CHAPTER FIVE #3
He cast a dark look over his shoulder at her. “Clarissa and her child would have been destroyed because of Adam’s lies. They didn’t deserve that.”
“And I did?” Even from half a room away he could see the glistening tears in her eyes.
“Of course not.” He stared down into the red coals as if they were brimstone.
Fitting. After all, he was already in hell.
“But I expected to take the brunt of the scandal for jilting you. I was certain society would see you as the wronged party and blame me. By the time I learned what had happened to you, I had been at Grangely for nearly a year. Alice had been born, Clarissa and I were trying to make our marriage work… There was nothing I could do to ease your situation. No one believed me when I said you were completely innocent.”
“Damn you,” she rasped out.
“Exactly,” he muttered into the fire. “Damn me.”
She shook her head, unwilling to accept his explanation so easily. “You left me there, waiting at the church, with all the pews filled with our family and friends…the rector was waiting…everyone was waiting—” Her voice cracked with anguish. “You left me standing there like a fool!”
He deserved her rebuke, but his heart had long ago been cauterized against the pain of that day. It had been the only way he’d been able to survive. Even her angry tears wouldn’t be able to pierce him.
“You were already at the church before I could send word to tell you to stay home.” He rubbed at the knot forming at his nape. “Clarissa had been so distraught that she collapsed, and I had to send for the doctor. I couldn’t leave her. I was too afraid she’d lose the baby or harm herself.”
He’d been a fool to believe her when she threatened to kill herself rather than live with the scandal of being an unwed mother. Yet that day, he had no idea of the depths to which Clarissa was willing to sink to get what she wanted.
“So you sent her brother to tell me that I’d been jilted.” Her voice lowered to little more than a pain-filled breath. “To give me your note.”
“Wentworth volunteered to take a message to you. He was the best messenger I could find at the time.”
“James Wentworth, the man who told everyone I wasn’t good enough to be your wife.” Her soft voice came from right behind him now, and the chilling betrayal he heard in it grasped his spine with icy fingers. “Who told me that again, right before he gave me your note calling off the wedding.”
“Wentworth is an ass.” Steeling himself for the anguish he would see in her, he turned to face her. “You had nothing to do with what happened that morning, Helena. I wish I could make you believe that.”
Her silence condemned him.
“I had to protect my family and the dukedom, and I had to protect Clarissa. Marrying her was the only way.”
“And you didn’t consider telling me the truth?”
“I couldn’t risk anyone finding out.” Including the woman he loved.
“The world had to believe that the baby was mine, especially if it had been a son, because he would have inherited the title. If anyone learned the truth, Clarissa’s reputation and that of her family couldn’t have survived it.
Neither would Adam’s career with the East India Company.
” He gestured with his arm for emphasis, to take in the estate around him.
“Hell, the entire dukedom could have been put at risk, with Aunt Verity and all my employees and tenants right along with it. God knows that damnable prince regent is looking for any excuse these days to increase his fortune, and don’t think for one moment that he wouldn’t have taken back a title over something like that and kept the estate for himself. ”
He threw the rest of his unwanted cigar into the fire.
He leaned on one hand against the mantel and stared down into the flames.
“Clarissa and I had to marry immediately in order to hide the truth, so I spent what should have been our wedding day tracking down the archbishop to obtain a special license.” And bribing the man well for it.
“Clarissa was just far enough along that the baby could arrive early and not raise too many eyebrows, but there wasn’t time to send all the way to India to find Adam and bring him back to England to marry her.
By then, the baby would have been a year old, my family’s name thoroughly scandalized, and Clarissa’s and the baby’s lives ruined. ”
“So you chose to ruin mine instead,” she whispered.
“That was never my intention.” His shoulders slumped. “As I said, I had no choice.”
Desperately needing a drink, he crossed to the side table and helped himself to a generous pour of whiskey. He took a long swallow before turning to face her.
The expression of pure anguish on her face would have undone him if he hadn’t already stopped caring what women thought of him. Any woman, including Helena.
