Charmaine loved her sister with all her heart and knew her feelings were returned in full, even though it was hard to understand why, considering how she and their parents had treated Penelope all these years, leaving her on the outside. It had never been her choice to do so, but it had felt necessary so Penelope wouldn’t suffer under the cruel thumb of their stepfather as she had.
Lady Nester had once hinted how relieved she was at her husband’s obvious disinterest in his younger daughter and that she only wished she could tell Penelope this. But then Lady Nester would have had to openly admit what her husband was up to, and as she hadn’t done so even to Charmaine, she would never have done so to anyone else. Instead she had patted her younger daughter on the cheek with her usual sad smile and continued with her quest to keep her husband as far away from her elder daughter as possible.
But Penny had found love and a welcoming home with the Darlings, and in the end had married the love of her life and secured her place in the family officially. But, as she thought about it, Charmaine realized so had she, when she married Sin.
She looked at Rake smiling tenderly toward his wife as he nodded in response to her earlier question, and Charmaine felt her heart skip a beat as she realized that she trusted this man completely. She knew without a doubt that he would step up for her, too, and do anything for her.
But more importantly—he would listen to her if she told him about Lord Nester and his plan to kill Sin.
Rake might seem the worst tease and most wicked scoundrel there was, but that was just the façade he used to hide his true self. Or, rather, that he had used to hide behind, as everything changed when he fell in love with Penelope and opened up a small door in the wall for her.
“Indeed I have. The whole castle is talking about it. If this isn’t the best occasion for a vast celebration, I don’t know what would be.”
Rake looked up and met Charmaine’s gaze and smiled just as tenderly toward her as he had toward his wife, his brotherly love washing over her.
Trust him, her heart coerced her mind, and with a deep and shaky breath she braced herself for what she was about to do. Before she had a chance to change her mind or even to think twice about it, she opened her mouth and let the truth free.
“It was Father who shot Sin.”
Chapter Sixteen
The library was silent as a tomb as Rake and Penelope stared at her—she bewildered and he frowning.
“Are you sure?” Rake asked, slowly releasing his wife as he focused on Charmaine. “I mean, how could you know, if you weren’t there when it happened?”
She took a deep breath. “Because he told me so.”
“Sin told you Father shot him?” Penelope stared at her with large, scared eyes. “But you just said he didn’t remember anything from the shooting.”
Her sister’s obvious disbelief was getting to her, and Charmaine felt herself withdraw behind her secure walls again. This had been a mistake. She should have stayed quiet. Of course no one would believe her. What had possessed her to think they would?
“He told you before, didn’t he?” Rake said, surprising her with understanding the truth just as she was about to coax them into believing they had misunderstood her. “He told you what he was about to do.”
She nodded slowly, her heart racing as she waited for his verdict, waited for him to start shouting at her for not telling them sooner, so they at least could have had a chance to stop the shooting before it happened.
But Rake did neither.
He just sat there, silently staring at her. Behind him, Penelope leaned back on the sofa, her hands unconsciously picking at the needlework on a pillow, completely destroying the intricate stitches forever.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered out into the air without looking at her husband or her sister. “Can someone please enlighten me what we are talking about? What was it you knew, Charmaine? What is it you know?”
“Did you know that he was going to shoot Sin?” asked Rake.
She shook her head intensely, feeling a sudden need to clarify herself. Desperately she wanted to rise to her own defense in the matter and maybe be able to make him understand. “No, I did not. I-I was told about him wanting to kill Sin, but neither how nor when. If I had known t-that…”
Rake reached out and grabbed her cold hands in his, and the sudden show of compassion and humanity almost did her in. “It was all for you, wasn’t it?”
She nodded again.
“How long has this been going on?”
“A few years.”
His eyes turned as cold as ice. “How long? When you were a little girl, too?”
“N-no. It wasn’t like t-that then. H-he was just too obsessed then, too proud, and too interfering. He wanted to dress me up like a doll, decide what I was to wear and how my hair was combed. M-mother didn’t like that, and she…”
Her voice trailed off as the words eluded her and she took a deep, shaky breath before continuing stoically, speaking as fast as she could to get it all out as quickly as possible. “Mother made sure he never was alone with me. If she couldn’t be with me, she had her maid there, one who wouldn’t let him dismiss her. She was quite successful, as he stopped coming to my room for a while, until I grew up and became a woman, and he…”
She shook her head. She couldn’t say it out loud, it was just too embarrassing for her.
“I understand.” Rake’s voice was like a velvety blanket, snuggling her crying heart, comforting her. “You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to. I just need to ask you one thing—did he ever touch you?”
Again she shook her head, knowing exactly what he was asking her now that she was an experienced married woman. “No, he didn’t.”
“But he wanted to?”
“Yes.”
Rake’s grip around her hands hardened. “I could kill him.”
