Page 60 of Regency Whispers: Scandalous Matches

‘Your sister was still at home?’

‘She was. Every day I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t spend another month in that house—it was suffocating.’ He paused, and in the moonlight Jane could see the angst on his face. ‘I left her behind to save myself.’

‘You can’t have been very old.’

‘I was eighteen. Old enough.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘We wrote, a lot. She begged me not to blame myself, begged me to go out and live my life without the shadow of our father hanging over me. And then she disappeared.’

‘She disappeared?’

‘I was away at the time, but when I returned home the servants said one day she was acting normally, going about her daily routine, and the next she was gone. She didn’t take a single thing with her except the clothes she was wearing.’

‘You must have been so worried.’

‘My father paid for investigators—not out of concern for Rebecca, you understand, but because he hated not being in control. They uncovered nothing.’

‘What did you do?’

‘When I returned to London I met with some of her friends and one told me she had fallen in love. This friend informed me she had no clue who the man was, just that he was foreign. Rebecca had gone, vanished, and left no trace behind her.’

‘Did you feel guilty?’

For a long moment Tom remained silent, his lips pressed together and a frown on his face.

‘I should never have left her. It was selfish. I put my own future, my own chance of happiness, above hers.’

‘You were eighteen, barely more than a child yourself. A child who had lived through a whole lifetime of cruelty. Subject a hundred people to that, and show me anyone who wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to escape as you did.’

‘I loved my sister more than anyone in the world,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I still put myself first.’

Realisation slowly dawned on Jane. ‘That is why you don’t want to get married. You don’t feel you would be good enough, selfless enough.’

‘I can’t trust myself to put someone else’s needs ahead of my own. I didn’t do it before, and no one deserves that in a husband.’

It was as if the final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. She had always wondered if there was something more to his adamance that he would not marry. The pursuit of pleasure was one thing, but she had wondered what would happen if he ever fell in love. Now she understood he wouldn’t let himself fall in love for exactly this reason.

‘I searched for her. I spent a lot of money trying to find her, but I never did. She had hidden herself too well.’ He shrugged. ‘At least I know now she had a good life, a kind husband, a beautiful son. All the things she always dreamed of.’

‘All the things you deserve too.’

He shook his head and ploughed on, as if needing to get everything off his chest now he had started. ‘Then I had my accident and when I woke up I realised how lucky I was to be alive. It took a long time to learn to walk again, to be able to concentrate for more than a few minutes without getting a blinding headache, but I made progress month by month. When I was fully recovered, I decided I would dedicate my life to finding pleasure. That way I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I wouldn’t betray anyone like I had my sister.’

He fell silent and Jane wished there wasn’t such a distance between them. She wanted to pull him into her arms, to smother him with love, to make him see that he was more than worthy.

‘Now you see,’ he said after a long silence. ‘I can’t marry, not unless the alternative is much worse.’

The pain in his expression made her heart break and all Jane could do was nod silently. Nothing she could say tonight was going to change his mind. He’d held on to this belief for over a decade. It was firmly entrenched in his mind.

They sat for a long time, completely quiet, the only sound their rhythmic breathing. Jane couldn’t stop thinking of the heartache Tom must have carried round, the burden of guilt pressing down on him over the years. Nothing could change how he had acted when he had fled at the tender age of eighteen, but she wondered if there was some way to make him see he’d not been the same man then as he was now.

Chapter Eighteen

Tom shifted, wondering why he was quite so uncomfortable. He reached back to pull a pillow into place but his hand grasped only air.

It took a moment for him to remember where he was, his eyes shooting open and taking in the darkness in the room. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was still dark. Hopefully he had merely dozed off, not slept half the night in Jane’s bedroom, chaste though the experience had been.