by Deborah Hale
She couldn’t resist gloating, could she?
“Of course I don’t want to!” He’d rather leap into shark-infested waters than stand before Reverend Turnbull exchanging vows of lifelong fidelity. “Have you not heard a word I’ve said? Marriage is the last thing I desire, especially to a creature of your ilk. But since I have unwittingly taken your virginity, honour compels me to make an honest woman of you.”
“But you don’t love me.” She sounded bewildered, as if his actions were somehow inconsistent. Did she think he was entirely without scruples?
More than that implied insult, the word love horrified Simon. Bad enough she wielded such a dangerously intense attraction over him. The prospect of giving her power over his heart shook him to the core. “If you think last night had anything to do with love, you must be daft!”
“Daft, am I?” A blaze of passionate fury seared all traces of bemusement and regret from Bethan’s face. “Well, maybe I am—daft enough to think you were a good man who wanted and needed a wife to care for him. Daft enough to believe you respected me and thought more of me than just a willing body in your bed!”
The force of her outrage hit Simon like a broadside of artillery to blast gaping holes in the barricade he’d spent so long erecting around his heart—a barricade she’d been busy undercutting ever since her arrival in Singapore.
Her accusations struck their targets with perilous accuracy, forcing him on the defensive. “What more do you want from me? I’ve offered to wed you, damn it! Are you going to accept or not?”
Bethan hesitated only an instant.
“No!” She hurled his honourable proposal back in his face. “Not if it’s against your will and you think so beastly ill of me. How would a marriage like that be any better than keeping—just because we stand before a parson and sign a paper? Every vow we made would be a lie. I believe that’s a worse sin than anything we did last night!”
Simon’s jaw fell slack. Never for an instant had he imagined she would refuse him. A torrent of conflicting, confusing emotions ripped through him—astonishment, relief, regret, longing, shame—all far too intense for his comfort.
Before he could marshal his shaken wits to reply, she dashed past him, out of the sitting room and down the stairs.
When he heard the outside door slam, a spasm of panic gripped Simon. It had never occurred to him that she would be foolhardy enough to leave the house on her own after dark. Cursing himself and the hopelessly muddled situation between them, he set off after her as quickly as his protesting leg would allow.
Halfway down the stairs he met Ah-Ming coming up. “Where are you going, master? Dinner is ready.”
“I’ll eat later. I have to go out.” He didn’t dare stop to explain. Bethan had a head start on him and two sound legs to carry her.
Part of him was tempted to let her go and reap the consequences of her folly. But he knew the burden of guilt he would carry if any harm came to her. The shame of taking her virginity would be nothing compared with that.
Hurrying outside, he peered up and down the street until he caught a glimpse of her disappearing in the direction of the square. She had enough of a head start that he could never hope to overtake her on foot. Rather than trying, he called for Mahmud to saddle his horse at once.
A few moments later he rode toward the square at a full gallop. Peering into the moonlit shadows, he strained to catch a glimpse of Bethan’s yellow muslin gown. All the while he struggled to understand what had made her reject his proposal. Her actions forced him to consider the disturbing possibility that he’d completely misjudged her.
Shame and outrage warred within Bethan as she ran up North Bridge Road. She had no idea where she wanted to go, except to get out from under Simon’s roof. Discovering that he’d never intended to marry her had not humiliated her half as much as his hostile, demeaning proposal. He’d called her daft and he was right. What a green little fool she’d been to think he could care for her and they might possibly be happy together!
She could have understood him being angry over her lapse in honesty and how it had caused this terrible misunderstanding. But his reaction had been so much worse than that. Simon’s marriage offer made it brutally clear that he mistrusted and despised her. He thought so little of her that he’d expected her to jump at his proposal even after he declared he had never loved her and never would.
Though part of her had been tempted to become his wife on whatever terms he offered, her pride refused accept a proposal that he’d tossed at her feet with such blatant contempt. To do so would only prove that she was as conniving a creature as he believed her to be.
But how would she survive if she did not wed him and how would she keep all this from hurting Simon’s daughter?
Preoccupied with such thoughts, Bethan did not notice a pair of sepoys until she was almost on top of them. They seemed every bit as startled by her sudden appearance.
“Who is there?” one of the soldiers barked while both quickly raised their rifles. Their bayonets bristled in the dim light of distant street lamps.
She jumped back with a squeak of alarm. “My name’s Bethan Conway. I…I look after Mr Grimshaw’s daughter.”
The moment she mentioned Simon, the soldiers hastily lowered their weapons.
“Pardon, memsahib!” they cried in a tone of frantic apology. “It is not safe for a lady to walk alone at night. You must go home now, please.”
The thought of slinking back to Simon so soon after she’d flounced off troubled Bethan more than any danger she could imagine.
“I just want a bit of air.” She backed away rapidly. “Don’t fret about me. I’ll be fine.”
Slipping off into the shadows, she told herself the soldiers wouldn’t dare risk firing at her. To her relief, she was right.
The encounter forced her to pay more attention to her surroundings. Thinking about her predicament would have to wait until she found a quiet spot to rest.
