Leslie Lafoy (22 page)

She’d seen enough scarred men in Belize to know a knife or sword wound from any other. He who lived by the sword suffered by it, too. “They must have been very painful.”

He somberly gazed off into the near distance as though remembering. Slowly, the corners of his mouth turned up. He tilted his head to look at her, his eyes sparkling. “Cook put forty-one in my upper left thigh. Would you like to see that scar?”

It was the most thoroughly, outrageously improper offer any man had ever made her. And for some reason, instead of being offended, she was incredibly tempted to accept. “Perhaps some other time,” Sera replied, her heart racing frantically. She forced herself to swallow. “How were you cut?”

His smile instantly faded and his eyes darkened. He shook his head, instantly winced, and reached for his cup. “It’s not a tale for tender sensibilities,” he said around the rim, his gaze holding hers assessingly.

“I assure you that mine were toughened quite a long while ago. Life on the Mosquito Coast is a far cry from genteel and pleasant. I doubt that there’s anything you could tell me that I haven’t either seen or heard of before.”

He believed her. And maybe it was because his brain was still slightly numb around the edges, but her willingness to share his burdens touched something deep inside him. The words were out before he could think better of it and stop them. “Harry Dennison, fourth son of the eighth or ninth Earl of Dennison, has a passion for little girls. He kept it hidden well enough that no one suspected until the day the daughter of our washwoman…” The day, that one hideous moment, returned—as always—with gut-clenching clarity. He could see the vultures, feel the heat, hear the flies and the smell … The blood was everywhere. Carden deliberately shook his head, saturating his senses with the bright light of pain.

“Neither Cook nor Dr. Phinster could repair the damage and she bled to death,” he finished, reaching for his cup of broth. “She was the same age as Bea. And every bit as innocent.”

Her eyes were huge and bright with outrage as she asked, “You challenged Dennison, didn’t you?”

It was more statement than question. “That’s a nice way of putting it. The blunter version is that I tried to kill him. And, despite Harry’s spirited self-defense, I would have succeeded if Barrett hadn’t been afraid I’d bleed to death before I got it done and decided to intervene. Or if the first weapon at hand had been a pistol instead of a rapier.”

“I’m glad Barrett didn’t let you die, but I am sorry that Harry Dennison survived, as well.”

Oh, he liked her spirit. It was so much like his own when it came to the matter of vengeance. “Of course, violence between officers being frowned upon as it is, one of us had to go, and since Harry was engaged to the colonel’s daughter, I was the one asked to resign my commission.”

“That was hardly fair,” she observed. “Justice wasn’t served.”

“Yes it was,” he countered, smiling. “Cook put over fifty stitches in his face. And they weren’t small ones, either. For as long as Harry Dennison lives, the very sight of him will make children run away.”

“Good. And I hope the colonel’s daughter had the good sense to break off their engagement.”

He had no idea what the colonel’s daughter had done. She hadn’t displayed that much wisdom in accepting Dennison’s marriage proposal in the first place. The woman sitting on the floor with him wouldn’t have given the bastard so much as the time of day. Sera wasn’t just beautiful, she had uncommon good sense. She was compassionate, too, and strong and brave. She was the kind of woman who would make the perfect—

Good God Almighty. He’d pickled his brain more deeply than he’d thought. At least he’d caught himself before he’d said or done something irrevocably stupid. He smiled at her and cocked his brow in his most roguish way. “Are you sure you don’t want to to see the scar on my thigh?”

She blushed and blinked and took a long slow breath. The hollow at the base of her slender neck thrummed with the rapid beat of her heart as she softly said, “In all the confusion and activity of the day, I’ve neglected to thank you for all you did. I don’t know what I would have done had you not been there to pull Amanda from the river. And making the puppies breathe … It all could have so easily turned out to be a terrible tragedy. I’ll be eternally grateful that you took matters so masterfully in hand.”

Eternally grateful? He wasn’t too pickled to see the benefit in that. He grinned. “I live to be of service.”

“No you don’t,” she countered, smiling softly, knowingly. “But when circumstances make it necessary, you can be a most noble and honorable man, Carden Reeves.”

