He heard the faint creak of the floorboard, saw the flicker of light beneath his door a second before the study door opened and Emma appeared.
She was wearing her nightgown. One hand clutched a shawl around her that was slipping from her shoulders. The other held her candlestick and the half-burned beeswax candle that flickered within it. Her hair hung long and mussed from their earlier lovemaking, dark and beautiful as ebony. She had not taken the time to find her slippers, but stood there, her bare feet a pale golden olive against the dark polish of the floorboards. There was a look of worry on her face that made his heart ache all the more with love for her.
He lifted the sheet of paper from the desk, folded it closed within his hand. Rose to his feet and moved to meet her.
‘Could not sleep again?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
She glanced at the paper within his hand, then back at his face. Walked to stand before him.
‘Something is wrong.’ She sat the candlestick down on the desk.
‘Yes.’ He did not deny it.
‘Will you not tell me, Ned? I might be able to help.’
‘You might.’
‘I’m worried about you.’
The silence hissed loud and strained.
‘Tell me, Ned,’ she said. ‘You know you have to tell me.’
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I have to tell you.’
He looked into her eyes, eyes that were dark and warm and tender, and filled with love. And he savoured that moment, all of her love and all of what she was, all of the wonder of what was between them. Love. Something he had never known throughout a lifetime. Something so glorious and powerful and strong he never could have imagined. He loved her with all that he was, and because he loved her he knew that he would do the thing he had feared and dreaded more than any other thing in his life. More than hunger and starvation. More than beatings and the icy fingers of night that stole lives from slumbering forms in doorways and alleyways. The hardest thing in the world. And the easiest.
‘I love you, Emma.’
‘I know you do. And I love you, too.’
He smiled at that. Took the words and the sound of her voice and the gentleness in her eyes and stored those most precious of treasures in his mind for the dark days ahead.
‘I love you,’ he said again. ‘Always remember that. It is the truth, no matter what else you might think.’
‘I would never think anything else.’
But she would. His eyes held hers, clinging to these last precious moments. He reached a hand to her face, stroked his fingers against the softness of her cheek. And she nestled her cheek against his fingers and placed her own hand upon his and held it there.
He leaned forward, breathed in the scent of her hair, placed one final kiss upon her lips.
‘I am sorry, Emma. I would give everything to undo what you have suffered...everything to change what I did.’
‘Ned,’ she said softly, the little worry line etching between her brows. ‘Tell me what it is that you have done.’
He took a breath, gave the slightest of nods.
The seconds stretched, but he felt almost relief in knowing that the time was now, that the tortuous waiting was over.
The paper was clutched tight between his fingers. He opened it out, smoothed the creases from it and offered it to her. And in so doing he pierced his heart with a dagger made of words that had destroyed a family’s world.
She took the paper and held it closer to the candlelight to read the words penned upon it.
‘I do not understand,’ she said. ‘This is Kit’s vow, for our home and my father’s fortune, for everything that he owned...’ She shook her head, frowned. ‘I do not understand, Ned,’ she said again. He saw the moment that she did, the cold horror of realisation that crept across her face.
She raised her eyes to his.
‘Yes,’ he said in answer to the question he saw in them, the question that could not form upon her lips. ‘I am the man your brother gambled against and lost. I am the man who took your family’s fortune.’
She stared at him as if she could not believe it. But she did believe it. He could see it in the horror and pain and shock in her eyes. He could see it by the way the paper in her hand began to tremble.
‘You?’ she whispered.
‘Me,’ he confirmed.
‘You are the man who ruined my brother... The man who destroyed my family.’
He said nothing.
‘No.’ She shook her head as if to deny the truth. ‘No,’ she whispered the word again. Scrunched her face as if in pain.
‘Yes, Emma,’ he said. ‘I would give anything to deny it and say it was not me, but I cannot.’
‘Oh, God!’ she gasped and clutched a hand around her stomach. ‘Oh, God, please, no!’
He reached a hand to steady her, but she pulled back from his touch as if scalded, seeing the monster he was for the first time. ‘Do not touch me!’ she whispered fiercely.
He held his palms up. Stepped back to give her space.
Her breath was ragged. She pulled her shawl around her. Leaned back heavy against the desk. Stared at the floor, but he knew she was seeing nothing of what was around her only the horror within her mind. ‘This cannot be happening.’
Ned had said the same thing to himself a thousand times.
‘How could you do it?’ she asked.
He said nothing. Just swallowed.
‘You knew all along who I was.’
‘Not all along. Not at the start.’
‘You are lying! Everything between us has been a lie!’
‘I have never lied to you. I never will.’
‘I do not believe you!’
He said nothing.
‘You knew who I was. You tricked me. You made me love you.’
He stood there and accepted the wrath he deserved.
