“Nor did I mean to hurt you during your come-out Season in London.” He stroked the back of her hand, his chest tight. He had to make her see. “Twenty-one-year-old lads are marginally more intelligent than their seventeen-year-old counterparts, but I happened to inherit a viscountcy in the meantime.”
She gazed back at him flatly. Her eyes were luminous with suppressed pain.
He forced himself to continue. “Not only was I trying to live up to my grandmother’s impossible standards, I was now under the magnifying glass of the entireton. Anything I said, anywhere I went, every little detail appeared in the society papers. Now that I’m older, I no longer care what the caricaturists and society matrons think of me—”
“Obviously,” Rebecca muttered.
“—but from the start, I desperately wanted to make a positive difference in the House of Lords. And I knew nothing. About anything. I spent every day immersed in the estate and taking care of my tenants, and every night researching every topic that came up in Parliament. When you arrived, I couldn’t afford a distraction… and you had always been my greatest weakness.”
Her expression was skeptical at best.
He tried again. “I can’t claim I didn’t mean to ignore you, because I did so on purpose. Not because of anything against you, but because I knew one tea, one dance, one moment in your company and I would never be able to be anywhere else.”
Her eyes narrowed. She was no doubt having difficulty reconciling this explanation with how it had looked and felt at the time.
He couldn’t blame her for distrusting him.
“I did it for my own self-preservation, even though I knew I was hurting you in the process.” There. That was honest. But now that she knew the truth, he knew no excuse would suffice. “I recognize that I behaved like a blackguard. And I am truly, truly sorry.”
She pulled her hands from his grasp. “I was young. You were young. That was then. Very well, I forgive you for telling me I ‘wasn’t significant enough’ to bother dancing with… right in earshot of your grandmother and all the other guests.”
His neck flushed in shame. He hadn’t considered how devastating those careless words might have been on her reputation and her chance in Society.
Her eyes flashed. “I even understand the pull of wanting to fit in with theton, and the pressure of suddenly having to run a viscountcy and vote responsibly because England’s future depends on it. That’s not what still stings.”
He tensed in trepidation. How much worse had he harmed her?
“What hurt me for so long weren’t your little snubs, but that you could forget me so completely.”
His head shot up. “I swear I never—”
She lifted a trembling hand. “Don’t. Your life was hard. Thingsobviouslygot better. The viscountcy was solvent. You were elected to committees. Your name began to appear next to words like ‘flirt’ and ‘rake’ and ‘masquerade’ in all the society papers.”
He winced. All that was true. Once he’d got used to his new role, it had become easier to just keep playing it.
Her eyes betrayed her disgust…and her pain. “Clearly things had finally settled down and you now had more time and money on your hands than you knew what to do with. Yet you never so much as penned a single letter. Not one sorry word.”
His stomach twisted. He had been a coward. And he had hurt her more than he’d ever known. His throat grew thick.
She rose to her feet. The chasm between them yawned even wider. “Yearspassed, Daniel. I never heard your name unless I read it in a newspaper. Yet you expect me to believe I’m the one you never forgot?”
“Iwantedto write to you,” he burst out as he pushed to his feet. “I was terrified to. I knew it wouldn’t be enough. After everything that had happened, everything I’d put you through… What use was a letter? You would have torn it up, burned it, and I would have deserved nothing less. I needed to come in person. It was the only way. The best way.”
“Then why didn’t you?” Her voice cracked. “Years, Daniel.”
His heart sank. He hated himself for causing her so much pain. “I had waited so long and had so many excuses. The viscountcy, the House of Lords, the weather. What I really feared was that you couldn’t forgive me. That you never would. And as long as I didn’t try, as long as I didn’t ask, I could let myself believe there was still a chance for us to be friends again someday.”
“Is that what you want?” she demanded, her eyes flashing. A humorless smile twisted her perfect lips. “To be friends?”
“No,” he said as he cupped her face in his hands and tilted her mouth up to his. “I’ve never wanted that. I’ll prove it.”
He crushed his lips to hers and kissed her with all the passion he’d kept bottled up for so long. He kissed her for the green lad he’d been nine years ago, when they’d shared the first kiss of their lives with each other, right there in the same kitchen, with the scent of fresh-baked biscuits in the air.
He kissed her for the scared turnip he’d still been four years ago, who had been drowning from the pressure of trying to be a perfect viscount and dying to be a credible representative and secretly wanting nothing more than to run away from it all with a pretty gray-eyed girl with glossy black ringlets.
Most of all, he kissed her forher. For always being true to herself. For being the smartest person he knew. The bravest. The strongest. Whenever he asked himself what kind of man he wanted to be, the answer wasn’t to become his grandmother’s puppet, or to mold himself after some duke or legislator.
He wanted to be good enough forRebecca. He wanted to be wise and brave and strong. He wanted to be the kind of man she deserved. A man she could be proud of.