How clearly she’d seen through his carefully constructed façade. “A character flaw that, thankfully, I’m able to keep hidden most of the time,” he quipped, hoping to make light of the revelation. “I’d appreciate it if you’d say nothing of it to others. My reputation is at stake, you know.”

“And you’ve worked very hard to cultivate your rakish image, haven’t you?”

This was the most amazingly honest conversation with a woman he’d ever had. Even more amazing was the fact that he found it refreshing. “It requires some persistence,” he admitted, “but it’s not an altogether unpleasant effort. It does have its rewards.”

Her smile told him that she knew precisely what kind of rewards he was talking about. The fact she smiled at all was just as telling. She wasn’t afraid of him. And she most certainly wasn’t running away in a missish dither. No, Seraphina Treadwell was quietly, seriously intrigued. And there was nothing on earth more tantalizing than a curious, honest woman.

“Why would you choose to be a rake, Carden? There are so many other ways to keep the days interesting. Why deliberately do things that encourage people to talk about you? You live a life that simply invites scandal.”

“Which is precisely the point and the intent,” he confessed with a shrug. “And there’s nothing simple about it. They’re going to talk anyway and it’s better to have some control over what they’re saying than to let them make up their own stories.”

“Are they truly that vicious?”

His heart clenched. Yes, they were and that Sera didn’t know that for herself frightened him. He did live inviting scandal, and in inviting her to his bed, he was asking her to bear the price of it along with him. It occurred to him that a better man would back away and let her go rather than subject her to the almost certain gossip.

But he couldn’t. He’d wanted her the minute he’d seen her. And in the days and hours and minutes since, the wanting had become a hunger so deep that he ached with it night and day. No, walking away from Sera was impossible; he wasn’t that strong. But if she had the strength to do it, he could at least summon the resolve to accept her decision.

She had to know what taking up with him was going to cost her. It was only fair. And he owed her to be man enough to tell her. But God, the risk of losing her was terrifying. More terrifying than the memories he’d spent the day drowning. The past was the past and nothing could be done to change it. Sera was today.

Swallowing down his heart, he shifted about until he sat cross-legged in front of her. He held out his hands and she placed hers in them, her gaze gently searching his as he drew a steadying breath. “My mother was an actress,” he began. “And almost forty years younger than my father. They’d been married barely six months when I was born.”

“And people talked about all of that.”

“Oh, yes. They still do, actually. Whenever I walk into a room. Mostly they talk about my mother’s questionable virtue and the identity of my sire. The general opinion is that my father—in his doddering old age—was tricked into giving his name and financial support to another man’s bastard.”

“Surely your father didn’t believe that,” she suggested softly.

“Obviously he didn’t at the outset or he wouldn’t have married my mother. But at some point the lies became his truth. I remember that they lived very separate lives and that what few dinners we ever shared were always excruciatingly silent ordeals. My father was seldom home, seldom sober. My mother never went out. No one ever came to call.”

He looked down at their hands. Sera’s were so small. “All we had was each other,” he whispered, remembering how his own hand had once looked in his mother’s. “She was my first and my best friend.”

His throat thickened and he cleared it before he embarrassed himself. “Then,” he said, pushing on, threading his fingers through Sera’s, “when I was seven, something brought about a thaw in their relationship. Mother became pregnant again and—in the dead of night—we were sent to live at the country house.”

He looked up to meet her gaze again. “Derive what you will from those facts,” he offered. “Personally, I’ve always thought that the opinions of his fellow peers mattered more to my father than anything else. He packed us off to the end of the earth rather than summon the courage and dignity to face down speculation and scandal.”

“It must have hurt your mother very much to have been exiled like that.”

“The midwife said that delivering a stillborn child killed her. I think she simply didn’t want to live anymore and gave up trying.”

“I’m so sorry, Carden.”

What did it say about his life, he wondered, that Sera was the only person who had ever offered a condolence for his mother’s passing? Twenty years, a legion of staff, what everyone else called a family …

“After she died, did your father regret what he’d done and bring you back to London?”

