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Laurel closed the door and sat down at the desk. It was outrageous to be searching someone else’s private papers, but it seemed this was a matter that concerned her, to put it mildly. If Giles and his father were hiding things from her, then she could sink her scruples and pry.
It did not take long to see a large folded document with her father’s hand clear on the outside. She pulled it out, flattened it open on the desk and began to read.
* * *
She was reading it through for the third time—it was easier to keep reading than to have to think what to do next—when the door opened.
‘Laurel?’ Giles looked, and sounded, appalled. And he looked as guilty as hell.
‘I overheard you talking,’ she said. ‘So I came to see for myself. Why did you not tell me, Giles?’
‘Would you have married me?’ He was quite calm, his eyes watchful, only the tic of a nerve in his cheek betrayed feeling.
‘No. Not at the beginning. No.’
‘So. There is your answer.’ It seemed he would not defend himself, or apologise.
‘You lied to me.’
‘I never lied. Prevaricated, perhaps, avoided answering directly, yes. But I would never lie to you, Laurel, upon my honour.’
‘Your honour?’
That brought the colour up on his cheekbones, but Giles said steadily, ‘That is what this is all about—honour. Do I see my father crippled by shame, do I see our name sink into the obscurity we rose from? Or do I fail to tell a lady the full truth while I offer her the marriage and the position she was destined to have? Where does my duty lie, Laurel? Because my honour depends on me doing my duty, does it not?’
When she did not answer he smiled, a bitter twist of the lips. ‘I should never have told you I loved you.’
Laurel folded her father’s letter and slid it back carefully into its place, then stood up. She found she had to hold on to the edge of the desk. How humiliating. ‘I do not think I can talk to you now. I will go and let you get on with whatever you came to do.’
‘I came to get that letter and then I intended to take it to you. I have damned myself, I know, and I see no reason why you should believe me, but I could not stand deceiving you any longer,’ Giles said.
Liar. The word was almost out of her mouth when she remembered the last words she had heard before she closed the door. ‘I may have damned myself, but I will—’
Laurel sat down again, jarring her spine. ‘What do you mean, you have damned yourself?’
‘I should have told you about the letter, the debt, the trust, my father’s debts, the reasons I asked you to marry me. Then I should have told you I loved you. Not the other way around.’
Of course I want to marry you. I want nothing more than to marry you...it is the sum total of my ambition to marry you, and only you... Trust. You believed him when he told you he loved you. He had no reason to say it. She had known from the beginning that something was amiss, that Giles was hiding something, was uneasy in his mind. This was it.
For better, for worse... I swore.
‘Tell me now.’
* * *
Giles told the story as though he was giving evidence in a court of law. The facts, only the facts. It was past the time for emotions or justifications. For pleading.
Laurel sat silently listening to him, that lovely brown gaze wide on his face, giving nothing away. But he knew her and she was hurting, she felt betrayed. She was betrayed because he had done what he had judged to be the right thing, the least worst thing.
‘I left him for nine years,’ he finished. ‘Because of my pride and my temper and because I had not seen how much he loved me under all that bluster, how hard it was for a man like him to understand his only son and heir who was so very different from him. I could betray him or I could deceive you by giving you the thing you had always been destined for. And it was not until I realised I was in love with you that I saw it was not only deception, it was another betrayal.’
‘I was very angry with you when we met again,’ Laurel said, her voice rigidly controlled as though to prevent the tears spilling from her brimming eyes He had put those unshed tears there. ‘You were angry with me.’
‘And you forgave me when you understood.’
‘And you? I was the reason you left the country, after all. Did you forgive me?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I desired you and I liked you, and I forgave you—in that order, I suspect.’ Was that just the tremor of a smile? ‘But I was too wrapped up in the deceit of what I had done to allow myself to understand that I love you.’
