Somehow she dragged in enough breath to speak. She forced herself to meet his eyes. “The whisky is not sitting well with me, I’m afraid…And the fire is so hot…I need some air…”
Oh Elizabeth. You lie so badly.
Nevertheless, to her relief, her weak ploy worked.
The expression of hurt confusion in James’s eyes was immediately replaced with one of concern. “Of course.” He rose and as he crossed the room to open one of the bay windows, she took the opportunity to free her legs from the confines of the blanket before shakily standing up.
What are you going to do, Elizabeth? Run away? Fly out the window?
A strange bubble of sound—something between a sob and a gasp of laughter—lodged in her throat. She must be going mad. Indeed, she did feel quite light-headed, not like herself at all. She reached for the back of the chair.
“Beth…” James was at her side again, his strong hands grasping her upper arms. His touch burned through the thin cotton of her nightrail, and she felt her nipples harden to throbbing points. This was worse, so much worse. She couldn’t think if he touched her. She fastened her gaze on the strong column of his throat—she didn’t want to meet his eyes.
James’s voice was soft and low. “My love…” He gathered her into his arms, and placed a gentle kiss at the side of her trembling mouth. “You’re exhausted. And you shouldn’t be on your feet. Let me take you to bed—”
“No!” Elizabeth couldn’t bear the thought of being intimate with James right now. Not if it led to a confession of love. She placed her hands against his chest without thinking, to push him away, but her cut palm protested. She tried to bite back a gasp of pain, but she wasn’t fast enough.
James noticed. He lifted her chin, studying her face, his dark eyes grave. “It’s all right, Beth. I only meant that you need to rest. Please don’t mistake my motives. After what happened this afternoon, I certainly don’t expect…I mean I wouldn’t press you…”
For sex...
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe sex was the answer. She could use sex to distract James, to destroy this poignant, agonizing tenderness between them. If she asked him to take her to his bed. If she pleasured him until he couldn’t see straight. Remind him that she was nothing more than his mistress. His plaything. A whore. Then surely he wouldn’t want to tell her…
She reached up and kissed him, hard, desperately. Swept her tongue into his mouth and wrapped her forearms around his neck to drag him closer. To stop him talking. She didn’t want his words. She just wanted him. She would always want him.
And she needed to take what she could because tomorrow she would be gone from here.
She’d stayed too long already.
James yielded at once and he kissed her back with equal fervor, his hands tangling in her hair. He tasted of whisky and passion and everything she’d ever wanted. She wanted to tear at his shirt, at his breeches. Wanted to touch all of the hot, hard planes and contours of his body. But her bound, clumsy, painful hands were useless as she slid them down to the fastenings at the neck of his shirt. She moaned in frustration.
He immediately broke the kiss and pulled away. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this, Beth. You’re hurt—”
“No. I’m fine. Really. I want this, James. I want you.” She was mortified to hear the desperation in her voice, but she was beyond suppressing it. She reached down to place her hand over his erection; she had felt it pressing against her belly as soon as she’d started to kiss him, but again her cuts pained her. She winced and bit her lip, blinking away the hot tears that threatened to spill.
This isn’t working.
“I want you too, my love. But not like this. I can wait. You mean so much more to me than this…”
Oh no. Don’t say it.
“Haven’t you guessed how I feel, Beth?” James’s voice was husky with emotion. He caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers before cupping her jaw so she couldn’t escape his gaze. The tender light in his eyes was unmistakable. “I love you. And I don’t want you to be my mistress. I want you to be my wife.”
What?
A confession of love was bad enough…but a proposal?
A choked sound of distress caught in Elizabeth’s throat. She couldn’t breathe.
She wrenched herself away and ignoring the pain in her knee, stumbled a few steps across the room toward the open window. She could clearly hear the waves pounding futilely against the cliffs below, and a biting, icy wind pulled at her nightrail and hair.
This was worse, so much worse than she’d ever anticipated. The man she loved was laying his heart at her feet, offering her heaven. And she had to say no.
She was in hell and God help her—although a sinner like her truly had no right to call on heaven’s help—she was dragging James down with her.
And it was all her fault.
“Beth.” James took a step toward her, his hand outstretched, stark bewilderment in his eyes. “I don’t understand…”
She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to swallow past the anguish that tightened her throat and constricted her chest. If nothing else, she could at least give him an answer. Her voice when it emerged was ragged, hoarse. “I’m sorry, James…I can’t marry you.”
“But...” He broke off, dropping his hand, his forehead creasing into a confused frown. “I thought…” He shook his head as if attempting to knock his thoughts into order. His chest swelled as he dragged in a breath. “I’ve surprised you, shocked you even. I can see that. I know it hasn’t been that long since you lost your husband but…if you need time to think on this, Beth—”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No. It won’t make any difference.” She had to convince him. She didn’t want him to harbor false hope.
James paled, his skin pulling tight across the angular planes of his strikingly handsome face as he suddenly seemed to recognize her implacability. “Could you at least tell me why?” The rawness in his voice sliced her to the bone.