She gave the lights of the military encampment a wide berth and soon felt the ground beneath her feet sloping upwards. Trees loomed up around her and the scent of spices enfolded her. This must be the experimental garden she’d glimpsed that evening Simon took her for a drive up Government Hill.
Remembering it made her imagine she could hear the soft beat of a horse’s hooves nearby. She realised it was more than a fancy when she heard the beast blowing out a loud breath.
As she hurried away from the sound, Simon’s voice rang out. “Stop, Bethan! I’ll only follow you if you don’t.”
She knew him well enough to be certain he was not bluffing. Besides, he was mounted while she was already winded after running from the soldiers. If she had to talk to him, better here than back at the house, where he was master and she was only an unwelcome guest.
Her footsteps slowed until she came to rest against the slender trunk of a young tree, gasping in deep breaths of the warm spicy air.
Simon sprang from his saddle, landing with a muted thud and a half-stifled grunt of pain. He caught her by the arm and grasped it tightly, as if he feared she would take flight again.
“I don’t care how angry you are at me,” he growled. “Don’t ever run off like that again. Do you hear me?”
“I may be daft, but I’m not deaf!” She wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “Why do you care what I do or where I go if you loathe me so?”
“I don’t loathe you!” His fierce tone belied his words. “And I certainly don’t want any harm to come to you.”
“A little late for that, isn’t it?” Bethan rubbed her arm in a fruitless effort to wipe away the tingling heat left by his touch.
Simon exhaled a deep sigh, heavy with regret. “I’m sorry for what happened between us. I swear I never meant to take your virginity. If I’d known it was marriage you expected, I wouldn’t have—”
“I know.” She cut him off sharply. Somehow it grieved her to hear he regretted the wondrous night they’d shared. In spite of everything that had followed and
all it might cost her, she could not bring herself to wish it had never happened. Did that make her a wanton harlot, deserving of all the foul names she’d heard such women called? “That wasn’t the kind of harm I meant.”
“It wasn’t?” He sounded baffled.
“I know you didn’t take my maidenhead on purpose.” Her eyes stung with tears she refused to shed. “But all the horrible things you thought and said about me, you can’t claim you didn’t mean them.”
“Perhaps not.” He sounded almost pained to admit it. “But I am beginning to suspect they may not be true.”
“They’re not!” she snapped, stung by the tepid nature of his doubts. “It doesn’t matter now, though, for I don’t care what you think of me.”
Bethan wished that were true, but she could not afford to let Simon know how much his opinion of her still mattered.
“That may be,” he replied after a long moment of tense silence, “but I still owe you an explanation for what prompted me to think and say those things. As you might guess, it has to do with my past.”
“And you’re willing to tell me about it?” she asked warily.
“If you’re willing to listen.” He sounded far from certain that she would be.
“I can’t very well refuse, can I? Not after all the times I’ve pestered you about keeping secrets.” She sank down at the base of the tree and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Go ahead, then. Have your say.”
Simon dropped to the ground beside her. After a moment’s hesitation, he took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Do you remember when I said the less Rosalia knows about her mother, the better?”
“Of course.” Though she knew this must be difficult for him, Bethan did not feel obliged to make it any easier. “What of it?”
“If you know more about my late wife, perhaps you will understand why I am so determined not to wed again and why I suspected you of trying to trick me into marriage.”
Bethan strove to stifle the itch of curiosity. An avid interest in Simon’s past strayed dangerously close to caring about what had happened to him.
“You may have noticed,” he continued in a wry, self-mocking tone, “I have a lamentable weakness for damsels in distress. I should have learned from my stepmother that such women are seldom as helpless as they appear. Carlotta certainly was not.”
Perhaps not, but heroes weren’t always as gallant as they appeared either. Even as that spiteful thought ran through Bethan’s mind, she could not shake off the image of Simon striding to her rescue.
“I met her in Penang,” he continued. “Her uncle was taking her from Macau to Lisbon for an arranged marriage. While their ship was having storm damage repaired, her uncle fell ill and could not keep her properly chaperoned. She begged me to help her escape…” His voice trailed off.
Overcome by the curiosity she had not been able to stifle, Bethan prompted him. “What did you do?”
“Married her, of course. Her uncle wanted to call me out for it, but Ford smoothed matters over somehow. For a while Carlotta was grateful and I was besotted. But her gratitude didn’t last long. A few months later she humiliated me by running off with an East India Company factor. My partners dragged me away on Raffles’s expedition to get my mind off her. It worked well enough until she turned up in Singapore a year later with a baby she claimed was mine. She begged me to take her back for the child’s sake. Chivalrous idiot that I was, I agreed.”
Bethan’s mouth fell open when she realised what he was saying. “You think Rosalia might not be your daughter?”
“How can I ever know for certain? She is the image of her mother. I’ve never seen the slightest resemblance to me.”
That resemblance must have made Rosalia a constant, painful reminder of her mother’s betrayal. Simon had tried to be a good father.
In spite of all that had happened between them, Bethan could not resist the impulse to reassure him. “I’m certain you are her father. I told you all the likenesses I’ve seen between you.”
