“It is easy to say no in the heat of the moment,” he said. “Then one does not realize that the rest of a lifetime can be a long and tedious business.”
“It was not easy,” she said. “I knew that it meant giving up everything and everybody I had ever known and loved. I knew that it meant being whipped for the first time in my life—my father had warned me that that would be one of the consequences of my refusing you. It was terrifying in anticipation. In actual fact it was too painful to be terrifying. There was only the pain.” She watched him frown briefly, the first change of expression she had seen on his face. “And I knew that after that I would be sent here for the rest of my life. I had never been here, but I imagined what it would be like, and I was a girl who enjoyed crowds and gaiety. No, it was not easy to say no. The only thing that made it possible was that it was even less possible to say yes.”
“You still loved him,” he said. “That was understandable, I suppose. But even that must have died in five years.”
“I did not love him,” she said, “even though I had eloped with him less than a week before. Perhaps I never did. Did you ever consider that? Perhaps it was all just a combination of his dashing appearance in his lieutenant’s uniform and his charm and the fact that both my father and my brothers had forbidden me to have any dealings with him and the fact that you had had the audacity to warn me against him.” There was bitterness, even anger, in her voice. He thought he knew everything. He knew nothing. He had never asked. Perhaps if he had asked—if he had asked the right way—she would have told him the full truth. But no, he had had all the answers.
“He was a fortune hunter,” he said. “He almost ruined my sister. I prevented them just in time from running off together.”
“Yes, he was a fortune hunter,” she said. “I have not forgotten how he faltered when you came after us and pretended that my father had washed his hands of me and cut me off without a penny. And how eagerly he accepted the sum you paid him to leave without me. Why did you come after us? I have never understood that.” They had not been good at communicating. She had not asked questions either. She had expected him to supply the answers without having to be asked.
“I could not knowingly see him ruin any innocent,” he said.
“And so you did it instead,” she said.
“Yes.” His dog was prancing again and then made off to explore alone among the trees.
She had not been fair, really. It had not been rape. She had been as eager for it as he had.
“I was able to provide for you,” he said. “I would have treated you with respect. I would have been faithful to you.”
All of which Lieutenant the Honorable Leonard Hastings would not have done.
“Well,” she said, “I refused you, even knowing all the possible consequences. And after five years the consequences still seem to me infinitely more desirable than the alternative would have been. You may return to London with a clear conscience.”
He did not move or change expression. This time when she turned away he did not try to stop her. She made her way back to the stile, trying not to hurry, trying not to break into a run. Her back prickled. She had to sit down on top of the stile, her legs were shaking so. She must be out of his sight, unless he had followed her. She did not look back to see.
The full force of it was hitting her as she gazed across the sand dunes to the beach and the sea and inland to the sandy road and the houses beyond, her aunts’ house among them. It was he who had leased Ty Mawr—the Marquess of Ashendon. He had come there because of her, because of some leftover and quite mistaken sense of obligation to her. It must go hard with a man of his pride and consequence to know that he had debauched a lady of quality and had been thwarted in his attempt to put all right again by marrying her.
She would never have expected it, though. She would have thought he would have left her father’s house with the burden of guilt and obligation lifted from his shoulders. She would have expected him to forget her in a matter of days—or weeks, at the longest. She would have expected that he would have relished the thought that she was to be whipped and sent into exile for having led him into such a dangerous situation.
Why had he come after her and Lieutenant Hastings? Why had he ridden hard for all of two days to catch up to them before it was too late? Why had he paid Lieutenant Hastings such an enormous sum from his own pocket to relinquish his claim to her? Why had he endangered his own freedom by taking her back to London when he might have sent for her father and kept out of the matter?
She had asked herself the questions before, of course. Many times, though after the first few months she had pushed everything ruthlessly from her mind and her life and forgotten it all. As if something like that could possibly be forgotten...
She had thought at the time that he had come because he cared. But he had been chillier than ice on the return journey and more silent than the grave.
And then on the second night she had struggled free of a nightmare to find him bent over her, shaking her by the shoulder. There had followed that most incredible incident of her life. But it had not seemed wrong, despite the fact that even a kiss granted to a gentleman could compromise her. It had not seemed wrong. She had thought he cared. She had thought be loved her. It was the only explanation for everything that made any sense.
She had loved him during that half hour or so. Not only with her body but with her whole being. She had felt the rightness of it, of finding out this way that he had cared for her all the time. She had felt all the wonder of its happening just after he had rescued her from something that might—that would—have kept him from her forever.
But it had been all lust on his part. Cold, cynical lust. He had known, of course, that he must offer her marriage when they reached London. Then why not have her during the journey? And so he had had her and then resumed the coldness and the silence.
But why had he come after her? She had never answered the question to her own satisfaction.
She got down from the stile and made her way slowly toward the road and her aunts’ cottage. He was a strange man. But he had discovered what he had come to discover, and in the process he had been reminded yet again that she detested him, that any fate was preferable to being forced to marry him.
He would go away now. Within a day or two—before the daffodils bloomed—gossip would tell of the new tenant of Ty Mawr leaving almost before he had arrived. Everyone would be disappointed. But no one would be really surprised. What, after all, did a place like Rhos have to offer a young and single gentleman of ton? An English marquess, no less.
She might have had a chance again for marriage, she thought, coming to a stop at the side of the road, though there was no vehicle approaching in either direction. He had strongly implied that he had come to offer it to her.
She might after all have found her exile at an end after only five years. She might have returned to England and even to London, respectable again as the Marchioness of Ashendon. She might have had a normal life as a wife and mother.
The emptiness might have been filled.
She had been long aware that that one experience with physical love she had had at an inn somewhere north of London had something to do with the loneliness she often felt. For a very brief span of time she had known the illusion of intimate closeness with a man. And she knew that her body and her mind and her emotions all craved such closeness as a regular, daily part of her life. Not just that physical act, but everything that it might symbolize. Everything it had not symbolized on that particular occasion with that particular man.
She had loved him. For half an hour of her twenty-three years of life she had loved him with all her being. And for the five years that had followed that half hour she had hated him as she had not thought it possible to hate anyone.
