by Mia Vincy
Even though Rafe was a devious, deceitful, beastly beast of a lying liar.
“Careful, Ventnor.” Rafe lowered Thea to the ground beside his discarded clothes. “Or you might find yourself taking a swim too.”
“Do not threaten me, you scoundrel.”
“Put that on.” Rafe tossed his coat to Thea. “Get inside and warm up. I’ll handle him.”
Water still trickling down his bare skin, Rafe shook out his breeches and yanked them on. Thea averted her eyes and fought her wet dress to shove her arms into the coat’s sleeves. She gathered the lapels under her chin, and tried to work out what was going on.
“Luxborough, you have made a complete mess of everything,” Ventnor said.
“Hmm?”
Ventnor pointed the silver knob of his walking stick at Thea. “That woman is not Helen Knight.”
“Hmm.”
“I sent you to stop Helen Knight from sneaking off to beguile Beau. You said you accomplished that by marrying her yourself, but you married the wrong woman, you blithering muttonhead!”
Rafe straightened and fastened his falls, looking as unbothered as Ventnor was riled. He shook the water from his hair and pulled on his shirt; it clung to his wet skin, but he didn’t seem to care. Thea looked from one man to the other, as confused as if she had walked onstage in the middle of a play, and she did not know what the story was, or who was the hero and who was the villain, or if she was the heroine or a hapless fool.
“You sent me off to do your dirty work and expected me to obey your commands. Who’s really the blithering muttonhead, Ventnor?”
“My heir is married to a shop girl because you cannot follow a simple instruction.”
Rafe started gathering up his boots and the rest of his clothing. “Your heir is married to the woman of his own choosing because he could no longer tolerate you treating him like a child.”
“You promised to keep Helen Knight away from Beau in exchange for the orchids.”
“I lied.”
“I want those orchids back.”
“Oh, go away, Ventnor.”
“I don’t understand,” Thea said to Rafe. “You seem to loathe him, but I thought you were allies. He’s your father-in-law.”
“A connection I would rather forget. Can you walk in those wet skirts?”
“Damn you, Luxborough. Stop talking to your harlot and listen to me!”
Rafe gestured at the viscount with a hand full of boot. “Speak of her like that again, and you will go in the lake. Thea, do you need my help?”
“I can walk. I’ll have to show my legs, but the best harlots always do.”
Defiantly, she lifted her sodden skirts to her knees and marched up the lawn. Rafe fell into step beside her.
“You needed a marriage certificate to get the money, and you didn’t want to marry again, so an invalid marriage to me did the trick,” she summarized.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“Then you kissed me.”
“And then I stopped kissing you.”
“Do not ignore me!” Ventnor stalked around in front of them. “I traveled all the way here to confront you, Luxborough.”
“And now you can travel all the way back.”
Thea and Rafe went around him and kept walking. Ventnor’s black carriage stood outside the house, spattered with mud and pulled by a mismatched set of rented horses. Only the three matching purple footmen did not seem the worse for travel, standing smartly to attention at their approach.
“So you never meant to separate them?” Thea said to Rafe. “Helen and Beau Russell?”
“I told you, I don’t care who marries whom, but I did like the idea of upsetting him.”
“Damn you, Luxborough. I will not be ignored. You will listen to me or I shall—”
“Or what, Ventnor?” Rafe sounded irritable and bored. “What will you do this time? Hire more actors to spread your lies that I practice sorcery and poisoned Katharine?”
Thea’s world tilted again. “Ventnor started the rumors? So the zealot outside your London house was William Dudley the actor?”
“Yes. Apparently, Ventnor placed scores of actors around the country. Everyone needs a hobby, and spreading rumors is his.”
“But why?”
Ventnor offered her a kind, patient smile. “His lordship started it, when he published ludicrous claims that my daughter was insane.”
“Yet it was you who put her in a lunatic asylum,” Rafe snarled.
“No!” Thea said
Ventnor continued as if neither of them had spoken. “For the sake of my family, I could not allow such damaging allegations to pass unchallenged. Naturally, I countered by claiming that Luxborough kidnapped, brutalized, and poisoned Katharine, and thus turned her mind.” With a derisive snort, he indicated Rafe with his stick. “But when he came back with those marks on his face, and his brothers’ deaths making him the earl, it was only a matter of time before the gulls of the world believed he had forged some bargain with the Devil. I would never have dreamed up anything so outlandish, but I confess I played along, as I rather enjoyed the effect.”
“The whole lot is nonsense,” Thea said. “Rafe would never harm anyone.”
“Silence!” The viscount shuddered. “How charming, Luxborough, that your harlot comes to your defense.”
“Enough.” Rafe dumped his clothes and marched to the carriage, sending the footmen scattering like bewigged purple chickens. He yanked open the door. “Get in before I throw you in. I’ll not strike a man your age, but I have no such qualms about shooting you.”
But the viscount only turned to Thea, and added, his tone affable, “Did he tell you how Katharine died? She rode off during a storm, fleeing him. Do you know why she fled?”
And Thea could not help but ask, “Why?”
Rafe looked bleak. “You know why. Katharine feared me.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.”
