“I was working,” she said bluntly, cutting him off. The gall of him, finding a tender connection in that moment. “That is all it was.” This is what he should come for? To chastise her for being here in London? “He came and sought me out. I did not approach him. I don’t—“
“No! You misunderstand. I’m not . . . upset at your being here.” He paused. “I have missed you, Edwina,” he spoke quietly. He always had. He’d been more serious where her mother had been a burst of sunshine who’d managed to make him laugh, and Edwina along with them.
She flinched. Of everything he might have said, that had certainly not been what she wanted to hear. “Yes, well, pardon me if I do not necessarily believe you.” And a lifetime of bitterness she’d not even realized she’d carried inside brought her words out sharply.
His features twisted. “I am deserving of that.”
Yes, he was. That and more.
“I didn’t know your mother died.”
“You should have. She loved you.” She’d loved him more than he’d ever deserved.
“And I loved her—”
Edwina made a sound of protest, and covered her ears to stamp out his lies. “Don’t do that. You did not love her. You didn’t love either of us.”
“I did,” he entreated her.
She glared at him. “Then not enough.”
All along, she’d been searching for this man’s approval, wanting his praise. Wanting him to accept her. To love her. Rafe had helped her to see that the marquess had never been deserving of any of that.
“Did you know I came to you upon her death?” she demanded. “When you sent your son to meet me?” My brother. “More money. You always were free with your funds.” And that would have been enough for many. All most bastards would ask for. But she’d wanted more. She’d deserved more. She’d deserved to be cared for and loved.
He scraped a hand through his hair, tousling those black strands. “My wife was sick. I was . . .”
“Riddled with grief?” she supplied, taunting him. “Unlike when my mother died?”
“I carried guilt. Much of it.” He took a step toward her, and she automatically retreated. The marquess stopped. “It is no excuse, Edwina. My love was first and always to your mother. My guilt came from marrying where I shouldn’t have, marrying a woman who always knew my love belonged to another. When she fell ill, it led me to end my arrangement with your mother.”
Arrangement.
He’d come to a cottage and bedded her and played a devoted lover for a handful of days each month, before going on his way to his real life.
She hugged her arms around her middle.
“I vowed to be loyal to my wife, Edwina, and care for you still. That was the best I could offer all of you.”
Loyal to his wife. “How admirable of you. Thank you for the . . . funds.”
His features crumpled. He dropped his gaze to the parasol once more, and he passed the article back and forth between his gloved hands. At last, he looked up. “I know forgiveness will not come easy, but I wish to make amends. I want to have you in my life. I want to claim you outright as my daughter, as I should have done, long ago. You shouldn’t have had to work as you have.”
“I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done. I did it myself,” she said, lifting her chin up in defiance.
“I am proud of that.” He turned a palm up, as if willing her to believe the sincerity of that admission. “But you shouldn’t know struggle and you certainly shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t . . .” Color flooded his cheeks.
Edwina scrunched her toes up tight as she was presented with the closest thing to words of what she’d done . . . what she’d been caught doing. And her father had been witness to her scandal.
“Come home with me, Edwina,” her father murmured. “Please.”
There it was.
It was all she’d ever wished for.
Acceptance.
And following her scandal, and the end of her career . . . he offered something more: security.
He might have failed her in the past, but he was offering to save her now.
And yet, staring back at him, she found herself thinking of what she truly wanted now—Rafe.
Chapter 24
For almost thirty-one years of his life, Rafe had gone without knowing his father.
When he’d been a boy, however, he’d dreamed of having a relationship with him . . . that unknown duke his mother had simultaneously sung the praises of and wept from the pain of missing. In those earliest years, even hating the Duke of Bentley as he had, Rafe had imagined a world in which he was a son in every sense of the word. In those wonderings, there would have been a father to laugh with, and learn from . . . and he’d been so desperate to know all of that intangible relationship that he’d even welcomed and fancied the idea of a father whose disapproval he’d earned, and the lectures that would come.
Only to find out a lifetime later, in his father’s office, faced with the duke’s damning silence, just how miserable the moment in fact was.
Not that Bentley’s or any man’s shame and disappointment could be any greater than that which knifed at Rafe now.
Standing in the middle of the duke’s office, with his hands clasped behind him, Rafe directed his gaze at his father. Or in this case, his father’s back.
The duke considered the tray of bottles on his sideboard, hovering briefly over a decanter of brandy, before ultimately bypassing it for the stronger whiskey.
It was the choice Rafe himself would have made, if he’d been in a frame of mind to consume spirits. Because the situation certainly called for it.
She’d been ruined. And he well knew the future and fate that awaited a ruined woman. His mother had been one.
It was what Edwina had feared above all else, and had sought to protect herself against. Only to find herself destroyed, because of Rafe.
And the truth of that ravaged him.
Setting down the bottle, and with two whiskeys in hand, his father came forward.
“I’m not looking to have a discussion,” Rafe said tightly. “I want to see Edwina.” Nay, he needed to see her.