‘How could you do it, Ned?’ she asked again. This time louder, more of a cry. This time the question was not of what he had done to her, but what he had done to her brother. ‘Tell me what happened that night.’
He glanced away. But she grabbed hold of his coat lapels with white-knuckled fists and stared up into his face. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘I have a right to know.’
He nodded. She had every right to know.
His voice was low and empty as he relayed a very brief sketchy outline. ‘A group of rich young aristocrats had taken to coming over to Whitechapel, to Old Moll’s gaming den in Half Moon Alley. They liked the play there. It amused them to come amongst us and see how the other half lived. To dice with living on the edge. Devlin, Hunter, Bullford, Fallingham and your brother. They were drinking deep and playing deeper.
‘I did not set out to fleece him, Emma. He...’ Ned thought back to that night. To Kit Northcote. And the truth of what had happened. He looked into Emma’s eyes, eyes that had something of that foolish young arrogant man who was her brother. The brother whom she loved. The brother whom she had cherished. And he thought he would do anything to save her, to take her pain upon himself. ‘He was neither skilled nor lucky with cards,’ he finished.
‘He was young and foolish!’
‘Yes.’
‘He was out of his depth in such a place.’
‘Way out.’ She had no idea.
‘And yet you took everything from him.’
‘I took all he had staked upon the table.’
‘You did not have to do that.’
‘Yes, I did, Emma,’ he said quietly.
But she did not understand. And she never would if he could help it. She shook her head.
‘Because you wanted to be a gentleman?’
He said nothing.
‘Because five thousand pounds were no
t enough that you must have even more?’
Silence.
Her fingers loosened their grip upon his lapels. She pushed him away. Hard. With disdain. ‘You bastard!’
He made no defence. Because he was a bastard in every sense of the word.
She moved away, perched on the edge of the winged chair before the dark empty hearth, the small distance like miles between them. A gulf that would never be breached.
* * *
The silence seemed to echo and hiss in the room around her. She wanted to strike out at him, to hit him, to yell and scream and cry and weep. But Emma did none of those things.
She sat in that armchair and her mind was reeling. Part of her unable to believe what Ned was telling her, part knowing that it was the truth she should always have guessed. So many thoughts tumbled through her mind, terrible possibilities making themselves known, although beside the magnitude of what he had just told her she did not know why they should be so very terrible at all. She felt as if he had taken a knife and cut her heart from her chest.
‘You should have told me,’ she said.
‘I tried.’
‘Not hard enough.’
‘No.’
She placed her knuckles against her lips, pressed hard to control the words, to control everything that was whirring with such fury and shock within her.
‘Or maybe I was just part of your plan.’
‘With you there was no plan.’
‘No?’ She felt flayed and betrayed, raw and weeping. She could not think straight, could only feel a gaping hurt and a roaring anger and endless uncertainty.
‘What were you really doing in Whitechapel, Ned? Those nights you came to the Red Lion to eat when you lived here, in a mansion in Mayfair, with the finest of chefs to cook for you?’
‘I’ve already told you the answer to that question.’
‘And if I do not believe you?’
He said nothing, just held her gaze, strong and silent, but she saw the tension that clenched in his jaw.
‘Your steward, Rob Finchley, does he know the truth? Of who you are? Of who I am?’
‘He was in the crowd at Old Moll’s that night.’
‘How you must have laughed together at my naïvety.’
‘We did not laugh.’
‘He did not accompany you on your trips to Whitechapel.’
‘No.’
‘And you just happened to find me the Red Lion?’
‘I just happened to find you, Emma.’
‘Why there?’
‘Because it was far enough away from my old haunts that I would not be known.’
‘You expect me to believe that your being in the same chop-house, in which I worked, was just coincidence?’
‘I don’t expect anything.’
There was an ache in her chest, a churning in her stomach, a bitterness in her throat. All of her fears rose up, vile and goading her to the worst of imaginings.
‘You took everything my family owned. Why not me? Was I just the final prize to be added to your winnings? That you could have everything from my brother: his money, his home, his position in society. That you could have even me, my heart, my body, my life? The ultimate revenge against a people you hated. Because we were rich and you were not. Because you wanted to taunt him. Because—’
A lightning of emotion flickered in his eyes. He moved then. Fast. Closed the distance between them in a breath. Grabbed her by the top of her arms. Pulled her up from the chair and stared down into her face.
‘Never!’ he said and the whispered word shook with the force of controlled emotion. ‘I did not know who you were, not until Lady Lamerton introduced us. And, yes, I should have walked away from you then, once I knew, and God knows I tried. Hate me all you will, Emma. Despise me. Loathe me. But never ever think that I would use you so poorly. I may have nothing of honour. I may not be a gentleman. I may have been a thief and a beggar and a rogue in my life. But never doubt that one thing.’ He held her eyes with a fierceness that belied the quietness of his voice.
