am not saying the right words, Sloan thought in anguish.
She was so stiff in his arms. Already, he thought, I have lost her. “Brianna! You have to understand!”
“Understand, My Lord Treveryan?” she asked coldly. “I understand quite well. You are married. You wish me to remain with you—as your mistress—while you leave a gentle wife behind.”
“Nay! Your tongue is ever sharp!”
“Show me where I am in error!”
“She is mad!”
Brianna held very still for a moment, aware that his voice and the tension in his body, in his very hold about her, betrayed a misery deeply akin to her own.
“Mad?” she whispered.
“Quite,” he said bitterly. “Alwyn was always frail. She trembled at the sight of me once we were wed. I was ever gentle with her. I let her be, and I wooed her as graciously as any man ever wooed his wife. There was a time, when we were very young, when I came to have great faith in a fruitful and happy life reaching out before us. But then—we had a child. A son. He did not survive three months in this world. And when he died, all that had been happiness for Alwyn died also. Slowly she began a retreat from this world. And now …”
“Now what?” Brianna asked him, aware that his eyes stared unseeingly across the cabin, that he was watching something a long way off. He shrugged.
“She barely knows me. She lives in my home, but all she knows is the forest and the pond of the estate where she finds peace. She is cared for by her old nurse, and she keeps cages of exotic birds. She loves to hear them sing, and to watch them fly. When I am at home, I allow her the fantasy that we are children again, and she believes that our fathers are visiting, and that we are together to play—as children.”
He stopped speaking, his eyes returned to Brianna’s. He wanted her to speak as she longed to do so. Yet it all swirled within her mind and wrought painful constriction in her heart and throat, and she could find no words.
He released her and stood, pacing the cabin. Finally he paused again, leaning against the doors.
“I have not touched her in a decade, Brianna.”
Brianna inhaled deeply. “Sloan, I—”
“You must understand,” he said, and his features were taut as he searched her countenance.
“She is my wife. I never loved her—not as I have learned to love you—and yet she does hold a part of my heart for all that we once were. She is mine to care for, Brianna, and that I do. I beg you not to despise me, for I have come to need you just as I love you.”
She had never heard more earnest speech nor seen a man more fraught with pain. She felt no more anger against him. She longed to reach out to him, but could not.
“Sloan,” she whispered at last, “I am sorry. So very sorry, for I believe with all my heart that you do love her. And I believe that you do love me. I—I don’t know what to say to you, or what to do.
Oh, Sloan! I just can’t be your mistress!
Taken about from port to port, displayed to the world, with no home, no life, no future. …”
“It would not have to be like that!” He came to her then, falling to his knees before her, taking her hands feverishly in his. “Ah, Brianna! Do you think that I would not care for you, that I would not silence the world if—”
“No man can silence the world, Sloan, Not even you,” Brianna told him wearily.
“But it is not the slights of any that concern me. Sloan, I just don’t know that I could bear it; that I could ever forget Alwyn, or”—she paused, searching out his intent and blazing eyes—“Sloan! Have you forgotten how you decry the plight of bastards? Jemmie Scott, dying in his quest for a crown denied him because of his birth. Sloan, it frightens me.”
“Nay! Brianna, once I swore that I would not inflict such a fate upon a child. But I love you; I long for our child. Brianna, I will leave no legal heirs! Our child—”
“Will be a bastard,” she interrupted simply. “You cannot change that.”
“I swear that he will never suffer.…”
She smiled at him, feeling numb and exhausted. “Sloan—it is not right. I am an adulteress, and perhaps because of it, we are cursed. Oh, Sloan, look at all that has befallen!”
“I do not believe in curses!” he cried to her passionately. “Nor can you! Brianna, I love you. I would gladly lay down my life for you a dozen times, and a dozen times again.”
“I believe that you love me,” she whispered.
“But that is not enough?” he demanded bitterly.
“You don’t understand—” she began, but before she could say more there was a pounding on the door.
“Approaching port, Cap’n!” Paddy’s voice called out.
Sloan lowered his head. “I must be topside,” he murmured, and then he was staring at her again, intently. “Brianna …”
“Nay! What can be said? You must take command as we go in.”
“You will not leave me!” he commanded her, and Brianna stiffened regally. “I am not your property, Sloan.”
Angrily he dropped her hands and rose. “Nay, you are not property. Is it property you seek? You have my love, and my life, should you require it. All that I deny you is my name, yet for that you would scorn me. Are you no better than the whore I thought had come to me in Glasgow? Is it the position you crave, the titles and the land? On that account, dear girl, you need not be concerned. I always pay well for services rendered—or have you forgotten?”
She leapt up to face him, slashing out hard with the palm of her hand, driven by the fury and the hurt.
He caught her wrist hard, twisting her arm behind her back, and bringing her body to his.
The angry tension within him frightened her.
“Sloan,” she gasped, for his hold stole her breath, just as his eyes made her tremble with sudden weakness.
She fought it, and challenged him. “Sloan! That you can say such words to me belies all the love you claim for me!”
He lowered his dark lashes. His hold eased and then tightened as he cradled her to him. “Forgive me,” he said simply, and she felt the quivering of his hard form.
How dully her heart ached! For all her shattered dreams she could not stop loving him.
“You must go topside,” she whispered miserably, pushing away from him.
He nodded, and for several moments his throat was too thick for speech. “Are you coming ashore with me?”
“I—I do not know, yet.”