Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

  “Tell me,” she pleaded, her warm breath stirring the cold, winter air. “I want to hear it from your lips and not that man you once called friend. I am tired of you only offering the half-truths you think I can handle. I want it all.” A paroxysm of pain twisted her face. “Even if that truth is you love another.”

  “I do not love another.” The denial exploded from him.

  By the sad glimmer in her blue eyes, she didn’t believe that truth.

  “I was a boy.”

  A broken, tremulous smile formed on her lips. “Funny how you should claim you were a boy in that regard and a man in all others.”

  He went still and then panic ran through him. She didn’t believe him? And why should she any longer. “I thought I loved her,” he said quietly, again. “I loved the excitement she represented. I intended to offer for her.” By the agony twisting his wife’s delicate features, he may as well have run her through with a dull blade.

  Prudence dropped her eyes to the snow-covered earth. “I see.” Christian strained to hear her faintly spoken whisper.

  “Oh, Prudence.” His voice emerged ragged from the place where regret lived. “Those feelings were not truly love. I loved the dream of being in love, but that is not…” His words trailed off.

  She raised her shattered gaze to his face. “That is not, what?”

  Christian forced his gaze to hers. “That is not what it was.” He’d not let the first time he told her be clouded with talks of Lynette.

  “I want to know about her and Blackthorne’s charges.”

  And she deserved those truths.

  “It is as he said,” he said warily, swiping a hand over his face.

  With her insistence, she dragged him back to that night, and the hellish days to follow. He’d spent so many years trying to bury the memories of that night that he did not know what to do with this request to share. The wind howled around them, whipping at her muslin cloak. In his haste to be rid of Blackthorne and with shame hot on his heels, he’d fled without his cloak. He welcomed the stinging chill as the snow slapped his face. “Her name was Lynette.” Of course, with the duke’s revelation, she was aware of such, but it was the only place he knew where to begin.

  His wife’s slender frame went still and he detested he’d been that rash, reckless youth who’d only lived for his own pleasures. “She was a Belgian woman. We met at a tavern and…” She’d easily seduced the seventeen-year-old boy he’d been. A boy who’d been foolish enough to believe her words of love and to have given her his heart in return. He cleared his throat. “I would go and…” Shame at even speaking of such to his wife, thickened his voice. “Pay visits to her in the city.”

  Through his telling, Prudence remained frozen. He allowed himself a moment to look at her but could not read anything of her expression. Was she disgusted? Horrified? “Several evenings before Toulouse, I was preparing to return for battle. She asked where I would be, said she would die if she did not see me immediately after the battle. Said she wished to…” Know the pleasure of his body. “See me once more.” His lips pulled in a grimace. How had he not questioned her insistence that night? With the inexperience of his youth, he’d preened like a peacock over her praise and the hungering desire in her eyes.

  “And you told her where you were to battle?” Prudence’s quietly spoken inquiry sought to make sense of the sins of his past.

  He gave his head a shake. “Not specifically.” Largely because he himself had not known the specifics of the battlefield plans. If he had known, he’d have easily given those facts over to her. “I made plans to meet Lynette at an inn in Saint-Gaudens. It is a crossroads between the two…” Recognizing he rambled, he allowed the useless details to trail off. “She was a French sympathizer. A spy for the French. She took that information and from there, French intelligence needed only to make their deductions on Wellington’s movements.”

  His wife frowned. “You did not give away your location.”

  He dragged a hand through his hair, a desperate laugh working up his throat. By God, why must she see more in him than there was? “I may as well have.”

  “No, no you may not as well have. Those are two very different things.”

  His sole remaining friend in the world, Maxwell had been of a forgiving opinion, too. When he’d visited Blackthorne after the war, burned and scarred and broken, he’d offered the man the truth. He’d sat silent, unmoving as the dead, and then with a terse “Rot in hell”, had never spoken to Christian again.

