by Lisa Kleypas
Minutes passed, and it became warm and stuffy in the carriage. Deciding that the smell of the docks was better than the prospect of sitting in an enclosed vehicle with no breeze, Aline began to rap on the door to summon Peter. Just as her knuckles touched the paneling, the door was wrenched open with a violence that startled her. She froze, her hand stopped in mid-motion. McKenna appeared in the doorway of the carriage, his shoulders blocking the sunlight.
He reached out to grip her arm as if he were saving her from an unexpected fall. The urgent clamp of his fingers hurt. Wincing, Aline reflected that McKenna seemed like an utter stranger. She found it impossible to believe that this harsh-featured man had held and kissed her so tenderly. “What is the matter?” he demanded, his voice grating. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“What?” She stared at him in utter bewilderment. “Why would I need a doctor?”
McKenna’s eyes narrowed, and his hand dropped from her abruptly. “You’re not ill?”
“No…why would you think I…” As comprehension dawned, Aline glared at her brother, who stood just beyond him. “Marcus! You shouldn’t have told him that!”
“He wouldn’t have come otherwise,” Marcus said without a trace of remorse.
Aline gave him a damning glance. As if matters hadn’t been difficult enough, Marcus had now succeeded in making McKenna even more hostile. Unrepentant, Marcus stepped back from the carriage to allow the two of them a marginal amount of privacy.
“I’m sorry,” Aline said to McKenna. “My brother misled you—I’m not ill. The reason I am here is that I desperately need to talk to you.”
McKenna regarded her stonily. “There’s nothing left to be said.”
“There is,” she insisted. “You told me the day before yesterday that you were going to talk to me honestly, or you would regret it for the rest of your life. I should have done the same, and I am so sorry that I didn’t. But I’ve traveled all night to reach you before you left England. I am asking—no, begging you to give me a chance to explain my behavior.”
He shook his head. “They’re about to pull the gangway. If I don’t reboard within five minutes, I’m going to be separated from all my trunks and personal papers—everything but the clothes on my back.”
Aline gnawed at the insides of her cheeks, trying to contain her rising desperation. “Then I’ll come aboard with you.”
“And sail across the Atlantic without so much as a toothbrush?” he jeered.
“Yes.”
McKenna gave her a long, hard stare. He gave no indication of what he was feeling, or even if he was considering her plea. Wondering if he was going to refuse her, Aline cast about recklessly for the right words, the key to unlock his frozen self-control…and then she noticed the vein throbbing violently at his temple. Hope unfurled inside her. He wasn’t indifferent to her, no matter that he tried to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps the only salve to McKenna’s battered pride was the sacrifice of her own. Reluctantly letting her guard down, she spoke more humbly than she ever had in her life. “Please. If you still feel anything at all for me, don’t go back on that ship. I swear that I will never ask anything else of you. Please let me tell you the truth, McKenna.”
As another untenable silence spun out, McKenna’s jaw tightened until a muscle in his cheek twitched. “Damn you,” he said softly.
Aline realized with dizzying relief that he was not going to refuse her. “Shall we go to Marsden Terrace?” she dared to whisper.
“No—I’ll be damned if I’ll have your brother hovering over us. He can go to Marsden Terrace, while you and I talk in Shaw’s rooms at the Rutledge.”
Aline was afraid to say another word, on the chance that she might cause him to change his mind. She nodded and settled back in the carriage, while her heart slammed repeatedly against her ribs.
McKenna gave instructions to the driver and then climbed into the vehicle. He was immediately followed by Marcus, who did not seem terribly pleased by the plan, as he wanted the situation to remain under his immediate control. Nevertheless, he offered no protest, only sat beside Aline and folded his arms across his chest.
The silence was thick and heavy as the vehicle rolled away from the docks. Aline was wretchedly uncomfortable, her legs stiff and itching, her emotions in turmoil, her head aching. It didn’t help that McKenna looked about as warm and understanding as a block of granite. Aline wasn’t even certain about what she would say to him, how she could tell him the truth without engendering his pity or disgust.
