They’d purposefully traveled through isolated villages, on roads with little traffic. Mark hadn’t wanted to meet one of his hangers-on. They’d shared the road with cattle drivers and peddlers—people who didn’t care about polite society and did not read the gossip papers. On the train into London, people had stared at him and whispered. He’d not thought anything of it, though. People always stared. These stares had seemed more pointed than before, but then, he felt all the more vulnerable.
“What was her name?” he heard himself ask. He already knew. Jessica.
“Nobody knows,” she replied. “But surely you can tell me.”
Mark could remember his last words to her with almost cold clarity. Print that you brought me to my knees. Fine words, then. Now…
Did all of London know of his courtship, his disappointment? Had everyone truly been looking at him with pity? How was he ever supposed to forget her under those circumstances?
“Who printed it? What was it called?”
“It’s—it was called—” She gulped and then glanced across the room. Mark couldn’t see what she was looking at—probably her friends, waving her on, urging her to find out more of the sordid tale. What on earth had Jessica said? His dancing companion had a faint blush across her cheeks, and she whispered all in one breath, “It was called ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’”
“Seduced, was I?” That much, at least, was true—in mind and soul, if he’d managed to barely restrain himself from the final physical act.
“Oh, no, sir!” she said innocently. “That is to say—it was the most romantical tale. I wept buckets at the last installment. Can you tell me, is there any truth to it? We all want to know,” she explained earnestly, gesturing toward the side of the room. Indeed, there were five ladies sitting there, watching them intently—they raised fans to cover their faces as he turned in their direction.
“I can’t know if it’s true. I haven’t read it. What is it that I have purportedly done?”
“Why… You encountered a woman, not knowing that she’d been hired by your dastardly enemies to ruin your name. And you—you treated her kindly, in the most Christian manner, and made her decide to change her ways.”
Mark looked at her. “That’s the entirety of it? I treated her kindly?”
She nodded.
No mention of kisses? No mention of that moment when she’d curled her fingers around his? Kindly did not begin to cover the truth. He could almost feel the humiliation creep over him. Still, she might have mentioned his own feelings. He’d told her about his mother. He’d told her about Smite—or at least, some portion of that. Had he mentioned Ash’s secret? That would be more devastating.
No. No. He didn’t think he had. That much, at least, was safe. Still.
No wonder everyone was casting such pitying looks at him. They all knew that he’d been stupid enough to fall in love with a liar.
“Sir Mark,” his companion said earnestly, “I think I speak for every lady here when I tell you that I could have fallen in love with you myself, except I so want you to love her.”
From across the room, he caught Ash’s eye. His brother’s expression was grim, and he jerked his head. Get over here quickly.
The waltz was winding to a close.
“Do you love her, Sir Mark?”
He’d thought his emotion had begun to burn down, to sputter and fade. But this news had fanned it to life, had made his every wound feel raw once more.
“Love her?” Mark said, his voice low. “When I find her, I’m going to kill her.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEY GATHERED in Ash’s study, the three brothers.
A report was there, on Ash’s desk. “‘Urgent,’” Mark read aloud. “‘Read immediately upon arrival.’” Immediately was underlined three times. There was a scrawl on the bottom, too, a note to Ash from Jeffreys, telling him that this time, as he’d been eccentric enough to have disappeared entirely, he’d have to settle for a written report.
Ash looked over at Mark. “I—I didn’t see it.” He glanced over at his other brother. “Truly. I had no idea. I don’t know why—”
Mark reached over and pushed his brother’s shoulder. “I know precisely what you mean, Ash. Nobody could hold it against you.”
Mark shuffled through the first pages of summary to find the newspaper clippings that had been so carefully collated. The paper seemed too flimsy to contain anything of so much weight. For the first time in days, his brothers’ presence annoyed him. He’d managed to barely talk about the matter at all. To have someone else talk to his brothers about it…it seemed even more horrible than having all of London know.
Read it when I’m done, he wanted to say. But then he looked up into Ash’s eyes. Ash was looking at that report with something like regret in his eyes. Mark’s brothers had stood by him all these past days. They didn’t deserve to be pushed away now.
“There’s just the one copy,” he said instead. “I suppose…I suppose it’ll go fastest if I read it aloud, yes?”
“If…if you could.” Ash didn’t meet his eyes.
Mark sank into a seat on a settee. His brothers settled to either side of him as he flipped through the sheaf of papers. Jeffreys had included not only the original serializations, but the commentaries thereon. Mark didn’t care what anyone else said. He just wanted to know about…well, about Jessica.
There. This flimsy newsprint was the start of it.
“‘When I first met Sir Mark,’” Mark read, “‘he said he spoke with the tongues of angels.’” Mark had forgotten that. He didn’t glance to either side. He didn’t want to know what his brothers thought of that introduction.
“‘But it took me a week to understand that he spoke not as a saint, nor as an ascetic, but as a man. He was just a very, very good one.’”
If he’d had any doubts that Jessica had written this account, they vanished with those words. He could almost hear her speak them. What he hadn’t imagined was the swell of emotion he felt in response. Not anger. Not betrayal. Just a sensation of recognition—as if he’d jumped into deep, cold water. It felt as if she were telling him something he didn’t want to hear but had known all along.
He read on. “‘I must admit that at first, I wanted to hurt him…’”
It was disconcerting to see himself through someone else’s eyes. For the past days, he had thought she’d been laughing at him. She’d watched him fall in love with an illusion. He had supposed that she had somehow intuited what he most wanted in a woman and had presented it to him. He’d felt trapped and angry, furious that even knowing all that, he still desperately longed for her.
But as he read, her version of the story corresponded with the woman he’d believed she was. Even though she did not voice them, he could hear her doubts. Even though she did not speak of it, he could sense her falling under his spell as surely as he’d fallen under hers. He felt as if he was rediscovering her in those pages. She was still the woman he’d come to know. There was that familiar prickly integrity.
All the hurt he’d nursed this past week…it was beginning to feel a little childishly resentful. Because if she had told the truth, she’d been seduced. She’d been thrown out of her home. She’d lost her dearest friend, had no family to speak of. He glanced at his brothers to either side of him.
In truth, she’d had no wealth at all. Not of any kind.
He read on and
on, unable to stop. He didn’t stop hurting; the pain just began to alter. She left off all accounts of their physical intimacy—the touches, the kisses, everything except the moments when he’d looked in her eyes and found himself unable to look away—but still he could sense their echo. She kept his secrets through every installment. The narrative went through to his ill-fated proposal.
And then Mark scanned the last words she’d written and set the page down before he read them aloud. He felt as if he’d had the breath knocked out of him.
He couldn’t say those words. Next to him, Smite leaned against him, offering unspoken comfort. Ash’s hand touched his shoulder.
If she could write these words, all alone, he could surely speak them aloud to the people who loved him best. Mark picked up the account again. “‘I left. What else could I do? I hated him for the same reason I loved him: because I could not break him, and because no matter how hard I tried, a woman like me could never have a man like him.’”