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Maybe it was because his hands over her shoulders gave the illusion of closeness. Maybe it was because he hadn’t expected a revelation of that magnitude from her. But he shook with the cruelty of telling a small child a lie of that nature. His hands tightened.
“So I was good.” Her matter-of-fact delivery only drove the ice deeper into his bones.
“It may be hard to believe, but I was quiet and polite and…and honest. At that age, at least. I never wept, not even—well, you can imagine how cruel young girls can be.”
Gareth had seen how the boys at Harrow tormented those not from the oldest of families. How they’d singled out the awkward and the quiet. He could extrapolate.
“I was uncommonly good until I turned nine. Then one of the other girls pushed me down and I skinned my knee and got mud on my dress. Nothing unusual, you understand. And while I was telling myself it would all come right when my mother came for me, I realized it had been years. She wasn’t coming for me. Nobody ever would, no matter how good I was. Mrs. Davenport had lied to me, and I was all alone.”
Gareth swallowed the lump in his throat. “So what did you do?”
Her shoulder blades leapt under his hand in what Gareth supposed was a fatalistic shrug. “I stopped being good. And here I am.”
Here they weren’t. She shifted and smiled at him. Pretending it didn’t matter.
“But all this talk of me is boring. What of you? Twenty-one, was it, when you discovered everyone lied?”
Gareth paused, reluctant. In part, he held his tongue because he wanted to learn more of her than she did of him. But he also didn’t want to air his petty complaints to her. Not now, in the barren aftermath of her revelation.
“The usual,” he eventually said. “Delusions of love.”
“A woman?” He must have made some sign of acknowledgment, because she covered his cold hand with hers. “And another man, I would imagine.”
“And more than one man,” he corrected. “One of whom was my grandfather.”
Her breath hissed in. “Good Lord. How did that—I mean—why?”
“It was a wager. I’d planned to ask her to marry me. My grandfather—he had the training of me after my father died—thought she wasn’t good enough to be the future Marchioness of Blakely. I said she was. He wagered he could prove otherwise.”
“What do you mean, wagered she wasn’t good enough? That sounds horrific.”
No more horrific than sending Gareth’s mother away from her son just because she remarried. Gareth waved his hand. “It was part of his lessons. Learn about the estates. Accept responsibility. Noblesse oblige. He said I had plebeian instincts, and he needed to drive them from me.”
“So he—he—”
“So he shagged the woman I intended to marry, yes.”
“And he called that a lesson? It sounds more like a travesty. How did he dare tell you what he’d done?”
“There was no need. He made sure I overheard them. She called his name, you see.”
Long silence. “At the time,” she finally said, “he would have been Lord Blakely, yes?”
Thank God for intelligent women, who understood the import of his little speech without him having to bare himself any more than he’d already done. Gareth traced his hand down the curve of her spine.
“So since you inherited—” she started.
“It’s been years. And no. Since I became Blakely myself, I haven’t been able to hear that name on a woman’s lips. Not like that.”
At twenty-one, he’d had as much perspective on life as an ant had of the horizon. He felt rather like that ant now—as if he were utterly trivial. A pimple on the face of an enormous mountain situated in a massive range.
She’d had nothing. By all rights, Jenny should have followed the path of doomed women everywhere. Increasing desperation. Sexual immorality. It should have culminated in her dramatic death in some snow-filled alley, as if she were some desperate female in one of those gothic serializations. But Jenny had not made a serial of herself.
Instead, it was her arm that fell comfortingly over his chest, her head that rested against his shoulder. She gave succor to him, and he, selfish creature that he was, sucked in all her heat, hoarding it as selfishly as he’d taken her body.
Years ago, he’d traded the uncertain comfort of companionship for the surety of superiority. It had been his grandfather’s last gift—or perhaps his curse. If this was what he’d given up all those years ago, could he justify those years of loneliness?
Gareth shook his head and sent the dark thoughts back from whence they came.
Twilight had passed, and now he could make out nothing of her features in the thick darkness. He pulled her against him. She was limp and no doubt weary. She hadn’t slept much the previous evening. Neither, for that matter, had he.