She laughed quietly, a sad little laughter that never reached her eyes. “Believe me, I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“He’s your father, for goodness’ sake! This is not how a father behaves toward his child.”
“No, he’s not.”
Charmaine froze as both she and Rake turned to look at Penelope, who had been forgotten in her corner of the sofa. She looked back at them with large, terrified eyes.
“What?” Rake looked ready to burst, and Penelope made a small, uncomfortable grimace toward him.
“He isn’t our father. Not really. He’s just the man who happened to marry our mother. Our real father died before I was born.”
Charmaine couldn’t believe what she heard. Penelope knew? Had she been desperately trying to hide the truth from someone who had known it all along?
“H-how…” was all she managed, and Penelope shrugged slightly.
“He told me.”
“When?”
“When he left me at Lord Bolton’s. I asked him how he, as my father, could do that to me—leave me—and he told me then that he wasn’t my biological father.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Penelope repeated with an arched eyebrow, not looking too happy with her older sister.
Charmaine didn’t know what to think. A part of her was furious with her sister for not telling her, but then again—just as Penelope pointed out—she hadn’t said a word either.
“I would have told you immediately if I’d had the chance right after it happened,” Penelope continued. “But we never met again after Father left me at Lord Bolton’s, not until you already were married to Sin, and by then I had forgotten all about it. It wasn’t important to me anymore. All that mattered to me then was Rake.”
Rake began pacing as if he couldn’t think straight when he was still. “But why kill Sin? Why now? You two have been married for a couple of months already. If he didn’t want you married to someone else, he should have interfered much earlier, or tried to kill Sin much earlier. What possessed him to do such a vile act now?”
“Mother died,” Charmaine said quietly, and he stopped in front of her, frowning down at her.
“What has Lady Nester’s death to do with your father’s urge to kill?”
This was almost too embarrassing, but she had to continue telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “Because then he became free.”
“Free?” Penelope repeated. “Free to do what?”
“Free to marry me.”
“Oh, my God.” Rake sat down on the sofa again, looking unusually dumbfounded, for him. “Why didn’t that thought cross my mind? Of course he wants to marry you. He’s not your biological father, he’s your stepfather. To a man in love, marriage suddenly becomes the ultimate goal.”
He held out an arm toward his wife, and she immediately scooted in under it, leaning her cheek against his chest. She smiled ruefully as he placed small, absentminded kisses on her forehead while he mentally processed the information he had been given.
Charmaine felt almost buoyant.
She looked at her cuddling sister and brother-in-law and could hardly keep a giddy giggle to herself. It was as if telling them had removed the burden from her tired shoulders. Now someone else knew, and the problem was not only hers to tackle.
Rake’s immediate understanding had helped, of course. If he had been even the slightest bit accusing or upset over her choices, she might have turned her back on them and made the conversation end long before any real admissions were out.
But neither he nor Penelope had been accusing her at all or throwing hard words at her. Oh, her sister had not been too pleased with her secrecy and unwillingness to share, but she still hadn’t put any blame on Charmaine. That she had done all by herself.
Sin still has to know.
The little voice in her head echoed what she in her heart knew was true, but in a strange way it didn’t feel as bad anymore to have to come clean with her husband. She had managed to tell Rake without him becoming angry as a bee that had had his honey stolen.
But would Sin be as understanding? She didn’t know. Rake and Sin might be close relatives, but they still were as different as night and day. Where Rake was easy and fun, Sin was dark and brooding.
Rake lived life, while Sin controlled life.
But still, she had to tell him. And then she would have to tell all the others of the Darling family. And someone would become angry with her. Someone would accuse her of hiding the truth, and she would have to take that, because the truth was simple—she had been hiding.
Both the truth and herself.
“Why didn’t you tell Sin about this?” Rake’s dark, smooth voice broke the silence and interrupted her thoughts. “Why didn’t you tell him about the threat?”
“I-I didn’t know h-how.”
“He’s your husband, Charmaine. Your husband! You should just have opened your mouth and told him.”
She felt her eyes burn, tears desperately trying to escape now that the accusing finally had begun. “It’s not that easy.”
“How can it not be easy? It might have saved him from getting shot! How long did you know about your father’s plans before he shot Sin?”
“A couple of hours.”
Rake looked as if he couldn’t believe what he heard. “You knew it for a couple of hours and you still didn’t tell him about it? Charmaine, for goodness’ sake!”
“I did try,” she cried out, too upset over his resentment to be able to stop. “I told him that there was danger and that he had to stay indoors, but he didn’t listen to me. He never listens to me.”
Rake stared silently at her before surprising her with a small grin. “I’m sorry. It’s Sin we are talking about. He doesn’t listen to anyone about anything, so why would he listen to you when you are trying to warn him.”
Penelope released herself from her husband’s grip and moved over to her sister’s side and put her arms around her, offering her compassion and love. “I’m so sorry, Charmaine. I should have been there for you, when we were at home, but I was too busy ranting about what I was missing out on, and I never once considered what our stepfather’s inattentiveness to me gave you on the opposite hand.”
