The Danger of Desire (40 page)

“He wasn’t honest. Because he—I—wanted you even then. Wanted you from the moment you smashed your head on my floor and every minute after. But I’m trying to be honest now, damn it.” He couldn’t keep a damper on the hot end of his temper.

“Trying?” She swiped at the tears that began to flow freely down her face. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know I would have done anything for you? Anything you asked. Anything. But now it’s too late.”

“No. Damn it, Meggs, it’s not too late. It can’t be. You’re confused, and you’re hurt, and you don’t know who you can trust.” This could not be happening. This was not how it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be in his arms, not railing at him like a fishwife.

“I can’t trust you. Why would I trust you? Meggs wasn’t good enough for you. So let me assure you Trinity Margurite Evans has far too much pride to accept the dubious honor of your rather late offer.”

“Is that all this is about, timing?” He wanted to put his hand to his head to hold it together. He felt concussed from all the blows.

“No.” She shook her head. “I ...”

“You can’t be thinking straight. I know this has all come as a shock to you. But we really must marry. You’re ruined. You must see. You’re the granddaughter of the Duchess of Fenmore now, for God’s sake. You have to marry.”

“Must? On the contrary, as the granddaughter of the Duchess of Fenmore, I finally don’t have to do a damned bloody thing I don’t want to do. And I don’t want you.”

“You didn’t say that two nights ago. You can’t pretend that didn’t happen—that we weren’t lovers.”

“Can’t I? I think my fortune will buy me as much virginity as I care to pretend.”

“And what about mine? Are you going to buy that back, too?”

He had meant to shock some sense into her, and by God he had. Her hand came up to cover her mouth, and her face went a livid white.

“We were two people together in that bed, Meggs. Two people’s lives changed unutterably. Nothing can be the same.”

“Nothing is.” She turned and ran headlong out of the room and out of his life. The door latch clicked into place with astonishing finality.

CHAPTER 27

H
e had made a wreck of it. If his life felt shipwrecked, his hopes dashed to pieces, Hugh had only himself to blame. And still he could not stop himself from thinking about her constantly, from hoping and planning, though his logical mind told him it was all in vain.

In such a state, even good news—the best possible news in the circumstances—failed to lift his hopes. A letter came from Admiral Sir Charles Middleton with official news of his honor—he was to be made a knight. Sir Hugh. But in the meantime, the admiral wrote, the country was still at war, and the Admiralty had need of its captains. He would be much obliged if Hugh would resume command of his frigate
Dangerous
, which would be shortly finished with its West Indies cruise.

More promising was the letter from Captain Marlowe.
Defiant
had arrived off Dartmouth, where Marlowe would maintain the boy in his safe keeping until such time as McAlden could be made to shift his sorry, broken-down arse to retrieve him. Hugh siezed the opportunity, damned his pride, and took the letter in hand to Fenmore. He knew it wasn’t a good idea. She might not even receive him. But he had to make one last try to see her. To speak to her. To spend a few last moments in her presence. She was like opium—he would have her at any price, any way he could.

He put on his dress uniform, let his guts knot up into a fist, and went. And she consented to see him at once. She walked across the wide, marbled entry foyer and stood not four feet away, curtsying to him. He drank in the sight of her like a man at an island spring, feasting on cool, clear water.

“To what do we owe the honor, Sir Hugh?” Ah. So at least some of his news had already preceded him.

“My Lady.” He bowed, though he could not take his eyes from her. Did she look unhappy? Did she look tired? Was she not sleeping at night? Could there be a God, and she had missed him one tenth as much as he missed her?

He made his voice quiet and calm—he would let himself engage in no shouting matches today. “I am come to tell you your brother has reached Dartmouth. His ship put in there two days hence. I thought you would want to know so you could make arrangements to collect him yourself. Although I hold myself still pledged to your grandmother to do that office for her.”

“Oh, yes.” She let out a rushed sigh of relief. “Thank you. I will let my grandmother know. Or have you ... ?”

“No. I asked to see you.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Thank you.”

