A Rogue's Downfall Read online

  He clasped his hands very tightly at his back. He felt that rush of almost painful love again. He swallowed, afraid for one moment that he was going to cry. “He looks like me,” he said.

  “Yes.” Just the one word, curtly and coldly spoken. He wondered if she loved the child, since it was what had finally forced her hand. She had had the foolish courage to refuse him when he had offered for her the day after the—rape. She had recalled him five weeks later when she had discovered that that single drunken encounter—they had both been drunk—had had consequences. The chances were that she would hate the child as she hated him, especially since the child resembled him. And yet one glance at her face reassured him. She loved their son as he did.

  “May I hold him?” Again his plea sounded more like a command. He stepped forward and reached out his arms before she had a chance to reply. She handed him their son without looking at him. She was careful not to touch him at all. She had touched him that night. All over. With eager, seeking hands and mouth. She had been drunk, of course. He had known that and should have prevented what had happened even though he had been well into his cups himself. The point was that he was used to drinking and its consequences. He had not been by any means beyond all responsibility. He had known that it was the drink that made her bold and amorous. But he had taken advantage of it. He had done nothing to douse her eagerness. Just the opposite. He had used all his expertise on her. He had penetrated her body knowing full well what he did, knowing even what he must do the following morning. She had moaned with the pain, desire, and eagerness to be taken to the end of what she was experiencing. He remembered the shuddering spasms of her climax, the sobs of helpless joy, the clinging arms, the damp, fulfilled body. The smell of gin.

  And then his son was in his arms, all soft, warm, sweet-smelling babyhood. He weighed so little that there was the instant fear of dropping him. The child’s mouth found the bare skin above his cravat and was trying to suck. He turned and walked toward the window with the baby so that his wife would not see his agony—and his ecstasy. He touched one of his son’s hands and spread the little, clinging fingers over one of his own. Perfection even down to the cuticles of the nails. How could one look at a baby’s hands, he wondered, and not believe in God? It was a thought that took him completely by surprise. He was whispering to the baby. He did not know what words he spoke. The baby began to cry.

  “He is hungry.” The lack of emotion in the voice that came from behind him jarred him.

  “Then he must be fed.” He turned away from the window. “You have done well with him, my lady. He looks well cared for.”

  “Of course,” she said, reaching out to take the baby from him. “I am his mother.”

  The baby rubbed his face against her shoulder, seeking food. He let them know his dissatisfaction at not finding what he sought. She flushed. The earl wanted more than anything to watch her set the child to her breast. He wondered what she would do if he did not leave or if he instructed her to feed his son. But he had no right to witness such intimacy. He had given her the protection of his name because he had taken her honor and her reputation and because his child was in her. He was her husband in the strictly legal sense. That doubtless gave him the right to any intimacy he chose to claim. But he had chosen to claim nothing. He was neither her friend nor her lover. He had no right to watch her set their son to her breast.

  He made her a stiff bow. “I would be honored, my lady,” he said, “if you would dine with me this evening.” He would be damned if he would live with her as he had lived for the week before the birth of their son and the two weeks after. Surely they could spend a few days together in civil courtesy. And something must be settled. He was aware that he had come on the spur of the moment because he had not wanted her at a Valentine’s party without him, perhaps flirting with other men, perhaps falling in love with another man, perhaps beginning an affair now that she had performed the duty of presenting her husband with a son and heir. He would not be able to blame her for such behavior—she had nothing from him. He just could not bear the thought of it. He had come without really planning to do so, but having decided to come, he was very aware of the occasion. Saint Valentine’s Day tomorrow. The day on which he had raped her— though only he had ever used that word. It would be a bitter anniversary. Something must be done. Something ...

  “Of course, my lord,” she said. He could scarcely hear her voice above the angry wailing of his hungry son.

  He turned and left the room. He wondered what they would talk about, seated alone together at the dining room table. Perhaps it would have been as well to dine in their separate apartments as they had done during his previous visit.

