He tried to even his breathing, sensing he could either let her go or he could fight for her in the only way he knew how. “There are guaranteed ways not to get pregnant. If that is what you want, I’ll ensure it. And maybe over time, I…you will change your mind and give us children.”
Her startled gaze met his. “You would give up your right to children for me?”
He swallowed. Could he really marry a woman who was too broken to give him children? His life would turn into a lie. He’d always wanted children and had already made a list of names written out for them to choose from.
He lowered his gaze to her small hand that still fingered the wool of his coat. His chest tightened. “The wedding is set for next week. People will be at the church waiting.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I simply…I…I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”
She and those overly serious blue eyes were confessing to being too broken to be part of his life. He’d first come to love her those many years ago because she’d come into his life when he desperately needed someone to cling to, someone who could see his pain and understand it and let him feel it without judgment. She was all he’d ever known and wanted to know. But maybe, just as his brother had accused, the comfort of that certain knowledge made him pompous, unworthy and lazy. Regardless of that one time he stupidly tried to surprise her with a visit by going to New York only to find out she was in Spain.
God knew, he hadn’t even learned to properly bed a woman, because he’d kept telling himself over the years he was saving the entire experience for her. If not for one smirking gamekeeper and one bored whore he’d went to in desperation, he’d know as little as Clementine did about what went on between a man and a woman. And yet, here he thought he could command her and speak to her about sex, marriage, family, love, passion, all the things he thought he wanted—nay, deserved—from life. He had earned nothing. Not a thing. Certainly not her.
He slowly dragged a hand over to hers. He felt the room sway knowing what he needed to do. “Is this what you want? To go to Persia with this man instead?”
She dug her fingers into his arm. “Try to understand it’s best for us.”
It was like realizing his life had never been golden. A suffocating sensation tightened his throat. “Do you trust this Nasser to his word? Do you trust that he will honor and protect you in the way you want?”
“Yes. He has proven his worth. You needn’t worry in that.”
Jealousy bit into him knowing another man was taking what he had always thought was his and only his. It was childish of him to even think it but…it wasn’t fair.
She gently laid her head against his shoulder, the softness of her bundled hair brushing his face. “I will miss our letters. I never told you but I always slept with them.”
His jaw tightened as tears burned his eyes. Having her head tucked against his shoulder and admitting to having slept with his letters whispered of so many possibilities he wished he was capable of cradling. He set a quaking hand against the side of her soft hair, fingering its softness. “I hope you’ll be happy.” He meant it.
She lifted her head, moving away from his hand. “Derek?”
“Yes?”
“You’re an amazing man. I want you to know that. It’s why I came out.”
His breath hitched. He turned his head and paused, realizing how close she was. Their shoulders were touching. Their faces were only inches apart. He searched those stunning and trusting blue eyes that held his. The ones he thought would always be his.
Drifting his hand up toward her face, he brushed the smooth warmth of her skin.
She stilled.
He leaned in closer and whispered, “If I’m so amazing, why do you refuse to be mine?”
Her chest rose and fell. “Because you deserve more than what I have to offer. Even if I did try to make this work, I know that in the end, I would only disappoint you and myself.”
She genuinely seemed to believe what she was saying. He could see it in her face and in her eyes. “Clementine. How can you say that?” He traced his hand down toward her exposed throat and felt his pulse throb against his own ears knowing he was touching her. He brushed the tips of his fingers against the softness of her skin. “We could be happy together if you will it,” he murmured. “I know we could. I adore you. Don’t you feel the same about me?”
She brought her hand up, her hand visibly trembling and grazed her finger across his jaw line. “Don’t make this anymore difficult,” she whispered back. “Please.”
He swayed against that hand, his heart almost skidding up to his head. It was like being seventeen again and letting his mind and body be consumed with senseless yearning. Every half-breath he took was tinged with her perfume, making him yearn for her all the more. He lowered his gaze to her full lips, every nuance of his soul wanting to prove to her that if there was any man capable of dispelling her fears, it was he.
He set his forehead against hers, struggling not to give in to what he wanted. To what he had always wanted. Her. “Give me one night in your arms and I’ll let you go.”
She edged away, her eyes widening. “Derek, I just told you—”
“No child will come of it. I swear. One night and I’ll let you go. I’ll stand before London without regret knowing I held you in my arms. Please. I need something from you other than good-bye. You can’t leave me like this. Not after years of…you can’t…”
“I understand.” Her fingers stilled against his face. “Can you guarantee no child would come of it? If I allowed for it, could you swear to it upon all you are and I know you to be?”
His heart thundered, sensing she was about to give in. “Upon my life and honor, I swear to it. I vow.” He held her gaze. “Come to me. Come to me at night and then I will let you go.” He reached out and watched his own hands skim up her shoulders and up to her soft face. “Haven’t you ever thought of having me in your arms?” Gently nudging her chin upward, so her full lips were positioned just below his own, he edged in, mentally willing her to be his the moment their mouths touched.
A knock came to the door. “Derek?” His mother called out in an exasperated tone from the other side. “Are you in the cigar room?” The knob rattled and the door opened.