The moment he’d caught her stricken expression, and watched as she’d taken flight, he’d wanted to set out after her.
“Sit, Rafe.”
Rafe flexed his jaw. “I don’t have time to talk to you about this.”
“I said, ‘sit down,’ Rafe,” his father said again, when Rafe made to leave. “No good will come from you flying after her, to her rooms, without talking this through, and thinking this through.”
Talking this through? Thinking this through?
What was there to think through? He’d ruined Edwina. And he would be damned if Edwina suffered that same existence.
“Please,” his father said quietly, and this time, Rafe crossed over, jerked the chair out, and sat.
Bentley joined him, offering one of the whiskeys.
Rafe ignored that offering. “I don’t need a lecture,” he cut in, before the other man could speak, and lecture or scold or sway Rafe.
“Well, that is fortunate, as I don’t have a lecture to give.” The ghost of a smile hovered on the duke’s lips. “I’m hardly the one to be lecturing anyone, particularly you, on just why it was wrong for you to be meeting Miss Dalrymple, alone, and engaging . . . as you were.”
Rafe winced. “Yes, well, you managed to get that in, anyway.”
“Yes, I thought I might attempt to have a”—Bentley held an index finger and thumb, a bare fraction of a hair apart—“very small piece said.”
Rafe sat back, and dropping an elbow on the arm of the chair, he rested his forehead in his hand, and rubbed at a swift-developing headache. What a damned mess.
“When I met your mother,” the duke began quietly, and startlingly, “I was . . . captivated. I was young. I’d just
suffered a broken heart, and desperately needed a distraction. But . . . she was a friend, one whom I confided in, and who eventually became . . . more. I told her it was a terrible idea for us to alter our relationship. I told her I couldn’t give her more because I’d loved another and was incapable of feeling that depth of emotion again. She insisted she didn’t want more. And I . . . allowed myself to believe that mayhap she meant it. Because it was easier. Because I cared for her. And . . . I lost a lifetime of happiness for it . . . just as I undoubtedly cost your mother much happiness.”
It didn’t escape Rafe’s notice that love was not mentioned. Not in terms of Rafe’s mother, and given what the duke shared just then, it also served as a revelation as to why she’d not confided in him about her children. Why she’d gone to London, and accepted the carefree entanglement he sought, before returning to Rafe and, eventually, the siblings he had. “I don’t see how this has anything to do with . . .”
“What has passed between you and Miss Dalrymple . . . ?”
“I’m going to marry her,” Rafe said bluntly.
He braced for the outrage.
That didn’t come. Instead, his pronouncement was met with a calm curiosity. “Why?”
Why . . . ?
Rafe paused.
“I don’t have much advice to impart, but what I will tell you is this. I always did that which was expected of me by society. My best friend fell in love with the same woman I did . . . first. And I thought honor dictated that I let her go. I could have been happy with your mother, and yet I didn’t marry her because of the expectations imposed by society.” Setting down his drink, the duke leaned forward. “Instead, in my first marriage, I wed where there was no love and no affection and I was . . . miserable for it.”
“You would be an immoral cad to urge me to leave her to her own mercy.” Rafe peeled his lip in a sneer. “I am not you. I would never abandon her. I . . .” Love her too much for that.
Rafe froze. His heart knocked around in his chest.
I love her.
Of course he did. It was . . . all that really made sense. He suspected he’d fallen head over heels for her the moment she came sauntering into his coalfield, waving that silly parasol.
“Rafe?” He stared blankly at his father. “Rafe?”
He gave his head a clearing shake. He felt as if he’d been flipped and then turned upside down. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m not encouraging you to abandon her. Quite the opposite. I have seen the way you and Miss Dalrymple are with one another, and I’m encouraging you, if you care for her, as I suspect you do, to not be the stubborn man I was.”
No, he was a better man than his father. And he knew his heart, and he knew his mind. Rafe stood.
“There is something I should mention.”
“What?” he asked when the duke didn’t immediately speak.
“The elder gentleman who served as witness to the . . . to the . . . scandal in the gardens tonight, the same one Lydia escorted off”—Rafe didn’t give a damn about any of the people who’d been present beyond one—Edwina—“he is an acquaintance.”
And yet Rafe’s ears pricked up, as he intuitively heard more there. “What?” Rafe demanded.
“He is . . . also Miss Dalrymple’s father.”
Rafe stiffened, as silence rolled over the room.
That person . . . did matter. To Edwina. The man who’d failed her. Whose love and admiration she’d sought, when she’d always been too good for him. And yet, even as Rafe had known as much, Edwina had cared so very much for the man’s approval . . . and she’d wished to live the life that had been denied her. “What?” he asked dumbly, sinking back into the seat.
A knock sounded at the door, and Rafe was grateful for that interruption as he tried to put his disordered thoughts back together.
He dimly registered his father calling out a greeting to the duchess.
She came over and claimed the chair beside Rafe. “Lord Rochester asked to speak in private with Edwina,” she said quietly, without preamble, with a directness that normally would have made sense to him, but now he struggled to keep up.