The last of the light faded as he held her close.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WHEN JENNY AWOKE the next morning, the side of the bed next to her felt cold. He must have left sometime in the night. She opened her eyes. Pale light touched the walls. Outside, she could hear the sounds of early morning in London. A cart rumbled by, and the market a few streets down was coming to life. A butter-maid’s shout punctuated the dawn. “Freshly churned, freshly churned!”
Jenny sat up and looked around the room, stricken. Every scrap of clothing he’d set on the chair the previous night had vanished. After the conversation the previous evening, she had begun to believe she meant something more to him than a mere sexual relationship. She had thought that they had formed a deeper attachment.
The secrets they’d shared on the previous night had left her feeling vulnerable. Apparently, it had passed him by completely. It would be foolish for Jenny to harbor illusions about Lord Blakely. He wouldn’t care for her. For him, this was a temporary circumstance. It was physical pleasure. And no matter how close he held her, he would one day leave. When he did, she would not let her life be as empty as this room.
She swung her feet to the side of the bed and stood up. She’d slept in nothing but his arms. She reached for her clothing, heaped in an uncertain pile on the floor. Drawers first, and then her shift. The working woman’s stays that provided support rather than shaping.
As she dressed herself, she realized one last thing: Her desire to be loved hadn’t lessened during the decade since she’d embarked on that first disastrous affair.
Her feelings for Gareth had passed the point of danger. She was desperate to take everything he said as an indication that he cared for her. But aside from a few comments made in the heat of the moment, he treated Jenny as if she were nothing more than a mistress. And that she’d vowed never to become. Not again.
There was no good way to take his departure in the morning without so much as an explanation. No doubt he’d come back some other evening—and no doubt, he’d try to buy her participation in the sexual act with another piece of furniture. Perhaps he’d give her a silver bracelet when he was done with her.
Perhaps by that time she would be desperate enough to take it, to accept the bare monetary value he placed on her heart.
Jenny vowed not to let him fool her again. She’d let her own desperate loneliness overwhelm her. She had more important things to think about. Such as how she was to rescue her four hundred pounds from Mr. Sevin’s clutches. And what she was to do with the funds once she had them in hand.
She hugged her knees.
Had she not foolishly told Gareth about her childhood last night, she could have withstood this. But she had felt naked and exposed—and afterward he’d held her so gently. She’d felt as if she’d come home. She’d never had a home before.
Damn him. The facts were simple. He was a lord. She was a ruined woman he had taken on as a mistress. She accepted as payment the casual kindnesses he offered.
It had been many years since Jenny had allowed herself to cry.
She did, now. She cried hot tears for her own stupidity. For that raging desire that still burned
inside her, her determination to be strong and respected. She buried her face in her blanket and sobbed. It felt strangely exhilarating to let her tears loose.
She’d always thought it weak to indulge in tears, but nothing else seemed to answer for the situation. Crying didn’t solve any problems, but not crying hadn’t proven particularly effective, either. She let herself weep.
The creak of hinges interrupted her. Heavy footsteps sounded in her front room, and a metallic scrape. Jenny looked up through tear-blurred eyes in time to see Gareth come down the short hall between her rooms. His hands were full; he held a bundle under one arm, and the kettle from the other room in his hand. He set the kettle on the hob-grate over the fire.
Then he glanced over at Jenny and froze in shock. The cloth he’d used to hold the kettle fell from his hand and fluttered to the floor. It landed with an ignominious plop.
“I’ll be damned,” Gareth said slowly, “if I ever have any idea what to say at times like this.”
Jenny sniffled. “You didn’t leave?”
He looked at her as if she belonged in Bedlam. “Of course I left. I was hungry, and I couldn’t find anything to eat. I bought a loaf and some cheese. And oranges.” He set his paper-wrapped package on the table. “Wait. You mean, you thought I had left. Without saying a word to you. Would I do that?”
He drew himself up, cold and affronted.
Jenny nodded.
His jaw clenched. “Damn it. You know better than most I’m no good at these things but even I am not that bad. Really, Jenny. Why would you believe such a thing of me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, mulishly. “Maybe because you once told me all you wanted from me was a good shag?”
“I said that?” He looked surprised, then contemplative. Then, apparently, he remembered, and winced. “God. I said that? Why did you even touch me?”
She glanced away so he could not see her heart in her eyes.