Charmaine hugged her closer. “It’s not your fault, Penny, so don’t blame yourself. It is I who have been behaving wrongly to awake such emotions in him. Had I been a better daughter, this would never have happened. But I was too caught up in myself to consider what it did to Father and his feelings.”
“Now wait a minute!”
Both sisters looked up at Rake, who hovered above them, glaring as they sat hugging each other on the sofa. “How can you even think you are to blame for your father’s unhealthy feelings toward you?”
Charmaine let go of Penelope and put her hands on her knees, as she did when she was trying to compose herself and not let her troubled inside rule what was on the outside. “It is someone’s fault, and if it’s not mine, who is then to blame? Father? He can’t help what’s in his heart.”
“Of course he can.” Rake seemed ready to explode with frustration. “He’s the adult, and you were the child. It doesn’t matter what you did or what you said, or what you say or do now, he will always be the father figure and should act as such. Fall in love with your stepdaughter? Bloody hell! It doesn’t matter how you look at it, he’s the one who has done wrong—not you. A father should be there for his daughter and carry her on his uplifted hands, making sure her life will be light and easy. Not drag her into hell.”
Penelope sighed softly as she looked up at her handsome, avenging husband. “Isn’t he just divine?”
Charmaine couldn’t hold back a smile as Rake stared aghast at his admiring wife, and she agreed, “He sure is.”
“He must be the most adorable man ever born. Doesn’t he remind you of a knight in shining armor the way he stands there, declaring the wrongs of the world to us?”
“Indeed he does,” Charmaine again agreed, and giggled, amazingly relieved to be able to do so, as Rake glared at her. “Just the armor missing, I’d say.”
“Are you two insane?”
Penelope ignored her husband’s unintelligent input to the discussion, instead turning toward Charmaine with an excited smile. “I know where there is some knight’s armor! It’s just outside the duke’s private study. If Rake puts that on…”
“Bloody hell!”
Penelope pursed her lips as she looked up at her furious husband. “What’s the matter with you? Where did all your chivalry go?”
“Out the door,” he snarled. “Soon to be followed by the rest of me if you don’t stop this nonsense and instead concentrate on what’s important.”
“You are important to me,” Penelope gasped, and Rake immediately calmed down, his eyes turning darker and hotter.
“Penny…”
“Rake?”
“You know that I love you very much.”
“And I you.”
“And you know how much I love our discussions.”
“Me too.”
“But could you shut up for a second and let me talk things through with your sister. Please?”
Penelope rolled her eyes heavenward. “I am discussing things with my sister, thank you very much.”
Rake closed his eyes and took a deep, strengthening breath. “Penny, my love. What your sister just told us is horrifying, and you just can’t start talking about love and butterflies instead of…”
“Knights.”
“Pardon?”
“I was talking about love and knights, not butterflies. Please do continue.”
Rake made a big show of rolling his eyes, but Charmaine could tell he was laughing at his wife and the mysterious way her head worked. Penelope did live with her head in the clouds now and then, but this time it wasn’t by accident. Charmaine knew all the nagging came from wanting to soothe the subject and give her some time to breathe and calm down, as well as to calm Rake down and lessen the intensity.
She sent Penelope a grateful look, which her sister accepted with
a graceful bow of her head before beckoning her husband to continue.
“As I was saying before my once-so-dear wife rudely interrupted me, you have done nothing wrong, Charmaine. Believe me when I say that all the blame is your father’s.”
“But I am the one who made him fall in love with me, and therefore it’s my responsibility to act upon it.”
“Who said so? Your stepfather?”
“Yes.”
“And how on earth can his wrongdoings be your responsibility? It’s like saying it’s my fault that my father couldn’t sire any daughters.”
Charmaine smiled politely at his joke. She didn’t know what to think. Her stepfather had told her over and over again during the last several years that she was the one who had misused her looks and made him unwillingly fall in love with her. And when she thought how everyone else seemed to do the same thing, falling in love with her from across a ballroom just because she was beautiful, her stepfather’s words actually made sense to her.
The only one who hadn’t fallen for her looks was Sin. And Rake, of course. And the rest of the Darling men. But otherwise, most men had been staring at her with stars in their eyes while scribbling down their names on her dance card.
All those proposals to her, a girl with no great dowry or good connections, had all come because of men wanting her for what she looked like—Beautiful. Astonishing. Magnificent.
Rake went down on his knee in front of her and forced her to look straight at him. “You are now my sister, and I want you to know that I have come to love you most dearly for the sweet and caring person that you are. And you have, in your own way, shown me you love me back by trusting me with this—with your secret. All I ask of you, now, is that you let me decide what to do next. I want to release you from the responsibility of your stepfather’s actions and for once give the man some resistance.”
The Beauty of You Page 20