How to Romance a Rake

by Manda Collins

  “He has said little about his mother,” she admitted. “I believe she died in a carriage accident.”

  As soon as she said the words she knew it was untrue. She also knew she was about to hear something she did not wish to.

  “What if I were to tell you that Lady Elizabeth Deveril died in this very room. By her husband’s hand.”

  She opened her mouth to refute the claim, but Devenish wasn’t finished. “What if I told you that your husband watched and did nothing?”

  Juliet instinctively gasped. She’d expected Devenish to implicate his late brother. From everything she’d heard, the previous Lord Deveril had been a drunk and a brute. She had little doubt that the man would have been capable of killing his own wife.

  But that Alec had witnessed the murder? It was too much to be borne. She stood, prepared to order the man from the house, but a voice behind her stopped her cold.

  “Get out,” Alec said from the doorway. “Get the hell out of this house.”

  * * *

  Alec had returned home from White’s with the shushed whispers of his peers ringing in his ears. Gentlemen were not so overt in their gossip as ladies, but they were not immune to the lure of a good story. And the tale of how the Viscount Deveril had been trapped into marriage with a cripple was a compelling one. Never mind that it had been obvious before the marriage that she had some sort of injury to her leg, and never mind that Juliet was lovely and one of the finest musicians in London. And, most importantly, never mind that he told more than one man that he’d known the true nature of her injury before they’d married.

  There was also the fact that the ton felt betrayed by the fact that they themselves had been tricked into thinking Juliet was merely injured instead of maimed. The distinction was laughable to Alec, who felt only admiration for the fact that Juliet had managed to pass for so long without having anyone suspect her of hiding the true extent of her injuries. But society’s pique could not have been greater if Juliet had revealed herself to be an Amazon princess rather than a gently bred young lady. And it would take some time for them to recover from the upset.

  He returned home hoping to learn that Juliet’s morning calls had been more successful, only to be informed by Hamilton that she was in the small sitting room with his uncle of all people.

  Angered because he’d informed the older man that he was no longer welcome in Deveril House, and worried that his uncle would reveal secrets he had no right to betray, he stalked into the small sitting room.

  The room was silent, save for Juliet’s sharp intake of breath at something his uncle had just said. From the look on Roderick’s face it was not something particularly pleasant.

  “Get out,” he ordered, his anger rising as he saw Juliet’s stricken face. Damn it, if Roderick had told her anything about what had happened in this room …

  “Get the hell out of this house,” he repeated, unable to stop himself from raising his voice even as he saw his uncle’s pleased expression.

  “Ask him, my dear,” his father’s brother said with a cryptic smile. “Ask him about what happened here in this room.”

  His poisonous work done, Roderick left the room, and Hamilton and the footmen were waiting for him just outside the door to escort him from the house.

  “Alec,” Juliet said, hurrying toward him.

  “So, I suppose you have guessed my own little secret now,” he said bitterly. “That makes us even, does it not, wife?”

  As he had intended, her expression changed from concern to hurt. But, resilient as ever, Juliet quickly hid her pain. “I had not thought of it in those terms, my lord,” she said calmly. “And whatever secret you harbor, I know we can get past it. After all—”

  “There is no need to ‘get past it’ as you so eloquently phrase it,” he said, knowing he was behaving like an ass, but unable to stop himself. “We are well and truly wed, and no amount of secrets and lies can put that asunder.”

  “That is true,” Juliet said, ever reasonable, “so—”

  “Do you not understand it, my lady?” he interrupted her. “I have duped you! I have duped you. All of London is atwitter with the news that the ton’s most eligible bachelor was tricked into marriage, but the joke is on them. For I’m the one who tricked you.”

  “How?” she demanded, her voice remarkably calm despite her pallor. “How have you tricked me?”

  Stepping closer, he lifted her chin with a finger, and said quietly, “I let you think that I am a decent man. I let you think I am worthy of you.”

  She shook her head, as if trying to keep the words from worming their way into her ears. But the truth, as Alec well knew, was more insidious than the deadliest poison.

  “I let you think…” he told her, kissing her gently, then stepping away from her, dropping his hands as if she were a hot coal.

  “I let you think,” he continued, backing from the room, “that I am not the son of a murderer.”

  Unable to watch the confusion on her face turn to loathing, he turned and fled the room.

  * * *

  When Alec finally stumbled home that night, in the wee hours of the coming day, it was to find his bed empty, and the connecting door between their rooms very firmly closed.

  Just as well, he told himself. Now that she knew just what kind of stock he hailed from, Juliet would do well to protect herself from him.

  He unwound the woefully wilted cravat from around his neck and closed his eyes against the memory of Juliet’s face just before he turned and left the room. He had hoped to explain the most awful day of his life to her, but in his own time. After he’d assured her that he had done everything in his power to prevent himself from becoming the same kind of man his father had been. The same kind of man his uncle now was.