As if sensing her worry, Marcus reached down and took her fingers in his, giving them a small, encouraging squeeze. Looking up, Aline saw that McKenna had noticed the subtle gesture. His suspicious gaze flickered from Marcus’s face to hers. “You may as well start explaining now,” he said.
Aline gave him an apologetic glance. “I would rather wait, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine,” McKenna said derisively. “It’s not as if I don’t have the time.”
Marcus stiffened at the other man’s tone. “Look here, McKenna—”
“It’s all right,” Aline interrupted, digging her elbow into her brother’s side. “You’ve helped quite enough, Marcus. I can manage on my own now.”
Her brother frowned. “Be that as it may, I don’t approve of you going to a hotel with no family member or servant to accompany you. There will be gossip, and you don’t—”
“Gossip is the least of my worries,” Aline interrupted, increasing the pressure of her elbow against his ribs, until Marcus grunted and fell silent.
After what seemed to be hours, they reached the Rutledge Hotel. The carriage stopped in the small street behind one of the four private accommodations. Aline was in an agony of anticipation as McKenna descended from the carriage and helped her down. Turning, she glanced back at Marcus. Seeing the raw helplessness in her eyes, Marcus gave her a reassuring nod, just before he spoke to McKenna in a hard voice.
“Wait. I want a word with you.”
Arching one black brow, McKenna stepped aside with him. He met the earl’s gaze with a look of icy inquiry. “What now?”
Marcus turned his back on Aline, and spoke too quietly for her to overhear. “I hope to hell that I haven’t underestimated you, McKenna. Whatever comes of your conversation with my sister, I want to assure you of one thing—if you harm her in any way, you’ll pay with your life. And I mean that literally.”
Aggravated beyond bearing, McKenna shook his head and muttered some choice words beneath his breath. He strode to Aline and guided her forcibly to the back entrance, where the footman had already rapped at the door. Gideon Shaw’s valet appeared at the doorway with an expression of open astonishment. “Mr. McKenna,” he exclaimed, “I would have thought your ship had sailed by now—”
“It has,” McKenna said curtly.
The valet blinked and strove to regain composure. “If you are searching for Mr. Shaw, sir, he is at the company offices—”
“I want the use of his rooms for a few minutes,” McKenna said. “See that we’re not disturbed.”
With an admirable display of tact, the valet did not even glance in Aline’s direction. “Yes, sir.”
Brusquely McKenna ushered Aline into the residence, which was handsomely furnished in dark woods, the walls covered in rich plum-colored em-bossed paper. They went to the sitting room, with the bedroom visible just beyond. Heavy velvet drapes had been pulled back to reveal curtains of tea-dyed lace that softened the sunlight as it streamed into the room.
Aline could not control her nervousness. It erupted in a violent trembling that made her teeth click. Clenching her jaw, she went to sit in a large leather chair. After a long pause, McKenna did the same, settling back in a nearby chair and regarding her coldly. An antique French carriage clock ticked busily on the mantel, underscoring the tension that fractured the air.
Aline’s mind went blank. In the carriage she had managed to think of a fairly well-structured explanation, but all her carefully conside
red phrases had suddenly vanished. Nervously she dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
McKenna’s gaze flickered to her mouth, and his dark brows drew together. “Get on with it, will you?”
Aline inhaled and exhaled slowly, and rubbed her forehead. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m just not quite certain how to begin. I’m glad of the chance to finally tell you the truth, except…this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Looking away from him into the empty hearth, Aline gripped the upholstered arms of the chair. “I must be a better actress than I thought, if I’ve managed to convince you that your social standing matters to me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never cared one whit about the circumstances of your birth…where you came from, or who you are…you could be a rag man, and it wouldn’t matter to me. I would do anything, go anywhere, to be with you.” Her nails dug deep crescents into the worn leather. She closed her eyes. “I love you, McKenna. I’ve always loved you.”