  He glanced down as his wife slid her hands into his and held them up, forming a small circle between them. “It was a mistake, Christian,” she said quietly, cutting to the heart of it. “What happened was not your fault. Toulouse would have happened whether you’d mentioned Saint-Gaudens or not.”

  He pulled free of her hold and backed away. She advanced, as determined as Wellington himself had been. “Will you cease defending me?” His harsh command brought her to a jerky stop. “When will you simply accept the truth of who I am?” Of what I am.

  His wife gave him a gentle look. “And what is that?”

  The snowflakes danced about them, captured by the dark blue of her cloak. “I am a coward.”

  “No, you are not,” she interrupted giving her head a brusque shake. “You are a man of strength and honor. You were a boy who went to war and fought.”

  Poorly. He’d fought poorly. Why could she not understand that?

  She took another faltering step toward him and then stopped as though uncertain. “When I was a girl, I was afraid of the dark. My sisters, Poppy and Penelope, were as well. Oh, never Patrina. She was far too logical to be afraid of the dark.”

  He blinked trying to follow along whatever path she now took him with her words.

  Prudence waved a hand as she spoke. “We had governess after governess.” With his wife’s ability to seek and find trouble, he rather believed it. For a moment pain lifted, and he smiled, thinking of the person she’d been then. “Each of those dour women would scold us for our silly fears. Except, it didn’t matter how much they told us we were being irrational. Every night, my sisters and I would look at the walls and there were these shadows. I began to realize, if I laid a certain way or moved just so, those shadows would shift. If I looked at them long enough, I could control what I saw in those shadows.” She brushed her hand over his cheek. “I came to find people are like that.” He wanted to turn himself over to the warmth of her touch and the allure of her words. “You see, Christian, you see yourself one way. You see yourself as a coward and a failure, but that is not how I see you, for that is not who you truly are.”

  A bitter, ugly laugh exploded from his lips and he jerked away from the tantalizing promise she dangled. “What do you see? A hero?”

  “I do,” she said with an automaticity that made him curse.

  “When will you cease to see I am not that gentleman?” Heroes were men of extraordinary ability and skills. They were men who commanded with strength and did not cry upon the fields of war. They were men who knew how to fire their gun and save their family from ruin without relying upon a woman’s dowry for salvation. “I am not a hero,” he cried. “You would make me out to be something I am not. I am a broken, useless man. A coward. Everything Blackthorne said is true. This is not about flickers of light that are real or not real. These are things I did and did not do in my life.”

  “Everything he said is not true,” she said, going toe to toe with him.

  A growl of impatience escaped him. “If you believe that, then you are a bloody fool,” he gritted out. He turned on his heel and stalked away from the bloody elm. And her.

  “Are you walking away from me?” she called out, shock raising her tone and echoing through the quiet, empty park.

  Christian spun about. A powerful gust of winter wind shook the branches overhead in a violent dance and those snowflakes she’d spoken of as magical flecks of white stung his eyes. “What would you have me say?” he bellowed. “I am—�
�

  Craaack!

  His heart stilled as the wheels of life seemed to churn with a mind-numbing slowness as he followed Prudence’s shocked gaze skyward. “No,” he thundered charging back and shoving her aside just as the limb of their elm knocked into the back of his head. He dimly registered his wife’s agonized scream, the flicker of light, and then he pitched forward.

  Chapter 26

  Lesson Twenty-six

  All men are determined to save themselves. It is up to us to show them that only love can truly save them.

  Prudence sat in the darkened chambers of her husband’s rooms in a leather winged back chair that Dalrymple had personally dragged over to the side of his employer’s bed. Knees drawn close to her chest, she layered her cheek to her white skirts and stared at her husband’s still, unmoving frame.

