Page 22 of Scandal’s Daughter

She smiled at him, knowing he spoke the truth and beyond touched that he had thought so carefully about a gift for her. He opened the box to reveal a delicate gold chain, and suspended on it, a small gold heart.

“Just to remind you, if you should ever be in any doubt ... that you have my heart, Georgiana.”

She touched her finger to the heart and blinked away tears. “Thank you,” she managed, though her voice was thick. “I will keep it always.” She took the chain from the box and slipped it into her reticule. “I will have to invent a kindly old lady who will bequeath it to me, won’t I?” she said, trying to joke though it seemed very far from funny.

“I would ask something in return,” he said, reaching out and curling a lock of her hair around his fingers.

“Of course!” she said, wishing she had thought of it herself. “B-but I have no scissors, nothing to ...”

“I came prepared,” he said, smiling at her as he brushed her lips with his own and snipped off one thick curl. He held it to his mouth and kissed it, before putting it carefully in the box her necklace had come in. “I will carry it with me always.”

“Oh, don’t promise that,” she pleaded, shaking her head. “For your wife will discover it one day and then how should she feel? No, it is too cruel.”

“And you are too good!” he shouted, pulling her close again. “Dammit, why should you care for her, whoever she may be. I know damned well I shan’t.”

“Don’t, Beau, don’t please,” she pleaded. “Kiss me again and then let me go, for if you don’t, I have the strangest feeling that everything will turn sour. Please, my love.”

“And what will you do?” he demanded, his tone once again cruel and desperate with pain. “When I am gone what will you do then?”

She looked up at him and this time she was powerless to stop the tears that ran down her face with abandon.

“Today?” she asked, her voice choking on a sob. “Today I will go home and tell them I am unwell as they all believed this morning, when I was so quiet and drab. And they will put me to bed and the moment they close the door I will cry and cry until there are no tears left in the world I haven’t shed.” She laughed then, feeling really quite beyond her own sanity, as though she would run mad in her desperate sorrow. “You see I have the advantage of you in this at least,” she said, smoothing her hands over his lapels with care. “I am only a woman after all, a weak creature governed by her emotions and fanciful whims. So, if I take to my bed and cry no one will think too very much of it, other than perhaps that I am a little low in spirit.

But you, darling Beau, you must be brave and swallow it down and pretend that there is nothing you care for, that nothing has ever touched your heart, nor ever will. And I promise not to embarrass you by throwing myself into the sea on your account or something equally sordid.”

She tried to smile at him at that but could do nothing now but cry, and buried her face in his neck, sobbing and clinging to him as hard as she could.

It took a great effort to stop herself, and it was only the thought that his last memory of her shouldn’t be of a red eyed, desperate creature that made her take a breath and steady herself again.

He was silent, but his hold on her was enough to speak for him, as was the aching sadness in his eyes. “Kiss me goodbye then, my own handsome scoundrel.”

For a moment she thought he wouldn’t but then his lips found hers in a tender kiss, full of longing and desire, and everything they both knew they could never have.

He caught her face in his hands, his expression fierce. “I will never forget you, Georgiana. I promise you.”

“Nor I, Beau,” she promised in return, kissing his cheek and somehow finding the strength to move out of his arms.

She was so numb she didn’t even call to Conrad who caught up with her farther down the lane with a bark of reproach. There was nothing that seemed real now, nothing that seemed to exist outside of this fresh, exquisite pain that tore at her from the inside and promised that she would never be happy again. So it was that she found her way home and did just as she’d told him she would. And while Aunt Jane instructed the maids to bring a hot brick for her feet and hartshorn and water, Georgiana cried and cried until there were no tears left at all.