There was no sound in the room, only the crisp tick of the mantel clock. As Aline continued, she had an odd sense of listening to herself as if from a distance. “My relationship with Lord Sandridge is not what it appears. Any appearance of romantic interest between the two of us is a deception—one that has served both Lord Sandridge and myself. He does not desire me physically, and he could never entertain that kind of feeling for me because he…” She paused awkwardly. “His inclinations are limited exclusively toward other men. He proposed marriage to me as a practical arrangement—a union between friends. I won’t say that I didn’t find the offer attractive, but I turned him down just before you returned from London.”
Opening her eyes, Aline stared down at her lap, while the blessed feeling of numbness left her. She felt raw and exposed and terrified. This was the hardest part, making herself vulnerable to a man who had the power to demolish her with a single word. A man who was justifiably furious at the way she had treated him. “The illness that I had so long ago…” she said raspily, “…you were right to suspect that I was lying about that. It wasn’t a fever. I was injured in a fire—I was burned quite badly. I was in the kitchen with Mrs. Faircloth, when a pan of oil started a fire in the basket grate on the stove. I don’t remember anything else. I was told that my clothes caught fire, and I was instantly covered in flames. I tried to run…a footman knocked me to the ground and beat out the flames. He saved my life. You may remember him—William—I think he was second footman when you were still at Stony Cross.” She paused to take a long breath. Her trembling had eased a little, and she was finally able to steady her voice. “My legs were completely charred.”
Risking a glance at McKenna, she saw that he was no longer leaning back in his chair. His body was canted slightly forward, his large frame overloaded with sudden tension, his eyes a blaze of blue-green in his skull-white face.
Aline averted her gaze once more. If she looked at him, she wouldn’t be able to finish. “I was in a nightmare that I couldn’t awaken from,” she said. “When I wasn’t in agony from the burns, I was out of my head with morphine. The wounds festered and poisoned my blood, and the doctor said that I wouldn’t last a week. But Mrs. Faircloth found a woman who was said to have special healing abilities. I didn’t want to get better. I wanted to die. Then Mrs. Faircloth showed me the letter…” Remembering, she trailed into silence. That moment had been permanently engraved in her mind, when a few scrawled words on paper had eased her away from the brink of death.
“What letter?” she heard McKenna ask in a suffocated voice.
“The one you had sent to her…asking for money, because you needed to break your apprenticeship and flee from Mr. Ilbery. Mrs. Faircloth read the letter to me…and hearing the words you had written made me realize…that as long as there was a chance that you were in this world, I wanted to go on living in it.” Aline stopped suddenly as her eyes blurred, and she blinked furiously to clear them.
McKenna made a hoarse sound. He came to the chair and sank to his haunches before her, breathing as if someone had delivered a crushing blow to the center of his chest.
“I never thought you’d come back,” Aline said. “I never wanted you to find out about my accident. But when you returned to Stony Cross, I decided that being close to you—even for one night—was worth any risk. That is why I…” She hesitated, blushing wildly. “The night of the village fair…”
Breathing heavily, McKenna reached for the hem of her gown. Swiftly Aline bent to stop him, gripping his wrist in a convulsive movement. “Wait!”
McKenna went still, the muscles of his shoulders tightly bunched.
“Burn scars are so ugly,” Aline whispered. “They’re all over my legs. The right one is especially bad, where much of the skin was destroyed. The scars tighten and shrink until it’s difficult to straighten my knee sometimes.”
He absorbed that for a moment, and then proceeded to pry her fingers from his wrist and remove her slippers, one after the other. Aline fought a wave of nausea, knowing exactly what he was about to see. She swallowed repeatedly, while salty tears burned the back of her throat. He reached beneath her skirt and slid his hands along her tense thighs, his palms skimming the fabric of her drawers until he found the tapes at her waist. Aline turned chalk-white, followed by brilliant scarlet, as she felt him tugging at the undergarment.
“Let me,” he murmured.