“You are very welcome. I also came to present you with the receipt of payment for your ...” He stalled over the most diplomatic way of phrasing. He didn’t want another door slammed in his face. “Assistance. Admiral Sir Charles Middleton insisted upon seeing to the payment himself and sends his most profound thanks. And I hope I need not add my own profound and sincere thanks, as well.”

She tried a ghost of a smile, though clearly, with her carefully blank face, she was not happy. “You are welcome, sir.”

“I made sure the money has been deposited to your account in Threadneedle Street, Miss Evans. I beg your pardon, my Lady. Mr. Levy sends his warmest regards.”

“Thank you. Though I’ve little enough need for the money now, sir.”

Every time she said “sir” it was like a fence—a buffer. Or an accusation. “Perhaps not. But you earned it. Honestly. And I pay my debts.”

“So you do.” She was generous enough to accept his explanation and perhaps to understand his need to say it. “Thank you.” She nodded and looked carefully at her shoes while they continued to stand there, the few feet between them an ocean.

And he had still not said what he had come here to say. “I also wanted to apologize.”

“Oh?” Her face, which had only been careful and unhappy, now grew guarded and vigilant.

“Yes. This ... impasse, for lack of a better word, we find ourselves in is entirely my fault. I made grave mistakes, missteps in my conduct, which caused you pain and for which I am deeply sorry.” If he had simply asked for her when the thought had first occurred, if he hadn’t tried to hedge his bets and see if he could turn her into someone suitable and more acceptable as a wife, she might now already be his. But he would never know.

If he had only trusted her, this small thief who had stolen his heart, the way he had asked her to trust him. If he had trusted his own instincts and his love, he would not be standing in her foyer, begging her to love him. Why couldn’t he say all those things? Why did the words pile up inside his chest as if they were going to choke him? And still he was mute.

She spoke quietly, addressing her feet, though her words were for him. “I know you don’t really want a wife. You said to marry you would be to condemn your wife to a life of hardship and loneliness. And if you must know, I think I’ve already had enough of that to last a lifetime.”

Ah. With that his hopes were cindered. There was nothing more he could say. But still he tried. “What will you do?”

“Do?” She laughed self-deprecatingly and blew out a huff of air. “As little as possible. For the first time in my life, I find I do not
have
to do anything.” And there was Meggs’s deceptively casual shrug. “I will sleep late. I will drink chocolate for breakfast. I will walk without any destination in mind.” She pretended to be happy with such an empty itinerary while consulting her toes. “I will put my past behind me.”

“You’ll be bored to death within a week.”

He surprised the beginnings of a smile onto her lips. She tilted her head. “Will I?”

Oh, it made him ache for her, that little tilt. “I know so. I know
you
.”

She shook her head, stubborn, still resistant, and perhaps a little sad. But at least not angry. “No, you don’t. You only know Meggs. Ambitious, worried, hungry, goddamned cold Meggs. She’s the only part of me you know.”

“Yes.” He acknowledged the truth of her words. “Only part of you that you let me know. But Meggs was more than just worried and hungry. She was also extraordinarily loving. And generous. And loyal.” He let that sink into her. It was a drop of rain into the ocean that was her. But she had seemed good at absorbing the inconvenient, hurtful truths. The bad facts, she had called them. He had admired that in her. But maybe she was tired of it all—the hard, cold facts.

“It was safer that way. Easier,” she admitted.

“Don’t know how easy.” He smiled a little at her to show her he wasn’t trying to antagonize. A man didn’t harass a woman into marrying him. Not if he wanted a happy life. And he did. He wanted a happy life. With her. “She had uncharted depths, your Meggs. A man could spend his life sailing in those seas and never find bottom.”

“Well. You found my bottom easily enough.” Her cheeks were flushed with her own boldness. But those were the bad facts.

But at least they were talking. And she wasn’t running away. She was looking at him now, at least as often as she was looking at her toes. He tried not to be encouraged.

“I reckon so,” he agreed. “And you found mine.”

“I oughtn’t have done. What we did was ... wrong,” she whispered, mortified, as if someone in the empty, echoing hall might hear her.

He stepped nearer and pitched his voice just as low. “What we did, my Meggs, was make love. And it was not wrong. It was
glorious
.”