  “Wake up, Christian,” she said quietly. Silence met her command. Undaunted, she continued, “You have been sleeping three days now. It is time you awake.” She studied him for any sign of movement. But for the slight, shallow rise and fall of his chest, there was no flicker of life. Tears blurred her eyes and she swatted away the futile, useless drops, angrily swiping the back of her hand across her cheeks. Since she’d sprinted through Hyde Park for the groom who carried Christian’s unconscious body back to the carriage, she’d not left his side.

  The door creaked, but her attention remained riveted on her husband. She didn’t have the energy to care about any of the many visitors who’d come these past three days.

  Lord Maxwell’s voice sounded from the doorway. “As advised, I saw to the missive for Christian’s mother. She and Lucinda should arrive within a day.”

  The grim doctor had actually been responsible for that particular note being sent. The man had given up hope of Christian awakening. Another dratted sheen of tears filled her eyes. Unable to manage the proper words of thanks, she gave a juddering nod.

  The earl cleared his throat. “Has he—?”

  She looked over her shoulder and shook her head once. “He’s not awakened.”

  The earl had set himself outside Christian’s chambers as a sentry of sorts. When her siblings came and went throughout the day, Lord Maxwell remained.

  …we were closer than brothers…

  A viselike pressure squeezed her lungs. If she’d not sent ’round a note for the duke, her husband would not have been at the elm that day, he’d not have rushed over and foolishly sacrificed himself for her. Tears flooded her eyes. “If I didn’t try to reunite him with that monster…” She dashed the useless drops from her cheeks.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Lord Maxwell murmured. He cleared his throat. “Your mother has arrived.” Again. That last word needn’t be spoken.

  As Lord Maxwell stepped aside and let her mother enter, Prudence returned her attention to her husband. But not before she’d seen the regret and sorrow lining her mother’s cheeks.

  “You need to rest, Prudence.”

  If she were capable of feeling anything beyond this cold numbness, she would have smiled at her mother’s attempts at controlling any and every situation. How little control she’d truly had. Of Sin. Of Patrina. Of her. But then, did any of them truly have any control? “I am not tired, Mother,” she said wearily. They each moved through life, pawns upon the chessboard of fate.

  The candle at the nightstand beside Christian’s bed cast his face in dark shadows. Prudence studied the dancing shades of the light on his chiseled cheeks, darkened by three days’ worth of beard. This still, lifeless being bore no hint of the strong, smiling man she loved. She wanted her grinning, teasing Christian. She wanted the husband who brushed his thumb over her lower lip and who humored her sketches. A sob tore from her lips and she smothered it with her fingers.

  The floorboards creaked as her mother came over and stopped beside the seat where she had set herself up as a sentry. Her mother rested her palms on Prudence’s shoulders. “Oh, Pru.”

  Pru. Not Prudence. As long as she’d been a girl, her mother had strived to turn her into a well-behaved, proper, dutiful daughter. She’d not once uttered that moniker, until now. “He is a good man,” she said, swiping at her tears. “I know you did not approve of my decision to wed him.”

  “I did not approve of your decision to offer for him,” her mother put in, unrepentant in her tone.

  No, her mother and brother had been so very determined to see her wed to a proper, dull gentleman who fit with their lofty and unrealistic expectations. “For so many years, I dreamed of knowing what Patrina and Sin had. I dreamed of finding love in Hyde Park and recreating those moments.” She angled her head back. “Do you know what I realized, Mother? Those moments belonged to Patrina and Sin. They were not mine. You wanted the dream of a gentleman who did not exist for me. I would have never been happy with the stranger you’d selected.” She bit hard on her lower, trembling lip and looked to her husband’s still form once more. “You both failed to realize he was the real dream. And he is not a paragon, but to me he is perfect.” Her tears fell freely and this time she allowed them to go unchecked.

  In a wholly un-countess like move, her mother sat on the arm of the chair and drew Prudence’s head close to her shoulder. For a moment, she resisted and then the floodgates opened. She wept just as she’d done for the past three days. Through it, her mother didn’t issue protestations or words of false assurance. She just simply held Prudence while she cried, and when the tears dissolved to a shuddery, watery hiccough, her mother gently released her. She set to putting her limp curls to order, tucking them behind her ears as though it mattered what her coiffure should look like when her world was so shattered.