She wanted to hope for a happy ending, but didn’t; he could hear it in her voice, see it in her eyes. Sera knew. He stroked his thumbs over the backs of her hands. “The night he put us in the carriage and sent us away was the last time I ever saw him. The staff and I were the only ones at her funeral.”

The memory of that day returned, clear and dismal. The wind, the rain, the mud, the gaping hole in the ground, and the looks of impatience all around him. But the whiskey had done its work and it didn’t hurt as badly as it had earlier in the day. He tightened his hold on Sera’s hands and deliberately stepped farther into the pain than he’d ever allowed himself.

“The son of a bitch didn’t even buy her a headstone, Sera.” His throat tightened again but he continued on, angry enough not to care. “So I sold my pony to get the money to buy her one myself. And I made the carver put cherubs on it.”

She gently pulled a hand from his grasp and cupped his cheek. “You were a good son, Carden,” she said softly, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “A far better son than your father was a husband and father.”

The words slid deep into the center of his soul, filling a void he hadn’t known existed. The weight of it was solid, comforting. But it was the kindness and compassion of their offering that overwhelmed him. He didn’t dare thank her for the gift; he wouldn’t be able to hold the tears at bay. Instead, he took her hand back in his, pressed a lingering, grateful kiss to her palm, and then lowered it to his lap again.

“Anyway,” he said, desperately forging ahead, “I lived at the country house until he died and Percival inherited it. He and Honoria wanted a rustic playhouse like all the other peers and so my bags were packed and I was sent off to school.

“Every now and again I was summoned for an appearance—when I had to account for my outrageous behavior and promise not to scandalize the Reeves name any more than my mother already had. I think, in all, that I spoke with Percival only a dozen times in my life. Arthur even less. He was always out of country on one adventure or another.”

Sera wanted to cry for him, for the loneliness and cruelty of his childhood. Honoria was right; he had become a far better man than anyone could have expected. He’d become a good person despite the miserable examples those around him had provided.

“I saw what they did to my mother, Sera,” he said earnestly, tightening his grip on her hands. “I learned from her misery that it’s better to exercise some measure of control over what they say than leave them to their own devices. It limits the damage they can do, the pain they can cause.”

And, she realized, it was their willingness to inflict it that lay at the heart of why Carden Reeves didn’t want to be a peer. He didn’t want to sit in the House of Lords and hear the whispers, didn’t want to have anything to do with the people who had all but driven his mother into the haven of death. “That you’ve inherited your father’s title is the darkest, meanest twist of fate, Carden.”

He smiled weakly. “In all honesty, there’s a part of me that’s thrilled with the notion of my father spinning in his grave. But the larger part of me…” He sighed. “To be part of what has been the cause of so many heartaches and all the resentment in my life … I’ve never wanted anything less, Sera. If I could hand the title to someone on the street, I would.”

“Perhaps,” Sera countered, breathless with the simplicity and ease of a suddenly realized solution, “you could ask Victoria to take it back and give it to someone who wants it. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s an idea,” he agreed, his eyes sparkling and his smile returning, wide and bright. He drew her hands toward him until the rest of her body was drawn with them. “I have a better one, though,” he murmured, looking up at her. “Rakes never pass up an opportunity to kiss a beautiful woman.”

“And you’re a very good rake,” she observed, easing her hands from his to place them on his shoulders.

“Yes, I am. Practice does indeed make perfect.”

If perfectly stunning her was his intent, he succeeded beyond her wildest expectations. His hands didn’t go to her waist as she’d thought they would. They came up between the two of them, to the uppermost button on her night rail. His fingers worked quickly, seemingly effortlessly, down the row of small oyster shells. His gaze held hers all the while and she could hear his voice in the dark depths of his eyes.
Do you dare, Sera? How brave are you?

She was trying to decide when his gaze slowly slid downward and his fingertips skimmed over the bare swells of her breasts. She stopped thinking altogether when he leaned forward to press a languid kiss to an inside curve. He drew back ever so slightly, whispered, “Beautiful Sera,” and then kissed the other side of her cleavage.