by Candace Camp
“Of course.”
Damaris looked around her. She did not know what to do or say. The room was small, and the bed seemed to fill it. There was no place to sit other than the one chair or the bed, and it seemed much too suggestive to sit casually on the bed. Her face and hands felt gritty, and she was sure that beneath the bonnet, her hair was a mess. For some reason, the realization that she did not even have a brush was enough to make the tears start in her eyes. She blinked furiously and drew a steadying breath.
“If you will excuse me,” Alec said, “I believe I shall go downstairs and see if I can procure us something to eat.”
Damaris turned and smiled at him. She knew he was tactfully giving her a chance to be alone, and she was grateful. “Thank you.”
“Mm. You may wish to hold those thanks until you see what I manage to find.”
After he left, Damaris pulled off her bonnet and did what she could to freshen up. At least there was a washstand in the room and water in the pitcher so that she was able to wash. There was little help for her hair except to take out the few hairpins she had left in it and run her fingers through it to disperse some of the tangles. She was trying in vain to restore some order to her tresses when a soft knock sounded at the door and Alec entered, carrying a tray.
“Alec!” Damaris’s voice lilted upward in delight as a delicious aroma filled the air. “Food?”
“I was able to wheedle some scraps from the cook. Meat pie, mostly, and a bit of bread.” He set the tray down on the bed.
“Anything sounds wonderful to me. I am starving,” Damaris admitted, going over to inspect the tray. “Oh! You even got a bit of cake.”
“Bought by flattery and a sixpence.” He had set the tray down more or less in the middle of the bed, and he whisked off his boots and perched on the other side. “Sit down. Enjoy it.” He made a show of tucking a napkin into his neckcloth, then whipped another one off the tray and handed it to her. “Meat pies are messy business.”
Damaris laughed and followed his example, sitting down on the bed and picking up a small meat pie. It was so hot it burned her mouth, but she was too hungry to care. It was a messy meal, the crust flaking everywhere, and she had cause to be thankful for the placement of the napkin. But she had rarely enjoyed a meal more. Her hunger added a zest to the food unequaled by any sauce, and the cup of milk tasted better than the finest wine. Best of all was sitting there, feet tucked up under her, with Alec cross-legged on the other side of the tray, as if they were picnicking on the bed. They talked and laughed, going over their day’s adventures again and repeating choice bits of Mrs. Sanders’s conversation.
“Is that what she was talking about?” Alec exclaimed when Damaris explained to him that the woman’s sister’s affliction was pregnancy.
“Yes! And apparently the poor woman has to endure a months-long visit from her every time she has a child.”
“That would be enough to put one off of having children forever. Hmm.” He looked thoughtful. “Yes, I can see how if one left out every reference to giving birth or pregnancy or lying-in that it might come out that way. I thought the poor woman was wasting away of some unmentionable disease, though I could not imagine what.”
“Mrs. Sanders would not want to bring up such lewd topics with a gentleman,” Damaris told him.
“Oh, aye, especially an inveterate gambler such as myself,” he retorted. “Feel free to slander my character any other time you choose, by the way.”
“I did not!” Damaris protested, laughing. “It was Mrs. Sanders who was sure you had lost your money on cards and dice. She said it was always so with gentlemen.”
“No doubt.” He took a bite of the cake, then leaned closer and popped a bit of it into her mouth.
His fingers brushed her lip, and suddenly the food became flavorless on her tongue. She was overwhelmingly aware of the state of her hair falling loose around her shoulders and that they were sitting together on a bed. Entirely alone and distant from everyone they knew. She gazed at him, her eyes caught by his ice-blue gaze. She thought of his lips on her. His hands. The heat that had surged up in his skin when he touched her, as if someone had laid a spark to a torch.
No one need ever know what happened here tonight. The thought dangled tantalizingly in front of her.
Except, of course, that she would know. She would hope and dream, and gradually her comfortable life would slip right through her fingers, no longer in her control. Damaris turned away and slid off the bed. Reaching down, she ripped another bit of ruffle from her mistreated petticoat and used it to tie her hair back. She turned back to face him.
“Thank you for supper,” she said, her voice and face formal.
“You are welcome.” His face changed, too, and he followed her lead, leaving his relaxed position on the bed and standing up. He set the tray aside on the dresser and turned back to her. “It is time to talk, is it not?”
The grave expression on his face, the way he stood, arms crossed over his chest, sent little prickles of warning through her. “About what?” She suspected that she knew what was coming, and she had little desire to face it. However, she could not continue to keep Alec in ignorance. He had done too much for her, taken too many risks.
“About those men. Who are they? Why are they after you? I find it difficult to believe that this is simply a ‘family matter.’ “
“It seems excessive,” Damaris agreed. “Truly, Alec, I do not know who they are. I have never seen them before the other day when they seized me. I assume that they were hired.”
“Who hired them?”
“I don’t know, but I think… perhaps… it was my father’s mother.”
“Your grandmother?” He stared at her in disbelief. “Are you seriously telling me that your grandmother hired a bunch of ruffians to abduct you? Why?”
