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Chapter Sixteen
“Is it in the nature of the human heart to love what is wrong?”
Private Education: A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies.
Elizabeth Appleton. 1815.
Rhys breathed indolent and deep. To inhale the scent of Miss Beaujeu – warm femininity, intense jasmine and bitter chocolate.
No answer came to his question. Yet as he drew back, her eyes were as turbulent as a Welsh storm.
She fulfilled some profound need in him tonight – filled the yawning gap and imparted life into his heavy soul. Never had he spoken with such candour but her quiet strength and understanding had invoked an intimacy such as he’d never felt.
He seized her hand. “Some amongst the London Ton believe I’m too high in the instep to wed anyone lower in status than a viscount’s daughter. Truth or lie?”
Yet her silence endured, and Rhys wondered if perchance he’d been mistaken – that Miss Beaujeu held no interest in knowing him as a man, that the emotion which swirled within this study was merely his own.
He drew awa–
“L-lie,” she rasped.
He subdued his shudder. “Or that I’ll only marry a lady of Welsh lineage? Truth or lie?”
“I’d say… A lie?”
His lips curved at her uncertain tone. “So it is.” He watched his unbidden hand reach up and pretend to shift a stray curl of hair. “Some say I dislike womenfolk?”
“Lie,” she stated firmly, that huskiness seeping into his being like spring rain.
“And last but not least, my brother claimed I was the sort who would only ever marry for…” He hunched down to her ear, lips brushing the delicate lobe. “…the truest of love.”
He heard her gasp, deafening in the silent study. “T-truth.”
“So hardly a secret for you, is it, Miss Beaujeu?”
But oh, how he’d searched over the years, thinking it would be as the poets described – a burst of incandescence, a wrenching of his heart.
Yet naught.
And each year his heart had grown more wearied. In his eyes, those debutante diamonds of the first water dulling to disappointment.
Then Tristan had been lost to the sea and he’d become deeply aware life could be short, his duty called, and so this house party had seemed a sensible step. But the young ladies, though all perfectly charming and pretty, had been selected based upon Elen’s criteria of bloodlines and breeding. Not companionship and connection.
He leaned back. But not too far. “I have not as yet married because I sought love. No need for ancestry or further monies, for I have those in abundance. All I wished for…” He breathed deep. “Was love, passion and connection. I never found it, so I never married. Was I greedy, Miss Beaujeu, to want it all? Or a mere whimsical fool?”
“I do not think it greedy or foolish.” The curls dressing Miss Beaujeu’s forehead shook from side to side. “I think it…ardent, honest and tender.”
His eyes widened, lips parted…
“‘Love waits for my surrender,
Ever to greet my bared heart,
Ardent, honest and tender…’”
“Byrne,”she whispered. “You truly do know his poetry?”
“Oh, yes. I understand his every word. The aching, the want, the need.”