That brought her head up, but only for a moment. “It was not proper.”

“It rarely is, Meggs. Not if you do it right.”

“There’s a danger in giving in to such desires.”

He held his ground. “There’s just as much danger in not.”

“You don’t know that,” she insisted. “You can’t. But all I know is you never would have
done
the things you did with me, or
said
the things”—her face turned scarlet at the memory—“the things you said to me, to a duke’s granddaughter.”

He couldn’t stand the thought of her feeling shame. “Then you don’t know me. I never would have done those things, or said those words to
anyone
else, for the simple reason that I never have done those things with, or said any of those things to, anyone else. And I
never
will. Because I never wanted to do what we did—to make love—and to make love the way we did—with anyone but
you
.”

She stared at him, afraid to believe him. Afraid to believe in herself.

“Remember that, Meggs, when you’re trying to warm yourself by a fire in this cold mausoleum. No matter what you think we did, know that I will never, ever regret it. And I will never, ever stop loving you.”

And having finally found the words and said his piece, he jammed his hat upon his head, turned on his heel, and let himself out the front door.

The hall echoed with the same emptiness she felt inside. He was gone. And she had let him go.

Meggs would have gone upstairs to her enormous, luxurious, private room that was big enough to house a family of eight and all their livestock, and thrown herself on the enormous, luxurious bed for a good long cry, but her grandmother called her just as she put her foot upon the first step. And she had never been one for crying much, anyway.

“Trinity, dear.” Her grandmother held out her hand and brought Meggs to sit next to her on the chaise. “How was he?”

“He was fine, I suppose.” Meggs had never thought about how he
was
. The captain just was ... himself. Which made no sense. Nothing made much sense anymore.

“What did he want?” The duchess handed her an exquisite porcelain cup of tea. It was mercifully hot.

“Did he have to want anything?”

Grandmother smiled kindly. “But of course. A man like your captain doesn’t do anything without a purpose.”

“He’s not my captain. And he did come to tell me about Timmy. Here is his letter. And he told me about the funds he owed—He came to inform me the full seven hundred fifty pounds I had contracted with him, on behalf of the Admiralty, had been paid to my account in Threadneedle Street.”

“Did you accept the money?”

It wasn’t much compared to the tens of thousands of pounds her grandmother had told her were her birthright, but it was hers, at least until all the complicated matters of guardianship were sorted out. “I did accept it. I earned it, and he seemed to need to pay it.” And, she realized in a brutal moment of insight, he thought she needed him to pay. Funny cove, her captain.

“Ah.” Her grandmother invested a wealth of nothing in that statement.

Meggs sighed, too, afraid he was right. Afraid this would be the rest of her life—bored to death with propriety, having tea with her grandmother in this cold mausoleum, listening to her say, “ah” instead of what she meant. “Do you not think I did the right thing?”

“My opinion is neither here nor there. Do
you
think you did the right thing?”

Meggs shook her head and willed herself to keep the heat brewing behind her eyes from becoming tears. “I hardly know.”

Grandmother covered the hands Meggs twisted into the material of her dress. “Do you love him
very
much?”

Meggs sniffed back the tears. “Awfully. But it doesn’t seem to help.”

And so she did have her cry after all, her broken heart leaking with aching pain. But for all the pain, life went on, so she went up to her apartment to bathe her mottled face and recover herself, until the maid, a pale moth of a girl, knocked timidly at the dressing room door.

“My Lady?”

“Yes?” Meggs put down the precious, worn bar of soap and came out of the dressing room.

“Your ladyship, Her Grace the Duchess has sent for you. I was told to fetch you right away, miss. Your ladyship.”

“Right away?” Meggs took up a shawl. “Is she all right?”

“In a taking, her woman said. I was to bring you straightaway.”

Bloody blue fuck. Meggs ran the whole way—to hell with ladylike decorum. The old lady was the only relative she seemed to have left in the world, and now that she had found her, she would hold on to her for all she was worth. Meggs didn’t know what to expect, but when she arrived, the duchess was only wearing out the carpet in her private sitting room.