The Dangers Of Deceiving A Viscount (40 page)

Behind them, Will and Phoebe stood not a foot apart, regarding one another. The silence between them was heartbreaking. A million things she might have said blazed through Phoebe’s mind, but she rejected them all as too trite, too cavalier, and too empty. She looked at his eyes, remembered how they looked in the throes of passion. She looked at his mouth and recalled how tender and firm it was. She remembered every moment between them, every touch, every laugh, every caress. “You…you look well,” she said softly.

He nodded curtly. His eyes flit over her face, over her eyes, her mouth. She wondered what he saw. A face that was once dear and now repugnant?

“Will, I…I am so happy to see you,” she said.

“It has been a pleasure to see you again, Lady Phoebe,” he said, as if he was speaking to a mere acquaintance. He looked into her eyes, then abruptly looked away. His expression, Phoebe thought, seemed almost helpless.

She realized then that he despised her that much—he despised her and he was helpless to escape her in this oppressive social setting. As if to prove it, he gestured to the crowd. “You must forgive me, but I promised Lord Chalmers…”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, resisting the urge to weep. “You must go and…” And leave me to crumble. She couldn’t bear to look at him again. She couldn’t bear to see that helplessness. She glanced down and curtsied.

“Good evening,” he said, and with a curt nod, he walked away.

That was it, then. She watched him walk away as her heart broke. He would never forgive her. All hope was gone.

T wo days passed before Phoebe could speak of that awful night at all, much less face what it meant. She stayed in her suite of rooms, unable to rouse herself to do much more than sit at the hearth.

On the third day she refused to leave her suite of rooms, and she and Ava had quite a row about it. “You cannot continue to mope about!” Ava had snapped.

Phoebe collapsed onto the settee, her hands pressed against her burning cheeks, her head spinning. “I knew he would come to London eventually,” she said morosely. “But I did not know it would hurt so, Ava. I cannot go out.”

“Phoebe! I refuse to allow you to sit glumly in this room and waste away! You cannot possibly remain locked away from all of society!”

“I am quite content to paint,” Phoebe said.

That earned a frown from Ava, who looked pointedly at the dozens of canvases scattered about Phoebe’s sitting room, paintings in various stages of completion, of wild horses and country fields full of flowers, and of a grand old house with a stone gazebo. They were made from the dozens of scenes Phoebe had sketched during her days at Wentworth Hall.

There was one painting in particular—tucked behind several others—of a man holding out an apple to a magnificent horse.

“How many paintings will it take before you are able to face the world again?” Ava demanded crossly.

“I don’t know,” Phoebe said wearily. “Perhaps until…” Until she stopped feeling so broken. Until she could look at herself in the mirror and not see the aching regret that ran so deep she could feel it in her marrow.

When Phoebe didn’t finish her sentence, Ava sighed heavily and sat on the edge of a chair across from her sister. “You are impossible,” she said softly.

Phoebe blinked back tears. “I truly loved him, Ava.”

“I know you did, darling.” Ava put her arm around her.

“I shall never forget the look on his face when he realized how completely I had deceived him. Just thinking of it now brings these bloody tears to my eyes. And if you had seen the way he looked at me at the Murdoch soirée—Ava, he loathes me.”

A moment of silence stretched between the sisters, Phoebe lost in her painful thoughts, and Ava having lost the ability to summon meaningless words to try to console her.

Ava did eventually coax Phoebe from her rooms, but she could not be convinced to go out into society—not while there was the slightest danger of encountering Will. But Ava soon let Phoebe be, as rumors suddenly began to swirl around Mayfair linking Phoebe to Madame Dupree.

Ava was very distressed that the rumors were impacting the work her husband was doing on the reforms—the battle in Parliament was becoming very intense. So intense that Greer and her husband, Rhodrick, returned from Wales earlier than they had planned.

Soon all of them were avoiding society, and the rumors of Phoebe’s involvement in trade had reached an on dit in the morning Times.