Her vision blurred with tears. She shook her head again, incapable of speech and closed her eyes. Her throat ached with the effort it took not to sob. She should leave. Go back to the servants’ quarters. Her trunk was still there. Pack.
The moment had come. This was over.
“Beth. This doesn’t make sense…”
“I know…I’m sorry…” Her voice was no more than a ragged whisper. She couldn’t manage any more. She turned away from him, toward the door.
But James wasn’t going to let her off so easily. Within the space of a heartbeat, he closed the distance between them and seized her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into her like talons. “Beth, look at me. Tell me what’s the matter. After all we’ve shared, can’t you at least tell me why you are rejecting me.”
She bit her bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood, and tried to tear herself away. But she was no match for James’s strength. Desperation made him rough, but she welcomed the pain.
He grasped her chin and tipped her head up, forcing her to look at him. His eyes were black and turbulent. Like storm clouds. Like the crashing sea below. “Don’t go, Beth. I beg you…not like this. I love you. Do you understand me? I need you. More than air, more than anything…I thought you felt the same way…” His voice cracked.
“I…Please…you have to let me go. I’m not worth it.”
“Of course you are. Just because you agreed to become my mistress doesn’t mean you can’t be my wife. Nobody will know, and besides, I don’t give a toss about what anyone thinks—”
“That’s not the reason.”
“Then what is it?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but halted. She didn’t want to confess her crimes. Her duplicity. But maybe it was the only way he would let her go. And didn’t he deserve the truth? The man that she loved. Her voice was a mere whisper. “I’m not widowed.”
James’s frown was almost a scowl as he struggled to make sense of what she’d said. “What, you mean you’ve never been married?”
>
“No. Just the opposite…”
* * * *
No. Just the opposite.
Comprehension crashed over Rothsburgh like a tidal wave. He dropped his hands away from Beth. “What? Do you mean that you…” He couldn’t complete the horrendous thought.
Beth’s already pale face became ashen. “Yes…I’m married.”
“No…” Surely she must be joking. But she wasn’t. He could see it in her very expression—the way her bottom lip trembled and her slender throat worked as if she was trying to stop herself from sobbing. The tears in her eyes.
Jesus Christ.
His beautiful, sweet, angelic Beth. The woman he loved beyond all understanding was married.
Rothsburgh shook his head, backing away from her, trying to deny the shocking truth. His mind was reeling. His world had been blown apart. Fragments of thought and half-formed questions lodged in his brain like shrapnel.
Why? Why would Beth do this? Pretend to be free when she wasn’t?
He’d known she had secrets. He’d known she was troubled. But never in his wildest imaginings had he thought that she hid something as awful, as shocking, as damning as this. He had to make sense of it. Heaven help him, even though she was splitting his heart in two, tearing his world asunder, he still loved her.
He dragged in a shaky breath and desperately fought to marshal his chaotic thoughts. “Your husband…you said he died at Waterloo, but obviously he didn’t. Was he even at Waterloo?”
Beth met his gaze. “Yes…he was at Waterloo.”
Something true at last. Insane hope flared within him for an instant. What if Beth was not quite a widow? Perhaps Lieutenant Eliott had been presumed dead because there had been no evidence left after the battle—no body. Dead, but not officially declared dead. He’d seen men blown to pieces… “Is he…is he missing in action then?”
“No. He came home…” Beth was shivering, a pale ghost in her nightgown, but he couldn’t afford to feel a shred of pity for her. Not when she was shredding his soul.
“So where is he now?” he demanded.
“James.” Beth’s voice cracked. “I can’t do this…Please…It won’t do either of us any good…”
“Christ, Beth. I’m trying to understand. You turn up here, professing you’re a widow…You become my lover. I just—after everything we’ve shared, don’t you think that you owe me an explanation, now that you’ve ripped out my heart?”
Her whole body flinched as if he’d struck her, and her face paled to the color of parchment.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered then took a step backward. Away from him. And another. She retreated behind a wing chair.
He didn’t know whether he wanted to drag her back into his arms, or order her to go. Either way she wasn’t his. Had never been his.
And there was virtually nothing on earth, nothing in heaven or hell that could excuse what she had done.
Beth was as deceitful as Isabelle. In fact she was no different to Isabelle.
He’d fallen in love with another faithless, lying whore.
An adulteress.
A sickening combination of black despair and bitter anger started to churn in his gut. Even though he felt as if he was being flayed alive, he still needed to know why, why Beth had pretended to be something that she wasn’t. Christ, did she even care for him at all, or was everything an act? Was she that good an actress?
He pushed his hands through his hair to stop himself reaching for her—to shake the truth from her, or to take her to his bed. Pound into her, possess her until…until what? It didn’t matter what he did—railed, cried, pleaded—it wouldn’t change the irrefutable fact that she was married.
Above all, right at this moment, all he could fairly demand from her was the truth. She at least owed him that much.
“Sorry isn’t good enough, Beth. You still haven’t told me why. Why did you leave him? Why did you come here? Why did you lie about being a widow?”
Why did you come here and break my heart? “You must have a bloody good reason.”