“Because I am a scandal to her. I am a reminder of the way her son flouted her for years, how he brought shame to the family name. I am…” She took a breath and said quickly, “I was born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
He continued to look at her. She could not read his expression.
“I am sorry,” Damaris went on quickly. “I should have told you earlier. But it is not the sort of thing one blurts out when one first meets someone. Clearly, I should have told you when you invited me to your party. I shouldn’t have gone to it. It was very wrong of me to put you and your family in that position.”
“That doesn’t matter. I am glad you didn’t stay away from the ball. If you had, I would not have been able to waltz with you.”
She gave him a fleeting smile. “That is very nice of you to say.”
“My dear girl, I think you have me mistaken for someone else. You keep telling me I am kind or nice, and I promise you that I am not known for either quality. Nor is ‘good’ a word that is usually attached to my name.”
“You have been all those things to me. And I have repaid your kindness poorly. I should not have accepted the invitation. I know that no one would fault a man such as yourself for… keeping company with a woman like me, but it is a different matter for your sister and your grandmother. They would not like the ton thinking that they are friends with a woman whose mother was an actress and who was not married to her father.”
“I am not sure that my grandmother is friends with anyone,” Alec told her lightly. “However, I am confident that she has known other people whose parents were not married—at least, not to each other.”
“I will not tell you again that you are kind, since you seem to mislike it. But I am not naïve or foolish enough to believe that your grandmother would not be most upset if she knew who I was. She would think, rightfully so, that I had deceived all of you, and she would be embarrassed in front of society.”
“I can promise you that my grandmother would not for a moment accede to the idea that anyone else had the right to disapprove of her or what she did. As a result, she is rarely embarrassed. You need not worry about that.” He paused, frowning. “B
ut I fear I still do not understand why you think your grandmother would hire thugs to abduct you. The scandal was years ago, after all.”
“Yes, but I think she fears that it would all come up again if I were in London, going to ton parties. You see, I have never done so before. I went to school in Switzerland, and after my father’s death, my mother and I remained on the Continent. I did not return to England until last year, and I have stayed in Chesley all that time. I don’t believe any of them knew I was here. But she saw me at your party. I did not even realize who she was, but she knew me. She came up to me during the ball, and she was livid. She told me she wanted me to leave England, that I would bring shame and scandal on her family.”
Damaris was not about to tell him the rest of her scandalous past. She was not even sure that her grandmother knew about her hasty marriage or that it played any part in Lady Sedbury’s fear of scandal. In any case, it was not something Alec needed to hear. “That night, when I came to you, I had no idea who the men were or why they would have attacked me. It was only afterward that I realized they must have been hired by Lady Sedbury to remove me from England.”
“Lady Sedbury is your grandmother?” At Damaris’s nod, Alec went on, “Then your father was…” He looked thoughtful. “The present Lord Sedbury’s father?”
“Clement, yes. Did you know him?”
“Vaguely. I saw him at the club a time or two when I was first on the town. We did not really move in the same circles.”
“My father was a quiet man, the sort who liked his hearth and home, except that he did not really like the home he was born to.”
“I don’t remember any scandal surrounding him.”
“You would have been too young. When my father was a young man, he fell in love with an actress. So much in love that he not only bought her a pretty little house, but he went to live with her there, as if they were man and wife.”
“If your mother looked like you, it is little wonder that he was willing to face scandal to be with her.”
“One could argue that he might have shown some restraint… or maybe enough courage to stand up to his family,” Damaris retorted tartly. “But he was unable to do either. When his father died and he inherited the title, his family convinced him that he must do his duty and marry a suitable woman. Someone from his own class. And so, when I was eight, he left us.” Her eyes flashed, and she lifted her chin. “He could not stay away entirely, of course. He visited my mother now and then. He would chuck me under the chin and tell me I was his girl. But I knew, of course, that it was no longer true. I was his bastard daughter, the one he would not openly acknowledge.” Tears sparkled in her eyes, and she dashed them away angrily. “Oh, blast it all. I am not going to cry about him.”
Alec went to her, but she turned her head aside, unwilling to let him see the hurt in her eyes. Gently he took her chin in his hand and tilted her face upward so that she had to meet his gaze.
“He loved you,” he said firmly. “No matter what he did or how many other children he had, he loved you. I am sure of it.”
“So he told me. But such assurances meant little to an eight-year-old girl who was used to her father tucking her in every night. He vanished, turning up every now and then with a present and a kiss. It was hard for me to understand that he had another family now, that they were somehow better than we were.”
“Oh, Damaris.” His arms went around her, and he pulled her to him.
For a moment, she remained stiff in his arms, resisting; but then, with a sigh, she gave in and rested her head against his chest. The ache in her chest somehow did not hurt so much when she was standing in the warmth and strength of his embrace and his heart was beating reassuringly against her ear.
“He provided for me always,” she said, pushing back the tears that swelled in her throat, choking her. “He paid for me to go to a proper school for ladies, far from England, where they would not despise me for who my mother was. When he died, he left me well provided for. But it wasn’t the same as having a father.”