  God, he loved her still, he thought, coming to an abrupt halt at the top of the stairs that led down to his apartments. He was shaken by the unexpected realization. Shaken by his meeting with her now that he had been away from her again. So slender and lovely—and so cold and joyless. He wondered how she would have responded to him if he had chosen to court her. London’s worst rake and society’s freshest blossom. Perhaps he might have brought her to love him. He had no experience with innocence, but he had had plenty of other experience with women. Had he chosen to make the effort, he could surely have adapted that experience to the wooing of innocence.

  Perhaps she would have been his wife now, the ornament and the love of his life. Perhaps that look she had always had—that look of eagerness, mischief, whatever it had been—would still have been there. Perhaps she would have looked at him that way. Perhaps she would have loved him. Perhaps he could have added another dimension to her life instead of destroying all that was worth living in it.

  A pointless thought. He shook it from him as he descended the stairs. And yet something had to be done. He had made an empty shell of her life. He had made his own scarcely worth the trouble of living. Was it too late to woo the woman one had ruined and married and incarcerated on one’s country estate and heartily ignored for almost a year? Too woo her on Valentine’s Day? It sounded like the appropriate day on which to try. Except that for them it would be the worst of all possible days. He had wooed her exactly a year before, wooed her away from a party she had had no business attending right into the bed in which he had taken his pleasure with countless courtesans and mistresses. It was too late this year to try to set the clock back, to try to do it right.

  Far too late.

  Wasn’t it?

  Was it?

  Was there any way he could go back and do things as they should have been done? How should they have been done? How would he go about wooing her if she were not already his wife and did not already hate him? He knew only how to lure women into his bed. He was an expert at that. How would he woo Amy if she were still a young virgin and he the man eager to win her as his wife?

  He shrugged as he opened the door into his dressing room and saw in some relief that his valet had arrived and was already making his rooms look lived-in. He did not have any idea how he would go about it. But perhaps, he thought, he should get some ideas before the next day dawned. Somehow, he thought suddenly, if anything was going to be set right, it was tomorrow that it must be done. The memories of last year needed to be offset by better memories of this year if their marriage was to have a chance of becoming even halfway bearable.

  “Higher with the topknot, please, Jessie,” she said when she was getting ready for dinner. And then, when the task was done, she realized that she looked almost magnificent enough to be going to a ball. She was wearing the rose pink silk that she had had made for last Season and never worn before tonight. By the time the Season had begun last year, she had been married and with child and living—alone—at Reardon.

  Staring at herself in the looking glass, she considered changing quickly into something a little plainer. But there was no time. Besides, she needed the boost to her morale that her appearance would give her. She was terrified. She had already thought of and rejected a dozen excuses she might send down for not joining
him at dinner. She would not show such cowardice. She was his wife, his countess. They had been married for almost a year. Was she to cower in her own room because he had requested the honor—his word—of her company at dinner? She would not cower.

  His coat and knee breeches—knee breeches just as if he were going to court or to Almack’s!—were black, his waistcoat silver, his linen a startling white. He looked magnificent. As she joined him in the drawing room, she felt the old catch in the throat and quickening of breath she had always felt at the sight of him. London’s most wicked rake, the man most to be avoided, though he had never shown any particular interest in any of the young girls who had crowded the ballrooms and drawing rooms during the entertainments of the Season. She had fallen deeply—and secretly—in love with him from the moment she had first seen him. Just as almost every other girl had done, she supposed. The eternal attraction of the rake. Of forbidden fruit. She had woven dreams about him. She had hugged her pillow to her at night, pretending it was he. Poor silly girl that she had been.

  He came toward her, holding out a glass. “Ratafia,” he said when she hesitated. She felt herself flush as she took the glass and wondered if he remembered—or if he knew—that it had been gin at the opera house. She had never tasted gin until that evening. It had disgusted her and excited her. And four of them had made her light-headed, warm, and reckless. She had not been drunk in the way she thought of as drunkenness. She had not been insensible or fuddled in the mind. She had known clearly what was happening at every moment. It was just that she had been made into a different person, one who was willing to do everything that normally was confined to her dreams. Like leaving the masquerade with the Earl of Reardon—she had known who he was from the first moment even though he had been masked and wearing a black domino.