Ventnor laughed, once more shaking his ebony stick. “Because you did something to her, and that is what everyone will always believe!”
“Oh shut up, Ventnor.”
Rafe yanked the stick out of the other man’s hands, broke it over his knee, and tossed the two pieces into the carriage. Ventnor quivered with rage, spots of red appearing in his cheeks.
And then he paled.
The color drained away so abruptly that Thea feared he was about to have an apoplexy.
She followed Ventnor’s gaze, wondering what had induced this effect.
Or rather, who had induced this effect.
Sally stood in the doorway, frozen mid-step, staring at Ventnor with a matching look of shock. She, too, was unnaturally pale, unnaturally still. Thea silently willed Sally to march at Ventnor, gun raised in her confident manner, but Sally seemed only to grow smaller and more disturbed.
“You!” Ventnor said. “But they said you were…”
Sally whirled about and ran back into the darkness of the house.
Rafe looked as puzzled as Thea felt. “How the hell do you two know each other?”
Ventnor took a deep breath, the color returning to his cheeks, and when he spoke, he only said, “You harmed my family, Luxborough, by enabling my son to marry so far beneath him. I shall ruin you.”
“You will not,” Thea said. “Lord Luxborough is a horrid, beastly, lying liar, but apart from that, he is kind and caring and honorable and gentle.”
“Gentle? You foolish girl. He broke my walking stick.”
“Yes, but he broke it very gently.”
“And if you don’t leave, Ventnor, I shall shoot you gently too.”
Ventnor, lip curled, climbed into his carriage. As soon as Rafe had shut the door and stepped away, the footmen leaped onto the back, the coachman clucked at the horses, and the carriage made its escape.
“I still don’t understand.” Thea shivered in her wet clothes, while Rafe stood as impervious as a rock. “The whole time I thought he was your ally and you were do
ing his bidding, but the whole time you and I were actually on the same side. Nothing is as I thought it was. I worried you would be angry with me, and now I am angry with you, and I don’t feel I have a right to be angry, and that makes me even angrier. And when you kissed me, it wasn’t because you believed you had a right but because… And you did nice things for me, but you didn’t have to do nice things, because you knew I wasn’t your wife, and I felt so guilty but you…”
Rafe ran a hand through his wet hair. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s finished. Your sister is married. I got the money and the orchids. It went as planned. The game is up.”
“And now?”
He looked down at the lake and then back at Thea.
“And now it’s time for you to go.”
Rafe was almost grateful to Ventnor for the timely reminder of Rafe’s unsuitability for marriage; when Thea was in his arms, it was easy to forget.
Everything was as it was meant to be, he lectured himself, but his eyes strayed back to the lake, as if he might catch a glimpse of a man and woman frolicking together in the water.
Blithering muttonhead, indeed.
Resolutely, he walked into the house. In the foyer, servants appeared with dry towels, and Rafe handed one to Thea without looking at her. After drying himself as best he could, he started up the stairs. A backward glance showed that Thea was struggling, burdened by the oversized coat and wet gown, her hair tumbling haphazardly around her shoulders.
“Your breeches are askew,” she said. “It looks uncomfortable.”
“It is.”
“Good. I hope you get chafing.”
He marched back down. “Do you want me to carry you up the stairs?”
“I want you to explain why Ventnor knows Sally, and why you lied to me, and what happened to Katharine.”
“I already told you about Katharine.”
“Except for the tiny details about the lunatic asylum and why she feared you.”
Rafe muttered a dark oath. “I’m going to carry you or we’ll be here all day.”
“Very well. But I shan’t enjoy it, and I may be compelled to scream.”
“If you must.”
Rafe bent and scooped her up. Everything about them was cold and damp and uncomfortable, yet her weight felt right in his arms, and her softness perfect against his body. She looped an arm around his neck, for although this was new to them, they had already mastered it. Like those kisses, like their games and conversations. They learned each other so quickly. Rafe dared himself to look at her face. Her gaze searched his, and a pang echoed through his chest. Tightening his arms around her, he closed his eyes to her beauty and emotion, but still he saw her, still he felt her. If he were a different man, he could carry his bride like this. Lay her down and show her such bliss she would never want to leave.
But he was not a different man.
He opened his eyes and headed up the stairs and toward her rooms.
The sunlight was streaming into Thea’s sitting room, where her traveling trunk crouched, gaping and empty, a pile of underclothes beside it. Rafe lowered Thea to the floor and dumped the clothes into the trunk. He went into the dressing room for another armful, and came back to see her remove everything from the trunk and hurl it across the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” He looked around at the bright, peach-colored room, the furniture dripping with sunlit stockings and shifts and the devil knew what. One stocking was curled around a vase of yellow and white roses.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me about Katharine.”
“Katharine died years ago.” He dropped the armful of clothes into the trunk. “She has nothing to do with anything.”
“Yet you and Ventnor are still fighting over her. And that night in the portrait gallery, you said she haunts you.”
“That night I was intoxicated. Nothing I said was real.”
“That night you said you like me.”