  “I never told you about the day you were born.”

  She blinked. Mother had never been one to wax emotional over time past. Coolly pragmatic and reserved, Prudence did not even recall the woman crying when her daughter had run off with a blackguard.

  “For twenty-two hours I struggled to bring you into this world. I heard your father speaking to the midwife. She told him you were turned and that you would likely kill me. While they spoke, I had a moment where I could think past the pain. I stroked my belly and demanded you shift so I might see the fiery, spirited child who would likely make my hair grey. And do you know, just then, you turned.” A sad, wistful smile pulled at her mother’s lips. “That was the last time you obeyed me, Prudence Gwendolyn. Through the years, I questioned nearly every decision you made, even with your husband.”

  She glanced at her husband and again tears welled. He was so still. So broken. Agony knifed at her heart and she hugged her arms tight to her chest to dull the pain. Oh, God, she could not live without him.

  “But do you know,” her mother said softly, stroking the crown of her head. “You have a bold courage and strength I never had, nor will ever have. And you were correct where Christian is concerned.”

  The irony of this moment was not lost on Prudence. Her mother and brother had disdained her choice in husband only to now, with him near death, at last, be able to see his worth. “I would like to be alone with my husband again, Mother.”

  Her mother ceased her gentle caress. “Of course,” she replied. She stood with the rigidity she’d always shown through life, the proper countess in place once more. “But Prudence?”

  She glanced up.

  “The day you were born, I told your father about speaking to you and told him that you’d heard and understood. He, of course, credited that reaction to my delirium and your movement to…well, good-fortune. But do you know what I believe?”

  She shook her head, too tired from the agony of waiting for her husband to awaken from his silent slumber and her own lack of sleep to make sense of her mother’s words.

  “I believe if you speak, a person will listen. Speak to your husband, Prudence. Really speak to him.” Then, as though embarrassed by that not at all logical advice, color flooded her mother’s cheeks and she started briskly back toward the door. She reached for the door handle, but then wheel
ed swiftly back around. “And Prudence?”

  She looked tiredly at her mother. “Yes, Mother?”

  “I love you, and though I do not know Christian very well, I know in an act of heroism, he sacrificed himself so you might live and I will forever love him as my own for that.” With that, she took her leave, closing the door behind her.

  With her mother’s words ringing in her ears, Prudence rose on numb feet. Days of immobility caused tingling shivers to shoot down the length of her legs. She climbed into the bed and curled on her side, staring at Christian’s prone form.

  “The doctor said you really should have awakened two days ago, Christian. He is not at all pleased with you, and…” Emotion wadded her throat. “And I am not at all pleased with you, either.” She inched closer to him and rested her palm on his cheek. “You had no place pushing me out of the way. That elm branch was intended for me.”

  And for that sacrifice, as her mother had called it, her husband would cease to be. A gasping sob escaped her and shook her frame until she thought she might break, so that only his arms could stop that tremble. But he could not and so she cried all the harder.

  “Y-you are not to die, do you hear me?” Silence served as her only answer. “What am I without you, Christian Villiers? I have smiled more because of you and certainly danced more than I probably ever should.” Her tears broke as a half-laugh, half-cry. “And if you go, my world will forever be dark. I love you.” Prudence pressed her eyes closed and let the tears freely come. How many tears could a person cry? And why could they not heal? For if they could, Christian would even now be waltzing her through his darkened chambers, whistling a jaunty tune, kissing her lips—

  A large, weak hand settled over hers. Warm with a proof of a life. Familiar. Her eyes flew open and she shoved herself up on a gasp. “Christian.” His name emerged as a ragged, broken whisper.

  He maintained his frail hold on her fingers. “How could the world go dark as long as you are in it?”