They jumped away from each other and scrambled up from their seats, turning.
Derek staggered in an effort to even his breathing.
Lady Banfield casually walked in, her chartreuse morning gown rustling. She paused, her playful dark eyes veering toward Miss Grey. Her nose wrinkled. “Egad. I smell cigars.” She glanced toward the ash pan which held the telling remains of Clementine’s cheroot. She snapped her gaze toward each of them, her eyes widening. “Are you both in here smoking?”
Clementine winced.
Shite. He had to do something. Because God love his mother, she was a terrible gossip. She told everyone more than they needed to know. Be it the vicar or the neighbor.
Derek cleared his throat and did what any gentleman would do. “I desperately needed a cheroot and didn’t want to leave Miss Grey unattended. She was very gracious about it. I wish to apologize for my lack of judgment.”
Clementine swung toward him. “Your lack of—”
“I owe you an apology, Miss Grey.” He gave Clementine a firm, pointed look. “I should have never disrespected you. I thought myself to be a greater gentleman than that. Do you forgive me?”
Clementine gaped.
Lady Banfield strode toward him and stared him down, her pinned graying brown hair practically quivering. “I’m appalled, Derek.” She paused. “Since when do you smoke?”
He’d never been a good liar, but for Clementine’s sake, he did his best to keep his tone even and his stare firm. “Since Andrew and I stopped speaking to each other.”
Lady Banfield’s strained features softened. She sighed. “The fact that you’re smoking concerns me. I don’t know what you and Andrew argued about, for neither of you are willing to tell me about it, but I wan
t you to put an end to it. The boy is living in self-imposed squalor and refuses any assistance I have repeatedly tried to give. When I last visited, there weren’t even any chairs for me to sit on. I’m at a loss as to what he thinks he is doing. He tells me nothing.”
Anger rippled down his spine at what his brother was putting them both through. He wasn’t particularly fond of his mother after she kept his father’s illness from him, but she was still his mother. “I don’t feel sorry for him at all. His blatant disrespect toward both of us is no longer one I wish to reward. This is not what family does to each other and it’s time he grows up. If he needs coal for the bucket, he knows where I am.”
Lady Banfield’s brown eyes pleaded. “You can’t leave this to fester, Derek. Your father would have wanted this resolved.”
There were many things his father would have wanted. Things Andrew had refused to honor after the man’s death. Like how his father would have wanted to see Andrew in the military and rise through the ranks as opposed to being a mere novelist. Like how his father would have wanted to see Andrew associating with men and women who would make him a better man as opposed to associating with men and women who made him into a rebel without a purpose.
Derek shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mother, but I cannot continue to reward him when he acts like an imbecile. If he cannot open the door when I knock on it, how is that my fault?”
Clementine veered closer. She touched his arm. “Derek?”
He stilled at the unexpected touch and lowered his gaze to hers. “What?”
Her blue eyes softened. “You have more than proven that you are kind and compassionate and willing to listen, even when a person may not be worthy of it. Gift that to your brother. Especially if you know he is financially struggling.”
He shifted his jaw, angling toward her. It damn well riled him knowing that she thought she could have any say about him or his life when she didn’t even want to be a part of it. “I have not disappointed him. He has disappointed me. I didn’t turn him away. He turned me away. And it reminds all too much of someone else I know.” He held her gaze.
Clementine hesitated and dragged her hand back.
The silence around them pulsed.
Lady Banfield let out a soft breath. “I sent your brother an invitation to the wedding, insisting that he come. It is my hope he will.”
How absolutely fucking fitting. His brother would arrive at the church on Monday to find him without the very bride his brother claimed was all his without having to try.
His mother turned toward Clementine and paused, her dark eyes softening. “Look at you. So perfect and darling.” She beamed. “At long last, I have a daughter of my own.” Whisking toward her, Lady Banfield held out a gloved hand. “I apologize for not being here when you first arrived. I left one of the events early in an attempt to make amends for it.”
Clementine swept forward, her hand grasping his mother’s outstretched hand in mutual greeting. “I am so honored you would leave an event merely for me. You really shouldn’t have.”
Lady Banfield let out a pert laugh, shaking their clasped hands together. “With grandchildren on the horizon, I would leave any event for you.”
Derek cringed at the mention of grandchildren.
Clementine’s stare appeared to be plastered.
Lady Banfield took Clementine’s arm into her own, patting her hand. “We should introduce you to the housekeeper and our chef at once. The duties that will face you as the new lady of the house will be staggering. Banfield, I am afraid, is far too popular for his own good and has too many acquaintances, which will mean countless events and nothing but work, work, work. Come along. The sooner we introduce you to your duties, the sooner I can forgo mine.” His mother paused and gave Derek a long pointed look from over her shoulder. “We will leave my son to finish smoking on his own. I’m afraid his antics just lost him the right to see you for the rest of this day. Hopefully, that will teach him to never smoke in your presence again.”
Trying to be a good man in the name of a woman was a bitch.