The reforms some lords would see passed to benefit women engaged in occupations that, in effect, take a livelihood from a man, would seem to extend to ladies of leisure as well. A certain lady well connected to such reforms is thought to have engaged in a trade and profited from it. If ladies are now engaged in trade, will other privileges soon follow? Will dabbling in a man’s occupation lead to suffrage? Will a woman’s vote one day determine the men who will guide this country? Women are put on this earth to bear children and nurture their husbands, not determine the course of nations.

It was a stinging rebuke, for the reforms and for Phoebe personally.

“I don’t understand it!” Greer complained one afternoon as she held Jonathan on her lap. “Why should anyone want to deny poor women such basic rights?”

“Because women with rights are dangerous,” Ava said snidely. “They might attempt to put food on their table instead of sitting about like frogs on their lily pads.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Greer said. “There are times like this I should like to take certain thickheaded men onto a scaffold, explain the error in their thinking, and then hang the lot of them.”

Ava laughed.

Greer did not. “What? What do you find so amusing?” she demanded. “There are some very thickheaded men in Parliament!”

As Ava and Greer debated the merits of the House of Lords, Phoebe thought of Frieda, and continued to paint. Her mind was a million miles from London.

But one rainy afternoon, a chambermaid informed them that Lucille Pennebacker, the spinster sister of their stepfather, Lord Downey, was calling for Phoebe. Ava and Greer both moaned, but Phoebe was glad for the respite.

“I’ll see to it,” she said, and left her sister and her cousin to debate to their hearts’ content.

She made her way listlessly to the main hall and the receiving rooms there, smiling at one of the footmen, who opened the door to the small yellow salon. As she crossed the threshold, she smiled at Lucy. “How are you, Lucy?”

“Very well, thank you,” Lucy said. She had been a rather strict minder when she’d come to supervise the three of them directly after their mother died, but since falling in love with Mr. Morris, the Downey butler, Lucy seemed to have adopted a different persona altogether. She was actually very pleasant at times.

“I hope you won’t mind, but I escorted Lord Summerfield here myself, as he was given the wrong information as to your whereabouts.”

Phoebe suddenly realized there was someone else in the room; she whirled about and saw Will standing at the front window. He steadily returned Phoebe’s gaze.

“He called at Downey House in search of you, and as I was on my way out, I thought to escort him so he’d not get lost. The streets turn in such strange places.”

“Oh. Yes. Thank you, Lucy,” Phoebe muttered.

“Well, then, I have done my duty,” Lucy said cheerfully. “I must continue on, for I am late to a meeting at the Ladies’ Beneficent Society. We are gathering petitions to support Middleton’s reforms.”

“How very good of you,” Phoebe said numbly. Her mouth was moving ahead of her brain; she could not take her eyes from Will.

“You really must call on your stepfather, if you don’t mind me saying, dear. He’s rather lonely since Violet returned to France. Well, then, until next we meet. My regards to your sister and cousin,” Lucy said cheerfully, and with a nod of her head to Will, she quit the room.

Neither Phoebe nor Will spoke, but the tension between them was palpable, filling the room around them, swallowing them up. Oh, but Will looked magnificent—tall and strong and everything she recalled over and over again in her mind’s eye. She longed to touch him, to lay her hand against his breast and feel his heart beating.

Will glanced at the door, and for a moment, Phoebe thought he would flee. How easily, she thought, love could shatter like a crystal snowflake. One touch, one ill wind, and its perfection was shattered.

How long had she felt shattered now, completely and irrevocably shattered?

He seemed to debate what he would do, but then slowly—excruciatingly, heartbreakingly slowly—he looked at her again. “You…” His voice was rough and caught on emotion. He pressed his lips together and nervously dragged a hand through his hair.

Phoebe caught a sob of despair in her throat. The sound of it caused Will to look at her, and his brow knit in a frown.

She felt the heft of this moment, knew that it would be her last and only opportunity to repair the rift between them. But it felt as if there was a bloody ocean between them—a cold, fathomless ocean that seemed too large to cross.

“You…” His eyes were intent on her. “You look beautiful,” he said with great difficulty.

Phoebe gasped and covered her mouth. She had expected him to say something awful, something that would haunt her dreams. Not that she was beautiful.