  His uncle’s revelation had put paid to that hope. He’d spent his whole life trying to atone for his own role in his mother’s death. And when he’d seen the opportunity to save Juliet from her own hellish existence in her mother’s house, he had, foolishly he now knew, hoped that he would at last have a chance to settle the score with fate.

  But now that hope was gone. And he would have to find some other way to make his peace with fate. To prove to himself and the world that he was not just like his father. To show every member of the ton who whispered in hushed tones when he passed that though he bore Devil Deveril’s blood in his veins, he would not, could not, turn into the kind of rage-filled monster who could beat a helpless woman to death in front of her child.

  Yet the very urge to prove them all wrong was a kind of rage, he thought bitterly as he struggled to remove his boots without the help of his valet.

  “Damn it,” he said through gritted teeth as he tugged. The sound of the connecting door between their two chambers alerted him to Juliet’s presence, which perversely made him tug harder.

  “Let me help,” she said, moving toward him, the thin fabric of her nightgown and peignoir shushing against itself as she walked.

  Kneeling, she gripped the leather of his boot and tugged, her fingers brushing against his. He could not fail to notice that her lips were pursed in pique. Her auburn hair, neatly done up in the braid she wore to bed, hung down her back, giving her the look of an outraged schoolmarm. Unable to go in bare feet, or even the kind of night slippers worn by other ladies of quality, she wore the simplest of her prosthetic feet with a pair of lace-up half-boots. It was a sign of her agitation that she had ventured out of her own room in such attire, for she was as yet still worried about revealing her infirmity to anyone but him. He wanted to fold her into his arms and protect her from the world. But it was, it seemed, too late for that.

  Still he could not resist questioning her.

  “So you aren’t afraid of me?” he asked, even to himself sounding like a petulant child.

  “No,” came her calm reply as she turned her attention to his other boot. “I am annoyed, of course. You didn’t send word that you would be absent from dinner. And I was forced to send our regrets to C
ecily and Winterson.

  “I was somewhat worried as well,” she added, pulling harder than strictly necessary on his boot.

  Once she’d removed them, he took his boots from her and stood. “If that is the entirety of your scold,” he said harshly, “I would like to go to sleep now. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a long day for me.”

  Turning his back on her, Alec shrugged out of his coat, and unbuttoned his waistcoat, his dismissal of her as obvious as he could make it.

  But it would seem that Juliet was made of sterner stuff.

  “Your uncle revealed nothing outside of telling me that your mother died at your father’s hand,” she said with a frown. “Which, incidentally, is something I already knew before he told me.”

  That brought him up short. “What do you mean, ‘you already knew’?”

  “Oh, come, Alec,” she said wryly. “You have spoken of your father’s brutality again and again. It is not such a far reach to suspect the carriage accident you blamed for your mother’s death was a polite fiction invented to protect your sisters from the truth.”

  He stared at her as if she’d gone mad. Had he really been so transparent? Was it so obvious that his sisters had figured out the truth? He dragged a hand over his face, feeling the prickle of stubble on his chin.

  “What I do not believe,” Juliet continued, stepping closer to him, “is that you had anything to do with it.”

  “Your championship is laudable, my dear,” he told her, holding her at arm’s length. “But you do not know what you are saying. I am reminded every day of just how much of my father’s blood runs through my veins. And through his brother’s as well. Indeed, you would do well to avoid being in company with either of us from now on. You should have a care for your own safety lest you suffer my mother’s fate.”

  “Do not be absurd,” she argued. “You are nothing like either of them.”

  Pushing away from her, he strode over to stare out the window into the darkened garden below. “I suppose you will not be content with simply taking my word for it?” he asked without much hope. Juliet was turning out to be more tenacious than he could ever have imagined when they’d first met.

  “Not at all,” she snapped. “You have made some strong accusations against my husband. I cannot let that stand without some sort of proof.”

  “You are relentless, do you know that?” he asked, turning to find her, not surprisingly, just behind him.

  Tilting her chin, she nodded. “Yes, I am. So you’d better tell me the truth.”

  Without a word, he took her arm and led her to the chairs before the fire. He would have preferred to drag her to bed and ravish her, but he could see from her expression that there would be no intimacy between them until he’d revealed all. Though, as luck would have it, he very much doubted there would be any further intimacies between them after he told his sordid story. With a pang of regret for what had been shaping up into a workable marriage, he began to tell her his story.

  Nineteen

  “My parents’ was an arranged marriage,” he began, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, as if resisting the urge to curl in on himself and hide his soft underbelly from predators.

  Juliet resisted the urge to take him into her arms and soothe him. He looked so brittle. And she sensed that the slightest touch would shatter him. The planes of his face, so finely wrought, were made harsh in the firelight. As if the very act of revealing his secret had transformed his angelic countenance into something devilish.

  “I believe at first that they were happy enough,” he continued. “My father was able to restrain himself a bit more in those days, I think. Or perhaps he was afraid of angering my mother’s family, from whom she received an annuity in addition to the bride gift she’d brought to the marriage. Whatever the case, they got along well enough and within two years I had come along, and with my birth my mother’s main duty of providing an heir had been fulfilled.”