Clementine glanced back at him as she and Lady Banfield made their way out the door.
Derek held up a quick hand to her, silently informing her to play along.
When they were gone, and their voices were a mere sound one had to strain for, he shifted his jaw, turned, and trudged over to the ash pan where Clementine’s nub of a cheroot had been meticulously extinguished in the center of the small bronze pan. He stared at it and almost touched the rolled end where her lips had been. He pulled on the calling bell hard so the footman could clean it up before he did exactly that.
The quick sound of running steps made him pause and glance up.
To his surprise, Clementine rushed into the room, her cheeks flushed.
He stared as she bustled over to him.
Coming to a halt before him, she hesitated, as if struggling to admit to something, and then grabbed his face and kissed his cheek hard.
He staggered, his very skin feeling sparks.
She released him. “I have thought about you and us. Send me a missive as to how I am to come. Then after our night, I will go. I trust you to let me go. It’s the only reason why I’m doing this. Because I trust you.” She nodded, turned and hurried back out, disappearing as quickly as she had come.
A shaky breath escaped him as he grazed his fingers across his shaven cheek where her mouth had been. He couldn’t believe it. She admitted to having thought of him and wanting him. But if that were true, why was she leaving him?
It made no sense.
But then again, she never had made any sense. She was very much a beautiful fairy one came across in a forest, whose existence one always refused to believe in, but upon seeing its wings had to embrace it without being allowed to ever ask it any questions.
In some way, he knew his father had wronged him. His jolly and overly optimistic father had raised him on a grand scheme to believe that life and the world was anything and everything he wanted it to be. And that when a good man laughed and smiled and made the most of life by giving his heart and soul to what he believed in, good things unfolded. Especially when one passionately fought for what one wanted most.
But not everything could be fought for. How did one fight to change a woman’s heart if it had remained stoically the same for seven years? What more was he, as a man, to do? Bleed through his knees waiting for another seven years to pass?
One night in her arms was clearly all he could hope for.
As opposed to the countless nights he had always imagined.
Up until that moment, he had imagined long snowy nights spent in the quiet country making passionate love to her before the hearth and then drowsily waking up to find their children piling into the room. He had imagined that his brother would come out during the winter with his own wife and children in tow and together, they would all gather into open sleighs, bundled in furs and ride through fields toward a frozen pond so their children could skate.
It was tragic. Because getting over three million bank notes shoved into his right hand was completely worthless if it couldn’t buy him the one thing he’d always wanted most: her.
Thursday, a breath after midnight
If Derek was the flame, then she most certainly was the moth. But unlike all moths, Clementine had no wings left to burn, for she had long removed them and locked them away into a box not even she was permitted to touch. Selfish though it was to go to him, cradle him and then leave him, this was her one and only chance of ever truly knowing what, if anything, could have been possible between them.
Because once she followed Nasser to the throne, her life would be exactly what she had always wanted it to be: free of any and all choking emotions that always turned even the most civilized of people into simple-minded savages unable to control their own minds, their own bodies and their own breath.
Tightening her hold on her moonstone cashmere shawl, given the chill of the April air that pushed its way into the
old estate house, Clementine quietly followed the footman down the vast candlelit corridor. The silence of the night and the falling rain beyond the windows was amplified by the clicking of her slippers and the rustling of her primrose evening gown. A tall, broad shouldered figure dressed in a long green-velvet night robe lingered at the far end, intently waiting, his husky features blurred by the shadows.
Pausing before him, her heart jolted realizing his hair was down, barely brushing his muscled shoulders. The golden light of the candles within the corridor illuminated the contours of his lean, smoothly shaven face and glinted across the thick strands of his wavy brown hair, which fell around his face. It was a face that had always haunted her in her youth and a face that was haunting her now. A part of her didn’t want to let him go.
She quietly noted the naked smoothness of his broad muscled chest where the open neckline of the robe veered down to the belt on his narrow waist that held everything in place. It was obvious he was naked beneath that robe.
Her own fear of passion, which she had clung to since she was old enough to understand it, urged her to turn and run. But her mind whispered that this one night of passion was far better than eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty nights of passion she wouldn’t be able to control. Which was what fifty years of marriage amounted to.
His gaze skimmed her appearance. “Thank you, Wallis. You may leave. Please don’t mention this to my mother.”
The footman inclined his head and quickly departed, disappearing around a corner.
Derek’s brown eyes softened. “You came.” He said it as if it were a blessing.
Her stomach flipped. She wished she could control the way his voice and his eyes made her feel. She wished she could control how he had always made her feel. Because that is what truly scared her. Her inability to control what she knew beat within her. The very thing she didn’t want to trust. “My father is off on the town somewhere,” she quickly offered. “So it was rather easy for me to slip away. Heaven only knows where he is. He didn’t tell me where he was going, although I imagine he is off trying to meet women or…I still had to get past Mrs. Langley, seeing her room is adjoined to mine. Fortunately, she sleeps rather heavily, so it was easy. Hopefully, she won’t wake up.” That was pathetic. She was babbling.
Night of Pleasure Page 11