The Lure of a Rake (41 page)

Starting forward, she picked her way through the expertly cared for rose bushes interspersed with boxwood topiaries and elaborate watering fountains. As beautiful as this space had forever been, she’d secretly dreamed of a less deliberately manicured garden. Rather, one that belonged in its natural setting and less a testament to a man’s grandiose power over nature.

Genevieve stopped beside the bluebells that blanketed the earth and dropped to a knee. Fishing around her basket, she withdrew a small shovel and set to work gently digging about the base of a plant. The sun beat down on her bent head and perspiration trickled down her neck, dampening her brow. She paused to brush the sheen from her brow, a healthy exhilaration going through her at her freedom. Carefully unearthing the roots, separating it, she lay it inside the basket, and moved to the next.

Except, even as she found peace and solace outside working in the gardens, her mind harkened back to an overgrown space walled in by bricks, with a too-charming rake soaking up the sun’s warmth beside her.

*

He looked like hell. He’d not needed the horror wreathing the butler of the vast Kent manor to indicate as much. Cedric had known from the scratch of two days’ worth of growth on his face and the rumpled fabric of his garments.

As such, the old servant had left him waiting in the foyer while he went to see whether his employer was, in fact, receiving visitors. The man gone, Cedric surveyed the mural painted on the high ceiling. A storm raged with streaks of lightning, with a single crimson rose bush in an ominous display. It was hardly the inviting warmth one would expect for welcoming guests.

He imagined Genevieve as she would have been, an eighteen-year-old young lady, betrayed by her betrothed, sent away by her family to this expansive estate. What terror would she have known at her banishment and in the cold entryway to her new home? She’d been robbed of so much happiness and Cedric was among those thieves. Pressure weighted his chest. An aching need to see her, once more.

Just as he’d no place visiting his sister, he had even less place coming here. But he was that selfish, because he needed to see her. He needed to, at least, offer her his worthless heart, for then he’d know.

Then, what?
What if she turns me away, anyway?
His throat closed tightly.

“His Lordship will see you.”

He spun, having been so absorbed in his musings he’d failed to hear the old servant’s slow, shuffling approach. With a slight nod, he followed the other man. Mahogany side tables etched with roaring lions continued the ominous motif of the earl’s uninviting home. Yet, upon those narrow pieces of furniture were large urns filled to overflowing with colorful blooms.

His chest tightened. It was her. She was everywhere in those small splashes of cheer in an otherwise dark existence. Just as she’d transformed his life, flipping it upside down on him, so she brought an effervescent light wherever she went.
I would have killed it… If she’d remained in London, her light would have no doubt gone out…

“Here we are,” the butler murmured, bringing them to a stop outside an opened door. “His Lordship, the Marquess of St. Albans,” he announced loudly.

For a sliver of a heartbeat, Cedric’s breath lodged deep as he skimmed the vast library in search of her. Disappointment filled his chest at finding only an ancient and darkly glowering man seated. Either in a testament of the man’s age or in a blatant show of disrespect, the earl remained seated, not bothering to rise. Cedric would wager his very life it was the latter. Genevieve’s grandfather ran a coolly appraising gaze over him and then peeled his lip back in a sneer.

“So you’re the worthless husband then,” he spoke with a slowness, the aged tones stretching out each syllable.

Cedric solemnly inclined his head. “The very same,” he said quietly. He was deserving of the other man’s loathing…and so much more. Pain clutched at him. She’d deserved so much more.

Pursing his lips, the earl said nothing for a long moment. Then he grunted. “Well, I don’t expect you rode yourself into a sweat, with a face covered in beard, to hover in my doorway.” He jerked his chin. “Get over here, boy.”

Boy
. For the hell of his own making he’d lived these past four weeks, a faint smile pulled at his lips. He’d never truly thought of himself as a boy. His father had shattered all vestiges of youth when Cedric had bedded that whore in the schoolroom.