  Juliet ached to hear him describe himself in such terms. It might be true that as the heir he had been a duty, but no child should be made to think of himself as such. At least, she did not believe so.

  “I was four when Kat was born, and it was then that I became aware of my mother’s fragility. She had Nanny bring us both down to her in the parlor one afternoon, and when Nanny was called away for a few moments, Kat began to fret, as babies sometimes do. And when Mama could not quiet her, I began to feel true panic from her. I was only a child of course but her anxiety…” He stopped, searching for the words. “It frightened me. I tried myself to convince Kat to stop crying. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did somehow, that her cries were distressing to Mama in a way that was more than the situation warranted.”

  She had little trouble imagining Alec as a small child, his gilded curls shining in the sunlight, trying to entertain his baby sister from her tantrum.

  “This was when my father arrived,” he continued, and Juliet felt her heart sink, knowing without words where this tale was heading. “He was foxed, though I only realized that later, and was annoyed at having his good mood spoiled by Kat’s wailing. He ordered Mama to make the crying stop. And already overset by the situation, and I think annoyed at her own failure, she said something sharp to him. I do not even recall what it was. All I know is that the next thing I saw was my father’s hand striking her face.”

  Alec closed his eyes, as if to erase the memory. “I can still hear the sound of his palm against her cheek. And the way that Kat’s cries stopped suddenly as if she too were surprised at the blow. Of course she started up again almost immediately, this time with a wail fit to wake the dead, and by this time Nanny had returned and she hurried us from the room. But not before I looked back, and saw my mother cowering before his raised hand.”

  “That must have been dreadful for you,” Juliet said quietly, trying to keep her tone measured and not reveal too much of her anger at both his parents for their handling of the situation.

  “It was hardly the worst I saw between them,” he said with a shrug. “Over the years they fought again and again. Though as time dragged on my mother’s defiance became more muted. I believe there was something about pregnancy, or childbirth, that brought her low in some way. For she seemed to be at her most vulnerable point just after Kat, and later Lydia, were born. And there was something about her very fragility that seemed to bring out the worst in my father. As if he scented blood and knew it was time to go for the throat.”

  To hear him describe his parents so hurt Juliet’s heart on his behalf. Still, she needed to hear it all. “Tell me the rest,” she said quietly.

  With a slight nod, he continued. “Something happened to Mama after Lydia’s birth. Though she’d been vulnerable before, I believe there was something about her experience with Lydia that … broke her, for want of a better word. Though she’d never been a particularly social person she’d at least attended some society functions and events, but after Lydia’s birth, she became almost entirely housebound. Whereas she’d made some effort to spend time with us for a little while every day, she became distant. Barely looking up when Nanny brought us in to see her. Or worse, ignoring us altogether. It was as if the very life had drained out of her.”

  What Alec described sounded very similar to something her own aunt, her father’s sister, had undergone following the birth of her child. It was a sort of ill humor that descended upon one following childbirth, and often led to megrims, a decline, and in some severe cases, death. She shuddered to think of what Lady Deveril’s children must have suffered on her behalf.

  “I was around eleven, and preparing to go up to Harrow,” he said, his expression bleak, “and Mama was begging my father not to send me away. It was an old argument. And to my shame, I was desperate to get away from them both. I loved my mother, of course, but she was smothering at times and I was ready to go off and become a young man without having her coddle me.”

  “Which is perfectly natural,” Juliet interjected with a smile. �
�I believe all children go through that stage at some point.”

  “Well, as careful as I was not to hurt her feelings, Mama was determined to paint my wish to go to school as a betrayal. And of course, simply to thwart her wishes, my father took my side in the matter.” His eyes shadowed. “I do admit to feeling some discomfort at having him as my champion, but I was a selfish child and was willing to do whatever it took to get my way.”

  Juliet would have argued, but she could see that he had made up his mind on the matter. Though she doubted he’d taken into account the fact that he was a child at the time, despite his description of himself as such. Her heart constricted to think of the too-serious, wary little boy he must have been.

  “That day, she was more overset than usual about the situation. They had been bickering about it all morning, and I could see that she was growing more and more upset. I tried to calm her but nothing was working. Finally, my father said something particularly cruel, something about it being better for me to be away at school with other boys than chained to my bitch of a mother.”

  He exhaled. “I don’t recall the exact words. But they were the last straw for Mama. She rose from the chaise, and slapped him full across the face.”

  Juliet covered her mouth to catch her own gasp.

  “I think in all the years he’d been hitting her it never occurred to my father that she could or would strike back. The silence that fell over the room was deafening. It was unlike anything I’ve heard or seen since. But when he returned the blow, I could almost hear the bones snap in her neck. Of course that’s impossible, but I thought I heard them all the same.”

  “What did you do?” Juliet asked, her stomach in knots as she thought of how awful it must have been for him to watch such scenes play out before him.

  “I didn’t launch myself at him to protect her, if that’s what you’re asking,” Alec said harshly. Though Juliet knew his anger was directed inward, she still felt the sting of it.