“So you did.” For the first time that day, his voice warmed. “That meant a great deal to me. Regardless of her paternity, I owe Rosalia a father’s attention and affection. But knowing her feelings are like mine may make it easier to mend my past mistakes.”
As silence fell between them, Bethan tried to keep her anger towards Simon burning hot. But thoughts of how Carlotta had abused his generosity and betrayed his trust fell upon it like raindrops. At first they only sizzled and evaporated, but gradually they began to quench the flames.
“You might as well hear the rest of the story,” said Simon at last. “Carlotta did not remain content for long in a humble kampong house beside our godown. She died as I told you, drowned while boarding a tongkang. She was running away again—this time with the captain of a French ship.”
Bethan risked a glance towards him. With his crisp, compelling profile lit by the silvery rays of the moon, he looked like a statue carved out of ice. “So that’s why you thought I was trying to trick you into marriage. And why you don’t want another wife.”
“Carlotta was not the only reason. She was just the last and the worst of several women who deceived and betrayed me after I tried to help them.”
“But I’m not like those other women, Simon! Why must you tar me with the same brush?” The moment those words left her mouth, Bethan’s conscience hurled them back at her.
Was she so very different from Carlotta and the other women who had exploited Simon’s gallantry for their own purposes? By misleading Hadrian Northmore to secure her passage to Singapore, she had cheated Simon out of the mistress he wanted. Since her arrival, she’d purposely misled him about her reasons for coming here. Even after he had confided in her some of the most painful secrets from his past, she still could not bring herself to trust him with her secret.
Her situation was different, Bethan tried to persuade herself. She had not acted from selfish motives. She had no designs on Simon’s fortune and she would never desert him for another man. She was only trying to protect her beloved brother from people who might judge him as unfairly as Simon had judged her.
Her conscience refused to be soothed by those excuses.
Chapter Eleven
“I know you’re not like those other women.” Staring down the hill towards the lights of the town and the shadowy ships anchored off shore, Simon strove to ignore his nagging doubts. When Bethan had protested her innocence, she sounded as if she might be trying to convince herself more than him. “Part of me does, at least—the reasonable part, the fair part. But there’s something else inside of me that’s still bitter and certain of being betrayed again.”
Telling her the sordid truth about his marriage had felt as if he were stripping off the hard protective shell he’d worn for so long. When it was gone, he’d stood before her with all his flaws and weaknesses exposed. Yet it had also been like lancing an old corrupted wound, draining off some of the resentment and self-doubt that was slowly poisoning him.
He owed Bethan a debt for that and for helping him form an attachment with his daughter. He wished she would let him repay her in the ways he was able, by offering her his protection, his passion and the best of everything his fortune could provide.
But when he tried to tell her so, his insidious doubts made him say something quite different. “There’s one thing I still can’t fathom. If your English wasn’t good enough to understand Hadrian, how were you able to read the notice he put in the newspaper?”
He was afraid Bethan would resent his question, but she came back with an answer so readily, he knew it must be the truth. “Evan saw the notice and read it to me. Then he helped me write the letter to Mr Northmore.”
The note of fondness in her voice vexed Simon. “Who’s Evan?”
“He’s a friend of my…a friend of mine from Llanaled.” Her hesitation suggested there was more to it than that.
“How good a friend?” It shouldn’t matter to him. Whatever the connection it was all in the past an
d he had no claim on her. In spite of all that, it did matter far too much.
“Good enough to help me find a job in service when I first came to Newcastle. If you must know, he wanted us to be more than friends. I told him I didn’t feel that way about him and I wanted to see the world before I settled down. Evan was kind enough to help me make my dream come true.”
Simon’s lip curled. “Spurned suitors don’t usually go out of their way to do favours for women who’ve rejected them.”
“I don’t know why you’re asking about Evan.” Bethan grew suddenly defensive. “What happened isn’t his fault. It’s mine. If I’d told Mr Northmore straight away that I couldn’t speak English very well, I’m sure he would have made certain I understood that it wasn’t a wife you wanted.”
Was it possible Evan had been too simple to read between the lines of Hadrian’s newspaper notice? Simon wondered. Or had her friend played a cruel trick on Bethan because she’d rebuffed his advances? It would never cross her mind that she might have been betrayed by someone she cared about. Much as Simon deplored her naïveté, something deep inside him envied her innocent belief in the goodness of others.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” she pleaded. “That it was all a mistake and I never set out to trick you?”
“Yes, I believe you.” Though there were parts of her story that still didn’t ring quite true, a fragile seed of trust took root in Simon’s heart. “If you’d wanted to trick me into marriage, you wouldn’t have refused my proposal.”
“I reckon that’s true,” said Bethan. “I don’t want you to marry me against your will because of a mix-up that wasn’t your fault.”
The relief her answer gave Simon was not as overwhelming as it should have been. “In that case…is there any chance you’d consent to become…my mistress?”
Her whole body recoiled. “I may be daft and rash, but I do have some morals. If I let you keep me, I’ll be no better than the woman my father left us for. No better than your wife. I’d only be using you to secure my comfort the same way she was. I’d deserve to be shunned by your neighbours and called filthy names.”