He took a breath that filled his chest, and slowly released it. “I…I have been remiss,” he said, sounding uncertain, looking at his hand as he stretched his fingers wide, “in not responding to your letter.” He closed his hand again and looked up at her. “I did not know what to say.”

“Will…please forgive me. What I did was…was—”

“Reprehensible?” he finished for her. He unclenched his fist and turned his head to look out the window.

Phoebe felt her knees give way a little and braced herself on the back of a chair. “I don’t suppose it matters why I did what I did, but I…I never meant to fall in love with you, and I never meant to cause you any harm,” she said.

He glanced at her sidelong, a slight frown on his face. “Phoebe—”

“I treated you ill,” she said quickly. “I deceived you abominably.” Tears filled her eyes as she remembered it all, as she’d remembered it all a thousand times since she’d left Wentworth Hall. “I never expected to know you, much less fall in love with you. But I did fall, headfirst and very deeply. Lord, how I wanted to tell you, but the lie…it started before I’d even met you, and then it got so deep and so wide so quickly that I did not know how to tell you. And when it was clear you would offer for Miss Fitzherbert, I allowed myself to believe there was no harm.”

He suddenly threw up a hand. “No. No, Phoebe, I beg of you,” he said, his voice raw, “you have apologized enough.”

She gripped the back of the chair, uncertain if she could bear what he would say next.

“Phoebe…Lord God, you don’t understand. It is I who have not apologized enough.”

That stunned her.

“That night of the masque, I wanted to tell you that I would not offer for Miss Fitzherbert. I wanted to tell you that I loved you, and I hardly cared about your station in life.” He took an unsteady step forward, his hand clenched at his side again. His gaze was so deep, so intent, she could see the raw hurt in him from a few steps away. “I would have told you that night that I would give up everything for you, Phoebe. I would give up all just to be with you.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.” Her heart began to beat wildly.

“The discovery that you were not who you said you were was quite a blow, I admit,” he said, wincing with the memory. “I was angry, and I suppose I reacted from shock and some odd notions of propriety that have been ingrained in me since birth—I hardly know. But you were right, Phoebe—I seduced you, I pushed our affair on you. You didn’t want my attentions, but I pressed them home.”

She was afraid to speak, afraid her emotions would collapse her.

“When I read your letter, I understood what you’d done—yet I still believed it was a wretched, inexcusable thing you had done. But in London…there have been so many things written that I appreciate now how impossible your situation must have seemed to you. I cannot fault you for what you did.”

She gasped softly.

“There is one other thing I must concede to you,” he said a little sheepishly. “I have come to realize, through some of the longest nights of my life, that love does matter when one is contemplating with whom one will spend the rest of one’s natural life.” He sighed wearily and opened his arms wide. “Phoebe, what I am attempting to say is that…I love you yet. I never knew how much until I saw you at the Murdoch assembly. When I saw you there, looking for all the world an angel, a bloody angel, I could scarcely speak. I could scarcely breathe.”

Phoebe did not realize tears were sliding down her face until she tasted them on her lips. His words overwhelmed her, the realization that she had not lost him after all. She felt her knees giving away, felt herself sliding down to her knees, her hands still gripping the back of the chair, her forehead pressed against the fabric. “Dear God,” she whispered. “I thought you hated me.”

She closed her eyes as his words drifted through her. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath; she was drawing big, thick gulps of air between sobs.

She started at the touch of his hand on her back. It felt so warm, so strong, just as she had remembered it day after day since she’d left. Phoebe wanted nothing more than to fling her arms around him, but she could not seem to let go of the chair. She could not seem to move.

“It is astonishing,” Will said softly as he pried one of her hands from the back of the chair, “how a man can churn on the inside, yet give no hint of his true feelings on the outside.” He pried her other hand free and caught her by the waist, pulling her up to her feet, and catching her when Phoebe sagged against him under the deluge of her relief.

Will took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “When I saw you at Murdoch’s, all that I’d ever felt for you rose up like a storm in me, and I was perfectly incapable of speaking. I felt what someone once told me was a sign of true love—I felt as if I were breathing underwater.”