“For what end?” Rafe managed to make himself ask.
“He has asked Edwina to leave with him, so that she might have a life here in London . . . as part of his family,” the duchess explained.
There it was.
It was all Edwina had ever wanted, that recognition. Acknowledgment from her father. And it didn’t matter what Rafe thought of the heartless cad; it was about what Edwina wished for.
“And he invited her to go with him this evening.”
“What?” he blurted out.
The duke and duchess exchanged a look.
“Now?” Rafe demanded, when neither of them spoke.
“Given the circumstances, he thought it best for Miss Dalrymple’s reputation if she—”
Rafe was already out of his chair. “To hell with the circumstances,” he hissed.
“—return with him. And he’d not have you feel obligated—”
Rafe saw red. “Obligated?” he echoed. It wasn’t about obligation. Yes, there was of course the sense of wanting to do right by her. But that was not what had driven him to her this night. That was the need to be with her. And see her. And— “Where is she?” he demanded.
“She accompanied the marquess to his carriage . . .”
The man was a stranger, and yet, he was also the one whom she’d wanted a life with. She’d wished for the man’s acknowledgment. And now, she’d been invited to reside there with that marquess. It was everything she wanted. And therefore, he should be relieved: one, that she had what she wished for. And two . . .
No, there was no “two.”
With a curse, Rafe took off running.
The duke laughed. “And that, son,” he called after him, “is why you marry her.”
His heart pounding, Rafe sprinted from his father’s office and bolted down the hall for the front doors. Needing to stop her.
To stop this.
To tell her he loved her. To tell her that he wanted her happy above all else, and if that meant her leaving to live a respectable life with her father, and having the life she’d dreamed, then he’d let her to it. Even as it would destroy him.
The butler stood in wait, opening the doors as if it were the most normal thing in the world for people to go flying out that exit. “Rochester—”
The servant pointed to the pink-lacquered carriage.
It would be a damned pink carriage, too. Rafe had to compete with that. An older gentleman stood beside Edwina. Edwina . . . with her back to him, and her foot in that damned pink carriage, and—
Rafe bolted down the steps, his gaze on that pair preparing to leave. When Satan sits with God himself for tea. “Yoo-hoo!” he shouted, that greeting she’d called out to him in Staffordshire once-upon-a-lifetime-ago. “Miss Dalrymple.” Edwina’s back tensed, and then ever so slowly she turned.
Surprise rounded her features.
Surprise? How could it be such a shock to her that he’d come after her?
Perhaps, because you never gave her any indication of how you truly felt.
Because he’d been so damned bad at emotions and laughter and . . . all of it. Until her.
She said something to the marquess. Edwina’s father hesitated. Then, with a nod, he entered the carriage.
When he’d gone, Edwina faced Rafe once more. “Are you looking for me?” she asked softly, her words an echo of his own at their first meeting.
Was he looking for her? All along, she’d been everything he’d never known he needed. “You just . . . left.”
She bit at her lip, troubling that flesh, and briefly studying the pavement. “It seemed . . . for the best.”
Rafe searched each cherished plain of her heart-shaped face. How could
she ever think that was for the best? Except . . . what if it was the best of what she wanted? “I know you have waited for this moment, and I want that for you . . . if that is what you truly want.” Even as it would destroy him to lose her completely. “And I cannot . . . compete with . . .” He waved a hand at the carriage. “This. This, what you have wanted your whole life.” Rafe reached inside his jacket; Edwina’s eyes following his every movement, and he withdrew the small pink notebook he kept there.
She shook her head in confusion. “What is that?”
“It is called a notebook,” he said in another echo of her words to him from the day they left Staffordshire. “My notebook.” Rafe licked the tip of his finger and turned to the first page. “Fortunately, I once had a wise instructor.”
“Did you?” she whispered.
“Oh, yes.” He paused; he held her eyes with his, hers red with tears that she’d shed at some point, ravaging him inside. “You see, she advised me to fill the pages with the most important details of our time together.” He held the book in one hand. “And I did . . . and the thing of it is, Edwina, all those pages . . . came to be about you.”
“About me?”
“You see, it was as you said. I learned from recording my thoughts, Edwina. I recorded every thought of you, everything I loved, everything that made me laugh and smile and frustrated me and intrigued me.”
She sucked in a quavering little breath.
Rafe stared over the top of the page, the words there, long memorized. “ ‘I have never known a person more clever and witty, who makes me think more, and about things I’ve never before thought of.’ ”
Her lower lip trembled.
“I learned there are more than a hundred different smiles, because you showed them to me—the ones that light your eyes and dimple your cheeks when you’re truly happy, or the ones that hide upon your lips, as if you have the grandest secret, that makes a man yearn to know.”
“You have many smiles, t-too.” Her voice caught.
Emotion filled his throat, and he swallowed past it, looking at her squarely. “That is because of you. That is one more lesson you gave; you taught me to smile, too. When I didn’t realize I needed to or wanted to.”
Along Came a Lady Page 31