Beth shook her head, tears glazing her grey eyes then spilling unheeded onto her cheeks. If she was acting he should applaud her stricken expression. Despite his own burning anguish, his stupid, foolish heart contracted with pain at seeing her apparent devastation. Why wouldn’t she answer him?
Her nightmares. Did it have something to do with her nightmares? He suddenly felt like a drowning man reaching for something to hold onto, to save himself and save her. To absolve her of the heinous, treacherous act she had committed.
“Your husband. Did he abuse you? Neglect you? Abandon you?”
“No…no, he didn’t.” Her voice was thick with tears. He could barely make out what she was saying. “We grew apart…and then…It’s complicated…” She used her wrists to roughly dash the tears from her cheeks, swallowed, and looked directly at him. Her beautiful eyes were as bleak as a winter’s day at Eilean Tor. “It doesn’t matter why…it won’t change what I’ve done. How wrongly, how badly I’ve deceived you…I should go…”
Beth abandoned her defensive position behind the wing chair and headed for the door. She was limping, but he didn’t follow to assist her. Neither did he go to her aid when she had trouble turning the doorknob with her bandaged hands. He didn’t think he could bear to look at her. And he certainly didn’t have the right to touch her.
Would he ever touch her again?
Even though dark, angry despair penetrated his heart, he couldn’t quite stem the futile longing to go after her, seize her, take her.
But he wouldn’t.
She belonged with her husband, Lieutenant George Eliott. Poor bloody cuckold.
Rothsburgh turned away. The door clicked shut.
His broken voice was barely a whisper in the empty room. “Yes…go…It’s probably for the best.”
Chapter Thirteen
Elizabeth wasn’t sure what the hour was when she eventually rose from the narrow bed in her freezing room. It was fully night judging by the unrelenting blackness outside the high narrow window—the only one in this tiny servant’s chamber. The light of her single candle did nothing to relieve the pervading gloom. Neither did the squalls of rain constantly battering at the window pane. But the atmosphere perfectly matched her own state, and indeed what her future would be—cold and dark.
Bereft.
And it was no less than she deserved given the sins she had committed.
Now that her initial grief had ebbed, an odd numbness had begun to steal over her. If nothing else, at least she could think and function a little again. However her mind still reeled with incredulity at the thought that James had actually proposed to her. It was the last thing she had expected him to do. Her heart would bleed forever at the memory of his devastated face, at the very moment she had rejected him.
In some ways, his bitter anger on discovering she had single-mindedly duped him was easier to deal with than witnessing his despair. He was justified in hating her. It could be no more than she already hated herself.
Maisie had knocked on her door once in the early stages of the evening. No doubt her wracking sobs had been overheard. But Elizabeth had ignored the girl until she had at last given up and gone away. After that, no one else had approached her. She was thankful that James—she should probably refer to him as Lord Rothsburgh—had not thrown her out straightaway. She knew she didn’t deserve anything from him—other than his condemnation—so she was immensely grateful for that concession.
Crossing to the small chest of drawers by the bed, she checked her fob watch—ten o’clock. It wasn’t too late to find Roberts and ask when it would be safe to cross the causeway in the morning, and to check when the mail-coaches would pass through Torhaven. If she could have, she would have left without seeking assistance. Although Roberts and the other staff wouldn’t know what had precipitated her sudden need to depart, she felt so ashamed of what she had done, she felt thoroughly undeserving of any kind of aid. But there was no feas
ible way to leave Eilean Tor without it.
Elizabeth splashed icy water from the pitcher into a bowl, and washed her sticky, tear-stained face before beginning the painful and laborious process of getting dressed with her bandaged hands. She could hardly leave in her nightrail, and she refused to ask for any kind of help from Maisie or Mrs. Roberts. Besides, she was going to have to manage by herself from now on, so it was best that she started getting used to it.
Her plan remained the same. She would try her luck at securing the companion’s position with Lady Dunleven of Dundee. However, it seemed she would have to rely on her memory for the contact details of the baroness’s man-of-business. The newspaper advertisement that she had so carefully hidden in the pocket of her widow’s weeds had probably been destroyed by now. After James had taken her to his chamber, he had carefully stripped off her torn, bloodied and wine-stained garments, and Maisie had later taken them away to have them burned.
After Elizabeth had dressed, and as she clumsily slid the last pins into hair, she realized, there was hardly anything left for her to do. She would speak with Roberts, pack her trunk, and then write herself another reference letter from the astute Lady Beauchamp.
Then she would simply sit and wait through the long cold hours until dawn.
Alone. And that was how she would spend the rest of her nights until the end of her days.
* * * *
When consciousness returned, Rothsburgh really wished it hadn’t. It wasn’t just because he was lying face down on the hearth rug in the library with a blinding headache and a churning stomach. It was because the stark reality of living without Beth slammed into him with renewed force.
She can never be mine.
She belongs to someone else.
Last night, after she’d left his room, he’d set about drinking himself into a stupor that he hoped never to wake from, just so he wouldn’t have to deal with the agonizing truth.
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