“You’re hardly his type,” Mrs. Renier sneered, sweeping another damning look down Kate’s body. “But perhaps he’s run through all of us by now.”
The backs of Kate’s knees hit the settee, but she refused to collapse onto it. She registered the movement of the butler rushing away, but her gaze stayed locked on the woman in front of her. Aidan’s lover.
Mrs. Renier smirked. “You look distraught. I hope you weren’t so foolish as to think yourself special, though I understand the temptation. We all know the tales about him, don’t we? The countless women, the whispered tales of his . . . prowess. But once you’re alone with him, it seems you must be different.”
Kate tried to gather some strength, but it seemed only enough to shake her head. “No.”
Pain twitched briefly over Mrs. Renier’s face, turning her sneer into a grimace, but she laughed to cover it. “Of course you must be different, because he’s insatiable. Four or five times a night. It’s never enough for him. You’re never enough for him. Until you are.”
“Mrs. Renier,” she managed to plead past her collapsing throat. Something seemed to have come loose in her head. She knew that this was terrible, knew this information was going to hurt, and badly, but it was far away, softened by the distance of shock, by a haze of denial.
The woman’s smile gentled, and her voice lowered to an intimate murmur. “He is so skilled. So handsome. We want him to belong to us. But we are just like a hundred other women, you and I. And he has had us all.”
The pain finally caught up with Kate, sinking in its teeth with the viciousness of a small, rabid beast. Now her throat wasn’t the only thing collapsing. It seemed the whole room was falling in on her. Bile rose to sting her throat. She sucked in air and swallowed the sickness back.
Disgust and shame rippled through her stomach, and the bile surged up, gagging her. She choked it back but must have made some noise, some sound, because Mrs. Renier stepped back in alarm.
“There’s no need to be melodramatic, you fool. Have a little pride at least. It’s the only thing he admires.”
Kate pushed past Mrs. Renier and stumbled from the room, her eyes locked on the curve of the stairway.
“Kate,” she heard Aidan’s voice say. She didn’t look toward him as she finally reached the first step and started her escape. “Kate, what’s wr—”
“Pardon me.” Kate was amazed that she could speak so clearly. In some distant, still-functioning part of her mind she felt proud of her quiet voice, proud of the way her legs carried her up as if she weren’t dying inside.
Her legs carried her all the way to the second floor and down the hall to her room. But once she was inside, with the door safely shut behind her, Kate fell to her hands and knees, and put her forehead to the floor, weak with something she couldn’t understand and didn’t dare examine. How could she have imagined that Aidan York was lonely? His whole being defied the idea.
He was young and handsome and charming. He was rich, strong, and vibrant. Women loved him. She had loved him.
“Oh, God,” she said. She’d thought he needed her. An image filled her mind—of Aidan bent over Mrs. Renier, his exquisite body flexing, entering, filling her up while the woman cried out. Just as Kate had.
“No,” she moaned, closing her eyes, struggling to blind herself. Again the scene played itself out, a different woman this time. An icy blonde, screaming her pleasure.
Oh, all those beautiful, primal things they’d done, she and Aidan, all of them part of some traveling show he trotted out for anyone who asked. Hundreds of them. She dug her nails deep into the wool of the carpet.
Insatiable.
Laying her cheek very carefully against the wool, she cursed the softness, wishing it the cold of hard stone.
Insatiable. Kate had likely been just like the other women to him, except perhaps in that respect. He’d never been insatiable with her. He’d gotten more than enough of her, easily, quickly, had often found nothing better to do with her than fall asleep. I’ve never slept with another woman. My God, she’d been unsophisticated enough to take that as a compliment.
This newfound understanding of him was painful in so many ways, but humiliation struck her hardest.
Opening her eyes, she stared across the blurred colors of the rug, stared at the pale fall of drapes over the window. What had he even wanted with her?
It was true she was not his type—she could see that easily enough with that glimpse of only one of his women. Cool, effortlessly elegant, completely at ease among his peers. Mrs. Renier was beautiful, if a little older than Kate would have suspected. Older. More experienced. Less naïve.
The thought of her own inexpert responses to him brought tears to her eyes. Eagerness did not make up for lack of skill.
What was the appeal? The only explanation she could conjure was simple: sheer nostalgia. She was a reminder of his youth. It was possible he’d even meant to marry her. People married for less compelling reasons than nostalgia, certainly.
But she’d actually thought she was saving him, rescuing him from a bleak existence. My Lord, she’d been about to save a man from a harem. They would have married, she’d have left everything behind to be his wife, then watched, helplessly, as he began to drift away, back to those women.
This revelation of his true nature was a blessing, she told herself with desperate practicality. A gift to keep her from shackling herself to another endless, fathomless misery. This excruciating pain was better than the dull, eternal ache of yet another life spent with a man who didn’t love her and spent his nights elsewhere.
This was a rescue. She still had what she’d owned a few months ago. She’d come so close to throwing everything away for him, but she hadn’t stepped over that cliff. Nothing had changed.
Something wild scrambled inside her, screaming that she lied. She smothered it mercilessly and pushed herself to her feet. It was time to leave this place.