“Well, are you going to sit?” Genevieve’s grandfather snapped impatiently, motioning to the seat beside him.

And Cedric, a man long accustomed to giving dictates and never so much as receiving orders…sat.

The earl said nothing for a long, long while. Instead, he continued to study Cedric in that assessing way. The old man’s piercing green eyes bore through him and he had no doubt the man could see inside to his every sin, every crime, he was guilty of. Not for the first time since Genevieve had stumbled into Montfort’s ballroom and saw the world he was part of, shame filled him. It was fast becoming a familiar, deserved sentiment. He shifted in his seat and broke the silence.

“I’ve come to see my wife,” he said quietly.

“And it only took you four weeks.” There was a firm reproach in that statement that sent heat spiraling up Cedric’s neck. The earl didn’t allow him a chance to respond. “If you were deserving of her, you would have been here the day she arrived.” He snorted. “In fact, if you deserved her, she would have never reached my doors.”

His throat worked spasmodically. Yes, the man was right on so many scores; the loathing in his eyes, the reproach in his words. Nonetheless… “I am not deserving of her. I never was,” he said, more to himself. He held his palms up. “But I love her, my lord. I love her as I’ve never loved a person, and I need her.”

By the unyielding lines of his face, the earl was wholly unimpressed with Cedric’s short speech. “And what about what
she
needs?” He folded his arms at his sunken chest and lifted an eyebrow.

Cedric flinched, as the man’s words struck their appropriate mark. What she needed…well, it surely wasn’t him. “I believe…” He looked beyond the man’s shoulder to a rose-inlaid table stacked neatly with leather books. Wordlessly, he climbed to his feet and strode over to them, coming to a stop beside the pile of sketchpads. Pulling off his gloves, he absently stuffed them inside his jacket and then brushed his palm over the surface of the top book. A shock of heat met his touch and filled every corner of him that had been previously cold with her leaving. She’d caressed these pages. While his life had continued to crumble about him with her departure, she’d loved these sheets and transformed them. A hungering filled him to flip through the pages and steal a glimpse into the daily thoughts of her world as it had existed without him. Except, he didn’t have the right to be a voyeur on her thoughts. “She deserves more than me,” he said finally, turning slowly back to find the earl still intently studying him. “I hurt her,” he said, forcing those words out into existence.

The earl tightened his mouth again. “You certainly did.” Agony lanced Cedric’s heart. “But Genevieve is a strong girl. It would take more than a shiftless rake to destroy her.”

“Indeed,” he automatically agreed, as memories assailed him. Genevieve tossing her glass of water in the face of the first man who’d wronged her in a public display of beautiful fury. Genevieve slipping away from a ballroom and removing her slippers in her host’s home. He turned his palms up. “But I want to begin again with her. I want to have a real marriage with your granddaughter.”

“And your wicked parties?”

He winced. The man was relentless but it was just another jab Cedric deserved. “I’ve grown weary of them.” How had he ever found pleasure at those crude, soulless affairs?

“What happens when you crave them again?”

Most husbands would take umbrage with another interfering in his marriage. By the laws, a wife belonged to and with her husband. Cedric, however, would never have Genevieve in that way. He’d not force her to him. And any person, man or woman, who’d so protect her, had his unending gratitude. “I can give you my assurances that there will never be another beyond her. But what reason have I given you,” or more importantly, Genevieve, “to trust me?” Shame spread through him. “I have not lived an honorable existence,” he said, after he’d found proper words. “I have drunk too much and wagered even more.” That brought the other man’s eyebrows snapping together. “I enjoyed scandalous affairs, no respectable man or woman should even know about.”

The earl scrutinized him with hard, relentless eyes.