She obeyed clumsily, raising her hips while he pulled the drawers over her buttocks and stripped the garment from her legs. The hem of her skirt was pushed to the tops of her thighs, the cool air washing over her exposed skin. A profuse sweat of anxiety broke out on her face and neck, and she used her sleeve to blot her cheeks and upper lip.
Kneeling before her, McKenna took hold of one of her icy feet in his warm hand. He brushed his thumb over the pink tips of her toes. “You were wearing shoes when it happened,” he said, staring at the pale, smooth skin of her feet, the delicate tracing of blue veins near the arch.
Perspiration stung her eyes as she opened them to look at the top of his dark head. “Yes.” Her entire body jerked as his hands slid to her ankles.
McKenna’s fingers stilled. “Does it hurt when I touch you?”
“N-no.” Aline blotted her face again, gasping as the slow, easy exploration continued. “It’s just…Mrs. Faircloth is the only one I’ve ever allowed to touch my legs. In some places I can’t feel anything…and in others, the skin is too sensitive.” The sight of his hands sliding along her ravaged calves was almost more than she could bear. Transfixed and miserable, she watched his fingertips pass over the rough, reddened scars.
“I wish I had known,” he murmured. “I should have been with you.”
That made Aline want to weep, but she set her jaw hard to keep it from quivering. “I wanted you,” she admitted stiffly. “I kept asking for you. Sometimes I thought you were there, holding me…but Mrs. Faircloth said they were fever dreams.”
The motion of his hands stopped. The words seemed to send a tremor across his wide shoulders, as if he had taken a chill. Eventually his palms resumed their progress along her thighs, pressing them apart, his thumbs skimming the insides. “So this is what has kept us apart,” he said unsteadily. “This is why you wouldn’t let me come to your bed, and why you refused my proposal. And why I had to hear the truth from Livia about what your father did, instead of hearing it from you.”
“Yes.”
McKenna rose on his knees, gripping the chair arms on either side of her, his face just inches from her own.
Aline had been prepared for sorrow, sympathy, repulsion…but she had never anticipated rage. She had not expected the gleam of primitive fury in his eyes, and the grimace of a man who had nearly been pushed beyond the limits of sanity. “What did you think I meant when I said that I loved you? Did you think I would give a damn about your scars?”
Stunned by his reaction, Aline responded with a single nod.
“My God.” The blood rose higher in his face. “What if the situation were reversed, an
d I was the one who had been hurt? Would you have left me?”
“No!”
“Then why did you expect anything less of me?”
The explosive outburst caused her to shrink back in the chair. McKenna leaned forward, following her, his fury now edged with anguish. “Damn you, Aline!” He took her face between his shaking hands, his long fingers cradling her cheeks, his eyes liquid and glittering. “You’re the other half of me,” he said hoarsely. “How could you think that I wouldn’t want you? You’ve put us both through hell for no reason!”
Clearly he did not understand the source of her fear. Taking hold of his broad, hard wrists, Aline gripped them tightly, her throat working.
McKenna glared at her with ardent, angry concern. “What is it?” He kept one hand at the side of her face, while using the other to smooth the hair back from her forehead.
“It was one thing to make love to me when you didn’t know about my legs. But now that you know…you will find it difficult, perhaps even impossible…”
McKenna’s eyes gleamed in a way that alarmed her. “You doubt my ability to make love to you?”
Hurriedly Aline pulled the gown back over her legs, infinitely relieved when they were covered once more. “My legs are horrible, McKenna.”
He uttered a curse that startled her with its foulness, and gripped her head between his hands, forcing her to stare at him. His voice was savage. “For twelve years I have been in constant torment, wanting you in my arms and believing it would never be possible. I want you for a thousand reasons other than your legs, and…no, damn it, I want you for no reason at all, other than the fact that you’re you. I want to shove myself deep inside you and stay for hours…days…weeks. I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses…the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you in the final hour of my life…to lie in your arms as I take my last breath.” He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. “Aline,” he whispered, “do you know what hell is?”