Claiming the Courtesan
rdly dared to look at her. What would he find in her face? Contempt? Pity? Triumph?
Or worse, indifference?
Slowly, his eyes traveled up from the trailing green hem of her dress. She hadn’t shifted from her dressing stool, and her heavy hairbrush dangled in her lap. Reluctantly, he met her gaze.
And finally, finally, understood her silence.
Disbelievingly, he searched her beautiful face. Her eyes were stark with sorrow, and tears glittered on her cheeks.
“Oh, my dear,” she said brokenly. She smiled shakily and held out one trembling hand in his direction.
His lonely, doubting heart opened to the beckoning gesture. He crossed the room in a couple of steps and stumbled to his knees at her side.
“Verity…” he whispered and buried his head in her lap, his arms lashing around her waist. The brush slid to the floor as she bent over him and surrounded him with warmth.
“It’s over. It’s over. I’m so sorry for what you went through. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was husky with crying. “But you must have been such a brave little boy.”
She kept murmuring over him, stroking his hair with a tenderness that made him want to weep.
But he didn’t weep. Instead, he clung to her as the only good thing in his life. He stopped listening to her words and just let her endless compassion flow through him and melt the frozen emptiness at his center.
Closing his eyes, he surrendered to the welcoming blackness. A blackness full of sweet Verity.
And in that blackness, the truth that had skulked in his heart right from the beginning finally made itself heard.
He’d fled what he felt for so long that even now he resisted the inevitable moment.
But it was too late. The truth clawed into the light. He could do nothing to silence its clamoring insistence.
He’d had such a hunger for this woman’s body because he had an even greater need of her soul.
She fulfilled him in ways he only started to understand, although his heart had always recognized her as his other half.
He’d committed crimes against her, used her, wanted her, hated her, mistreated her.
All the while, she’d been his only hope of redemption.
He knelt beside her, clutching at her like a man lost on a stormy sea. She’d faced hardship, loss and violence. She’d confronted them all with courage and an endless willingness to sacrifice herself for those she loved. She hadn’t resorted, as he had, to the easy defenses of cynicism and indifference.
He loved her with every fiber of his being.
He loved her.
The oppressive weights of his solitude and anguish fell away. It wasn’t even important that she didn’t love him. Instead, he just felt the joyous relief of trusting himself to her and knowing she wouldn’t betray him.
She’d seen the worst of him. Yet she accepted him.
One day, he’d tell her of the long, difficult years at Eton, where he’d arrived as a barely literate savage after inheriting the title. He’d been mocked, beaten and bullied by other boys only too quick to sense his essential isolation.
Thank God he’d inherited a good brain from his harpy of a mother. By the time he’d left for Oxford, his academic brilliance and cool noninvolvement had been the envy of his classmates. They’d never guessed the years of lonely training that had created Cold Kylemore out of the frightened barbarian dragged kicking and screaming from the only home he’d known.
He’d tell her about the ruin the shallow, self-obsessed creature who’d borne him had perpetrated in his name on the tenants while he’d stood by, powerless to stop the devastation she’d wreaked.
He’d threatened to grow into an equally shallow, self-obsessed creature.
What would have become of him if he hadn’t surrendered to his curiosity about the woman who’d set tongues wagging the year he’d come into his inheritance? If he hadn’t met a pair of wary silver eyes across a crowded London salon?
His need for Soraya—Verity—had always been his one weakness. He’d spent years struggling to break free of her.