She could feel the press of his fingers around her arms.
She could hear the tremor in his breath and feel the extent of the control he was exerting over himself.
There was a pain and rawness in his expression that shocked her almost as much as his revelation had done. And an utter sincerity.
Their gazes held, locked in a torture. The seconds stretched in agony. Until he suddenly released her. Backed away. Sat down in the winged chair opposite and stared at the empty hearth.
She was shaking so much that she dropped down into the chair beneath her.
Only the clock punctuated the silence between them.
She did not know what to say.
She did not know what to do.
Her whole world felt like it had exploded around her. Love, hope, trust, a future—all gone in one fell swoop. She did not know who he was. She did not even know who she was any more. And the thought that thrummed through her head constantly, insistently, was that it had been Ned there that night in the gaming hell with Kit. The enormity of it obliterated all else.
‘You promised to find him, when all along it was you who drove him away,’ she said almost to herself.
She got to her feet.
He glanced up at her, the look in his eyes touching the rent in her soul.
She bled. The pain was piercing. It engulfed everything, everything, so that she could not think, only feel and what she felt was agony. An agony that was tearing her apart. An agony she could not bear. She needed to be alone.
‘I cannot be with you, Ned Stratham.’ Not right now. She could not look at him. Could not speak another word to him. Only shook her head and turned and walked away.
* * *
Ned sat in the study for the rest of the night. This was a beating like none he had ever taken. A wound that would never heal. But he did not allow himself the luxury of self-pity.
He locked his emotions away. Thought through the steps of what must be done. The only things he could do. Nothing would make this right. But then he had always known that. He could bear her hatred, but her hurt—that was a lot harder. But Ned would bear it. He had borne much in his life. Things that would have made men like Devlin and Kit Northcote quail. He would bear it and know he had done all that he could. And that knowledge at least was something.
Ned did not drown his sorrows in gin. He did not stare aimlessly down on to the darkened street. He went to the desk and he found the papers that he needed. Then he sat there in that expensive leather-winged armchair, in a room that was bigger than any house he had lived in. He waited for the night to pass, and the dawn to come.
* * *
When daylight finally came he washed and dressed himself in fresh clothes. And with the papers safely stowed in his pocket he slipped out of the front door.
Emma stood at the edge of the window of her bedchamber and watched Ned’s figure disappear along the road.
She was still wearing the nightdress and shawl. Her feet were bare and tinged blue from the cold. Her head was pounding from a night filled with a storm of misery and disbelief and nothing of sleep. Her eyes were swollen and heavy from weeping. But she did not weep now. She was empty. Numb.
She stood there even after he was long gone.
She stood there because she did not know what else to do.
What did a woman do when she discovered that the man she loved was not who she thought him? That everything upon which their life and love was based was a lie?
I have never lied to you. I never will.
Maybe not in words. But he had deceived her just the same. And she did not know where they went from here. Because she did not know what it was she felt for him any more. Because she was his wife and he her husband an
d nothing could change that.
He was her husband.
He was her lover.
And he was the man who had taken her family’s money.
She thought of her father having to give up their family home in Berkeley Street and move to a string of increasingly cheaper accommodations. And of the slow ignoble decline to obscurity.
She thought of Kit’s running away, of what that had done to her mother, of first Spitalfields and the consumption that had taken her mother’s life. And then Whitechapel, and the dockyards and the Red Lion.
‘Kit.’ She whispered his name in the quietness of the room, as if he would hear her. Kit. In her mind she saw his face, the laughing eyes that were so like her father’s, the grin that he wore when he teased her.
No one put a pistol to his head and forced him to the gaming tables. Devlin’s words sounded again in her memory. She tried to close her mind to that truth, just as she had always done, but this time there was something in the way and the door would not shut completely.
She closed her eyes and it was not her brother’s face she saw, but that of another man. A face that was not refined or beautiful. A face that was rugged, with its own harsh handsomeness. It made the hole in her chest, where her heart had been, ache. But it could not change who he was and what he had done. It only ridiculed it all the more, even if what had brought them together really had been just a cruel trick played by fate. Did she even believe that?
The memory of the pain in Ned’s eyes, the force of emotion pulsing through him when he had denied her accusation. A man on the edge. She believed him. But it did not change anything. He had kept the truth from her. And, in a way, that deception hurt more than what it was he had been hiding.
She thought of packing the little travelling bag with which she had arrived here. Of returning to her father.
She thought of turning up at the Red Lion and asking for her old job back. Of earning enough to rent a room with another girl.
But in the end she knew she could do neither of those things.
So Emma went through the motions and she washed and she dressed, and she waited for Ned to come home.
Harlequin Historical September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: The Lone SheriffThe Gentleman RogueNever Trust a Rebel Page 41