Cedric held his hands out. “But then I met your granddaughter. She stepped inside my father’s library and in that moment, she forever transformed me, even as I did not recognize it at the time, and even as I did not allow myself to accept that…until I lost her.” Memories of her laughter, her smile, her teasing words whispered around his mind, so tangible, so very real, it gutted him, making it impossible to drag forth words. Unnerved by the intensity of the earl’s probing stare, Cedric moved over to the floor-length window that overlooked the rolling Kent countryside.

…The sky is bluer and when you lay on the grass and stare up at the sky you see nothing but an endless blue, so that you think you can stretch your fingers up and touch the heavens…

His gaze snagged on the slender figure. Her head was bent over a blanket of bluish-purple flowers and his heart tripped a beat. He leaned forward; a starving man hungering for the first glimpse of her. “I love her,” he said again, his voice hoarse. Cedric pressed his brow against the warm lead pane as Genevieve continued to work. “And I will not lie and say I will ever be deserving of her, because I won’t. But if she’ll let me, I will fill her life with love.”

Silence met his profession and he forced his gaze away from Genevieve to look back at the earl.

The old man cracked his first smile. It was a faint, but genuine, expression. “Then, what are you doing with me, boy? Go find your wife.”

G
enevieve bent over the earth, digging a small hole. Working as she’d been without interruption so long the sun had made its high climb to the sky above, the muscles of her lower back screamed in protest. She straightened and paused to rub the dull ache, before returning to her task of splitting and replanting the bulbs.

She set to work digging the next home for the blooms, when a shadow fell over her. Ever faithful Delores who came to assist each day. “Will you hand me another bluebell from the basket, Delores,” she called, as she finished making the next hole. Genevieve held her palm out. At her maid’s silence, she looked back, and froze.

With a bluebell held in his large, tanned fingers, Cedric studied her in an inscrutable manner.

The world froze in this peculiar moment that dreams were made of. For all that had come to pass between them, not a day had gone where she’d not thought of him and ached to see him. His garments rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, and a thick set of stubble on his chiseled cheeks, he was somehow even more splendid in his masculine perfection.
Why is he here?
The shovel slipped forgotten from her fingers.

Her husband inclined his head. “I suppose I might say hello.”

Oh, God. Those words, some of the first she’d ever uttered to him, brought her eyes momentarily closed. They harkened to a time when she’d still secretly clung to fairytales and the hope of love. Those dreams had long since been slayed—by him. “Why are you here?” she asked, when she trusted herself to speak.

Cedric flexed a hand. “I came to see you,” he said flatly.

After he’d shattered her world, did he expect she’d greet him with arms flung about his neck? Genevieve climbed to her feet. Following his betrayal, and their loss…nay, her loss, she’d lost herself in enough tears to fill the Thames. In the recent weeks, she’d managed to wake without feeling her heart was being slowly whittled away with a dull knife. Now, in being here, he’d kick out the shaky foundation of a new world she’d begun to build for herself. “For what purpose?” she asked tiredly.

He caressed her face with a warm gaze. “How can you not know when you left, you took my heart and very reason for being?”

Her lower lip shook and she caught it hard between her teeth to stop that faint tremble. How very beautiful those words were. And at one time she would have sold her soul on Sunday to have them from him. Then there had always been beautiful words between them…just never substance. “I…” she searched her mind, “appreciate you coming here, Cedric. Too much has come to pass for there to be anything more between us.” She hated that truth, but she’d come to, at least, accept it.

Shock contorted his face and he shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

Tears filled her eyes. “But you wouldn’t, would you? Because that child was nothing to you. To me, he…” or she “was. And beautiful words will never be able to take back the pain of all I lost.” The air lodged painfully in her chest as all the agony of that loss assaulted her senses.

Cedric pressed his palm to his mouth and then he let his arm fall faltering to his side. Rocking on the balls of his feet, he glanced around the garden. “I never wanted children,” he spoke so matter-of-fact that grief scissored through her. Odd how that admission should still shred her. A sad, humorless grin turned his firm lips. “Why should I want a child? He would be an extension of me.”