Avoiding her eyes, Rafe set about scooping up clothes and tossing them into the trunk, only for Thea to grab them out and fling them across the room just as fast.
“You are the very devil,” he said.
“You owe me answers.”
“I owe you nothing.”
“You lied to me,” she said.
“My only lie was pretending to believe your lies. You lied first.”
She glared at him. “You put me in a position where I had no choice, when you threatened Arabella.”
“Then let us call it even. Either way, it is over now.” She did not agree, judging by the accusation in her face. “What is really bothering you, Thea? Are you upset because I tricked you?”
“No, it’s that…” She nudged some clothes with her bare toe. “Well, we were on the same side against Ventnor. You made me think we were enemies but in fact we were allies. So it…it would have been nice. To be on the same side. That’s all.”
Yes, it would have been nice. So many things would have been nice. But he could not have revealed the truth back then, because back then, he could not trust her. And now he knew her, it was too late.
He scooped up a cluster of items from her dressing table, hairbrushes and whatnot, and dumped them into the nearly empty trunk. They clattered against the sides.
“What happened in America?” Thea asked.
He shook his head and roamed around, grabbing up items and hurling them haphazardly toward the trunk. “At first, we enjoyed the adventure, though we hadn’t a clue how to make a home, aristocratic offspring that we were. And then, Katharine… She changed. She turned melancholy. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Just started fading away before my eyes. I promised to take her home to England when I earned enough money.”
“And then?”
“And then…”
Rafe paused to stare out a window and shivered, as if he were back in that cold, dreary cabin they had tried so hard to make cozy. The sunlight hurt his eyes so he turned his back on it; it forgave the slight and generously warmed his skin through his drying shirt. Thea had found a stripe of sunshine to stand in, the dust motes dancing over her white toes and damp blue skirts.
“Her melancholy passed, and I got as much work as I could. Then she changed again. One day, she spent our entire savings and more besides, buying up pots and plates and baskets of produce from the market. Hell, we had live goats and chickens running through our cabin. She said she planned to open a tavern; it would be the most popular place in the land and we’d become rich. I couldn’t reason with her. I mean, she could barely cook the most basic of meals and there she was, trying to cook ten things at once, nearly burning down the house. She didn’t sleep for days, just… And those blasted chickens…” She had alarmed him, with her eyes unnaturally bright and her speech impossibly fast. “Then that passed too, and she was frightened by her own behavior. There were other episodes too. When she had a shock, she lost grip on reality and feared the world meant her harm. And I…”
And he could do nothing. Nothing but hold her, and tell her everything would be all right, and secretly worry how to get her home to England. Time and again, Katharine’s mind turned on her during those years, and Rafe could do nothing but watch.
He wiped his hand over his face as if he could wipe away the memory, but when he looked up, the past was still with him, and Thea’s eyes were wide with concern. She looked almost comical, standing there bedraggled and barefoot, half her hair still pinned up, the rest tumbling over her shoulders. He smiled, despite everything. Oh, to forget the past and be with her now; to run his fingers through her hair and hold her against him, so that she might warm his heart the way the sun warmed his skin.
“You were so young,” she said softly. She took two steps toward him, but the trunk blocked her way. “In a foreign land, with no friends, no family, no solutions. It must have been terrifying for you.”
“I don’t need your pity. It was Katharine who suffered. I promised to look after her but…”
He tore his eyes off her, away from
that gentle sympathy that he didn’t deserve.
“Lord Ventnor came,” Thea prompted.
“Right. Katharine had written to her mother, and he traveled all that way to take her home. I let her go. It seemed best. Then Nicholas—the bishop, you remember—he wrote me that Ventnor had put Katharine in a lunatic asylum, so I sailed back to England to get her out. As her husband, I had rights her father did not. If you had seen her when she came out of that place…”
The memory still made him shudder: spirited Katharine turned wan and silent, shuffling along, her eyes vacant.
Rafe shoved aside the image and picked up a heavy bestiary from the table. It was open at the entry on jaguars. That, too, made his heart ache: the thought of Thea, sitting alone, reading about giant cats because she wanted to know more and he would not tell her.
“And you lived in the Dower House here,” Thea said.
“Right. My father had died, my mother moved to the Continent, and my brother John was the earl. He let us live there.”
He slammed the book shut and threw it into her trunk.
“That’s not mine.” She bent to remove it and hugged it to her middle. “And why never mention that Sally lived with you?”
He shrugged. “It’s not worth the bother of mentioning. Sally was good for Katharine. The whole arrangement seemed to be good for her. She went weeks without an episode of any kind. I was reading about new treatments for disorders of the mind, out of France. A Quaker is trying something similar in York. I was corresponding with a French aliéniste, and I thought—”
“I beg your pardon? An alienist?”
“A doctor of mental illnesses. I was considering taking Katharine to the Continent. She was happy; we all were. But then—suddenly; I don’t know why—her mind turned on her again. We maintained complete calm around her, and she had had no frights or shocks. Except she read that blasted Gothic novel. She believed it held messages for her. And then the crows… She kept talking about crows, saying they were coming to take her away, and accusing me of being a crow or in league with the crows, or… I don’t know.”