Alec curled down over her, resting his head on hers. “Sometimes, it is better not to have a father,” he said, his voice grim.
His tender gesture pierced Damaris to the heart, and, surprising herself, she burst into tears, clinging to him and crying out her pain against his broad chest. Alec scooped her up and sat down in the old wooden rocker, cradling her to him. He rocked her gently, murmuring low words of comfort as his hand moved soothingly up and down her back.
When, at last, her sobs quieted and she rested, drained and still, against him, he said, “Your father was weak, I know, but do not doubt that he loved you. I know the demands that were put on him. No matter how well he loved you and your mother, no matter how much he preferred to live happily with you, there is a burden that weighs on one along with the title. Your life is not always your own. It is something you learn from the cradle; duty to your family is drummed into you at every turn.”
He pressed his lips against her hair, silent for a moment, then went on in a voice tinged with remembered pain, “Everything you do has consequences for your family. When I—when Jocelyn ran away, the scandal did not scorch me only. It caused untold embarrassment and pain for my sister and grandmother. They had to endure the whispers about my fault in the matter, the speculation that I was a cruel monster who had sent a sweet young girl running in panic.”
“No, Alec, that is so unfair!” Damaris stirred in his arms, lifting her head to look at him. Her lovely face was streaked with tears, eyelashes clumped together in starlike bursts around her eyes, so that she looked, if possible, even more beautiful. “You are not cruel at all.”
He smiled and cupped her face, wiping the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. “Don’t cry for me. I am long past all that. Sweet as it is, I am not asking for your sympathy. What I want to say is that, hard as it was for me, it was worse, I think, for my family. There were even one or two old cats who snubbed Genevieve and my grandmother, and everywhere they went, they had to endure the rumors, the looks, the disdain of people not worth a tenth of them.” His voice hardened, his gaze turning inward. “Grandmother feared it had even harmed Genevieve’s chances of making a spectacular marriage—though Genevieve swore to me that she never cared about that. The truth is, my actions caused them harm. I knew Jocelyn did not feel for me as I felt for her; I was stubbornly, selfishly certain I could make her happy, could make her love me. But by chasing my foolish dreams of love, I hurt everyone around me.”
“But you should not have to give up what you want,” Damaris protested.
Alec shrugged. “’Tis harsh, perhaps. But the truth is, when you are given so much, you have to accept the responsibilities, too. And that is what your father did. He took on that burden for his family. He sacrificed his happiness—and it is dreadful that his act caused you such pain. But it did not mean he did not love you. All those times he came back to see you, it was because he loved you; that was where he was happy. His home and heart were with you.”
“Thank you for telling me.” Damaris’s heart swelled with warmth and tenderness. She knew Alec was not a man who shared his secrets easily, and it touched her that he had revealed himself to such an extent in order to make her feel better.
He looked down at her in that way of his, in which only his eyes smiled, and laid a caressing hand against her cheek. “Why didn’t you tell me about yourself?”
“It is not the sort of thing one tells a stranger.”
“And I am a stranger?” There was a hint of hurt in his eyes.
“No. Of course you are not. But I—I wanted to hide it from you. I didn’t want you to look at me differently. As if I was… less than you had thought.”
“And you thought I would? That I would hold your birth against you?”
“I think that you are an earl. And a man.” She pulled away from him and stood up. She could not lie in his arms and say the rest. “And I am the illegitimate daughter of an actress. I did not believe you would despi
se me. But I would no longer be a lady to you. I didn’t want you to—to try to seduce me because I am not a lady. I did not want to be someone you could bed because my virtue need not concern you.” Her voice shook, and she turned aside, annoyed with her own weakness.
“Damaris.” He rose to his feet and faced her. “I feel nothing different for you than I did before I knew who your mother was or what your father did.” He raised his hand and stroked his knuckles gently down her cheek. “And I can promise you, without any doubt or prevarication, that my desire to have you in my bed has nothing to do with your father or the circumstances of your birth. You are the reason I want you. Only you.”
His eyes were bright, with that cold clarity that seared as much as any heat, and Damaris’s heart warmed within her. Impulsively she went up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his briefly. “Thank you.”
She had pressed her hands against his chest as she went up to kiss him, and she felt the heat rush in him, even through his shirt. His hands went to her waist, his fingers sinking into her flesh. She knew he was about to kiss her. She could see the hunger in his face—in the softening of his mouth, the intensity of his gaze. He wanted her, and Rawdon was a man accustomed to having what he wanted. He moved closer to her, his face looming above her, and Damaris’s head fell back.
She waited for his kiss; she wanted it. Her nerves were alive, sizzling with the memory of his hands on her this morning, the pleasure of his long, skillful fingers. She leaned into him, her body drawn toward its desire as surely as the tides to the moon. Her breasts were tender and aching for his touch. His hands slid restlessly down her side and curved over her hips, then back up. They stood, balanced on the razor’s edge of passion, for a long, yearning moment.
Alec pulled himself back, his hands releasing her, and with a final heated flash of his eyes, he turned away.
“You should get some rest. I—I’ll take a walk.”
Damaris watched him walk out the door.