‘Are you quite well?’
‘Very.’
‘Your eyes are turning red even as we speak.’
He let go of the wall and just made it to the bed. Once horizontal, he felt immeasurably better.
‘Could you do something for me, Beatrice-Maude?’ It was the first time he had called her by her name.
She nodded.
‘Could you let the party below know that I have been called away to town and that I send my very sincerest apologies? I need peace and quiet, and that will stop people coming up to see me. Could you also tell Lady Dromorne that I will call on her in town this week.’
‘Indeed, brother-in-law, I think it would be most wise if I did just that.’
He frowned as she let herself out and shut the door behind her.
I love you. Eleanor had whispered the words beneath her breath, but he had heard them plainly. Lord, he thought as he laid his arm against his face to block out the last bands of light, his hand fisting against pain. She was a wife and a mother and a woman who would not court the danger of ruin. But there were secrets in her eyes and in her words that could be there because of him and her sadness here in England simply broke his heart.
He had left and gone back to London. In haste. Eleanor knew exactly why he had.
I love you. So, so unwise. Why had she said it? She knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question.
Because the last waves of lust had still been within her, reforming the way she looked at herself, a woman who might enjoy the acts between a man and a woman with a singular abandon. Young. Free. Sensual. No longer scared and careful, the restraints of manners and culture pulling her into greyness.
Today with Cristo Wellingham she had felt powerful and true. To herself. A woman who could not wait another five years to feel … something.
Beatrice-Maude was looking at her now as she sipped at a cup of tea from the breakfast table.
‘Cristo has been unfortunately recalled to town and he has asked me to give his most sincere apologies. I should imagine that there is much to do when one is newly back in a country one has not lived in for years. He did, however, promise to visit your family when he was able. Mayhap we could all come.’
Her words brought a smile to Taris Wellingham’s face as he watched her.
A love match.
It was said their union was such, but in a town that spawned a thousand marriages a year, few were of that ilk.
Regret surfaced in an unexpected deluge as she thought of her own marriage. Martin had protected her, but never touched her. Perhaps it was his illness or his age, or the fact that when he had first met her she had been so very near to death, and a pattern had formed. Eleanor remembered the hospital in Aix and the blood and the tiny twin who had been left in the cemetery of the Chapel de la Francis, his body marked with a simple white stone.
Paris.
She had called him that. A strong name. A warrior’s name. The name of the beautiful Trojan prince who had stolen Helen from Menelaus, and the name of the city in which he had been conceived. The hair on the crown of his tiny head had been pure silver. His father’s son. She had never known the colour of his eyes because it had been a full week until the fever had left her and another two before she could even speak. The anger in her solidified and she hated the thick thump of her grief.
So alone.
If she had been braver she might have saved him … in a bigger city … with better attendants …
Shaking her head, she came back into the moment, leaving behind fury, but the light had gone out of her evening and all she wanted to do was to depart Beaconsmeade and go home to Florencia.
He dreamed that night of the ship he had taken when he left England. The Hell Ship. The Hell Captain. Things done to his body that he had never told anyone, an eighteen-year-old green boy straight out of Cambridge. The sears of whiplashes on his back ached in memory.
The canker of secrecy had eaten him up, piece by piece, catapulting him into the underworld of Paris with an easy transition.
Wrong. It was all wrong.
I love you. Eleanor’s whispered words. The first right thing in his whole damn life.
Feeling the movement of somebody else in the room, he opened his eyes. Ashe sat above him.
Cristo knew he had heard his secrets as he turned away, anger leaving only heartbeat in his ears.
‘Smitherton got to you, didn’t he? At Cambridge? God, and he promised me that he wouldn’t. That’s what you were doing in Paris?’
‘I could have left.’
‘No.’ The word was rough with fury. ‘No one ever leaves until their very soul is gone. It’s the way he works it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he got to me first and it was years before I could loosen the grip of it all. Wasted lonely years that taught me only how to hate.’
The light breeze from outside billowed the gauze curtains into a soft cloud, a summer night in the heart of Kent so far from the paths that they both had travelled.
‘Buy the damn Graveson property, Cris, and come home.’ His brother’s hand lay across his arm.
‘My lawyers got it yesterday. That’s why I was late down to Beaconsmeade.’
Laughter lit Asher’s eyes, the amber in them so very like his own. ‘This calls for a toast.’ He filled two glasses with lemonade and handed one over.
‘To family.’
With a headache pounding his temples, Cristo smiled. ‘Everything has a pattern, Ashe. And Graveson is the very first link of the chain.’
An hour later when Asher had left, Cristo sat up on the side of his bed, watching the candle on the side table burn.
I love you.
If he had had even a little bit of decency in him he would pack up his things and return to the Château Giraudon. Away from temptation, delivered from evil.
He could only hurt her. Then he amended. He could only hurt them both with his reappearance and this damnable attraction simmering between them.
I love you.
He had said the words to himself a hundred times. I love you enough to leave my husband? I love you enough to risk my daughter’s name? I love you so much I would throw caution to the wind and follow you to the edge of the world?
Reality stung and the ache in his heart was a signpost to a more virtuous truth. He should leave her to the life she was living and a family who had taken her as one of their own.
His name held only a little of what Martin Dromorne offered her, dogged as it was by scandal and mayhem. Oh, granted his brothers had gone out of their way to make him a son of Falder, but even that truth was cankered.
A half-brother. A bastard child. The son of a mother whom he had killed in childbirth and had been sent away summarily, no place in the hearts of her relatives for the reminder of such tragedy!
It was Alice who had saved him. Alice with her kind eyes and an open heart that had never once wavered in its love. And in the end he had failed her as well with his wild anger and bad choices.
He seldom allowed himself the time to wallow in self-pity but tonight, with the circumstances heavily weighed against him, he did. He frowned at the notion of a virtuous withdrawal from London for he knew he would never do it.
Fighting for what he wanted to have and hold was far more his style, but he would need to be careful and prudent.