Still, he took another sip of whiskey and welcomed the burn down his throat.
“Clarissa and I didn’t love each other, but I thought we could at least rub along well enough to have the same kind of marriage as the rest of the ton.
After all, most society marriages aren’t based on affection, and most go along amicably enough.
” He frowned into his glass, the golden liquid turned blood-red by the glow of the firelight and the dark shadows edging the room.
“But we were oil and water, and our marriage never worked.”
That description was too kind. In truth, his marriage had been an utter disaster.
“What happened?”
“Surely, you’ve heard the rumors.” He leaned back against the side table and crossed his legs at his ankles.
His posture was one of a man at leisure, but every muscle throbbed with knotting tension.
“Some gossips asserted I hired prostitutes by the dozens to assuage my depraved carnal urges and engaged in open affairs with married women just to spite their husbands and my wife. Others claimed I was keeping an Italian opera singer in a Piccadilly townhouse—keeping her there, literally, by tying her to the bed.”
“Absurd,” she scoffed. “Anyone who knows you would never credit any of that.”
“Unfortunately, not everyone in London knew me as well as you did.” He smiled grimly and took another sip of whiskey.
“It made no difference that I wasn’t even in town then, that I was here at Grangely.
But rumors of Clarissa’s unchecked spending were true, and she racked up huge debts on clothes and on furnishings for the London house when she redecorated it from parlor to pantry because she said my mother’s tastes belonged to Dr. Johnson’s generation. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“So was I.” And about a hell of a lot more than the color of the new drapes.
He’d sacrificed his own happiness to save her, and she’d hated him for it.
“Clarissa began openly cheating on our marriage nearly as soon as Alice was born. When I demanded she stop, she retaliated by telling everyone I beat her.”
Helena gasped. “Gabe…”
He continued to stare into his nearly empty glass and shrugged.
“I don’t know if she had been truly desperate for the kind of companionship I couldn’t provide or if she did it just to spite me.
But by then, we were living in separate houses, and our marriage was over.
” Before it had even begun. “She died the following year in a carriage accident while riding down to Brighton to meet her latest lover.”
She crossed the room slowly to him and hesitated before placing her hand on his arm.
He looked down at her fingers resting on his shirtsleeve. If her touch was meant to comfort him, she was wasting her time. He was beyond such gestures of consolation.
“Does Adam know?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I haven’t been able to find him.
He left the Company only a few weeks after arriving in Calcutta.
He told friends he was headed north to the Punjab, but he vanished.
I hired several men to hunt him down, but they couldn’t find any of trace of him.
” Gabe shrugged. “He might not even be in India any longer. He could be in Arabia, Siam— Hell, he could hiding in a Somerset village for all I know.”
“Perhaps…he’s dead.”
She had no idea how many times in the past five years Gabe had wished for exactly that. But he knew the truth— “I’m not that lucky.”
To keep from seeing her shocked expression, he lifted the glass to his lips and tossed back the last swallow.
He set the empty glass onto the side table with a dull thud. Then he pushed himself away and flopped onto the chair in front of the fire, his back facing her, not caring that he’d just broken half a dozen rules of propriety.
“So imagine my surprise, after all of that,” he said into the fire, “to receive a letter from Sir Henry Sinfell, asking if I would be interested in marrying his eldest daughter.”
She circled around his chair to stand between him and the fire. The light came through her thin dressing robe and night rail, silhouetting her legs beneath, as if she wore nothing. Memories flooded back of how warm her body, how silky smooth her bare skin… He trembled.
“And you said yes because you wanted a second chance at the life we should have had together?” Her voice was oddly flat, as if she were purposefully stripping the emotion from it so he wouldn’t know what she thought of the situation…or reveal any more of the pain he’d inflected.
“Because I wanted to make amends, that’s all.” He forced his voice to be as emotionless as hers. “I know what you’re implying, Helena, and trust me when I tell you that love never entered into my decision.”
She crossed her arms in a no-nonsense stance that would have done a governess proud and leveled a biting accusation. “Just as it hasn’t with raising Alice.”