  She should not have been at the masquerade at the opera house. No decent woman attended such scandalous affairs. But she had been feeling upset and mutinous at her parents’ refusal to allow her to attend the Pearsons’ Valentine’s Ball even though, unlike the year before, she had made her come-out. They had been obliged to attend a concert, they had told her. There would be time enough for balls and parties when the Season began later in the spring. But Duncan had arrived during the evening. Duncan was her devil-may-care, irresponsible, lovable cousin, who had brought a message for her father from a mutual acquaintance and who was going to the opera house masquerade. She had always been able to wind Duncan about her little finger. She had done so that evening and much against his better judgment—and her own—he had been persuaded to take her with him. Just for a short while, he had said. Just for a short while, she had agreed.

  But he had been a careless chaperon and appeared soon enough to have forgotten all about her. His companions had offered her drinks, and, nervous at the boisterousness of the masquerade, she had accepted. And got herself pleasantly drunk. And recognized with a leaping of the heart, the tall black-clad gentleman who had asked her to dance. She had danced with him for over an hour before agreeing that it would be more comfortable to be private together for a short while. She had made only a feeble protest when she had found herself outside the opera house, then inside a carriage, and then inside a comfortable house alone with him.

  She had been drunk but not insensible. Not at all. She could remember every moment. She could remember how his mouth had felt and how shocked and excited she had been when he had put his tongue in her mouth. She could remember where he had put his hands and what he had done with them. She could remember the weight of his body and its splendid masculinity. She could remember the moment he had entered her body. She could even remember her surprise at feeling no great pain and her realization that her inebriation was acting as a sort of painkiller. But not a pleasure killer. Fully aware of the horror she would feel when she was sober, she had enjoyed every moment of the intimate play of their bodies. This was what he felt like, she had thought. This was what happened. At least this was what happened with an experienced rake. It was wonderful.

  She had underestimated the horror that soberness brought.

  “I have not poisoned it,” he said.

  She looked up at him, startled. There must have been a long silence. She must have been staring into her glass.

  “Or would you prefer something stronger?” he asked. The word gin seemed almost to hang in the air between them.

  “No,” she said. “I must keep my milk pure.” It seemed an unbearably personal thing to say. But what did she say to him? And what would he say to her? She realized more fully than she had yet realized that they were almost total strangers. Before last Valentine’s Day, they had never spoken. Since then they had married and had a child together, but they had rarely spoken more than a dozen words at a time to each other.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and she was aware of his eyes straying to her breasts. She lifted her glass to her lips and realized that her hand was not quite steady. “Dinner is ready. I told Morse that we would come in as soon as you came downstairs.” He took the glass from her hand and extended an arm for hers.

  They had made love, she thought, remembering the feel of him inside her, what he had done there, and the sensations he had aroused there. And yet apart from that, they had scarcely touched each other. She set her arm along his. Her fingertips rested against the back of his hand. She felt an unbearable physical awareness.

  What if he had come to exercise his conjugal rights? she thought suddenly and felt her fingers press down involuntarily on his hand. It was a thought that had not entered her mind until this moment. She had assumed that because he never had exercised his rights in almost a year of marriage, he never would. But perhaps her pregnancy had held him away at first. Certainly James’s birth would have held him at bay in November. Perhaps now after three months he would consider her sexually ready again.

  What if he had come for that? What if tonight... ?

  “If I seat you at the foot of the table,” he said, “we will have to shout to converse.”

  He seated her to his right, sitting at the head of the table, where she usually sat. He intended then that they converse? He seemed very close. The room seemed horribly empty. The presence of Morse and a footman only succeeded in making it seem emptier.

  “Is my s— Is James a good baby?” he asked. “Does he give you any trouble?”

  She resented the questions. They seemed an intrusion. James was her baby. She had resented his taking the baby into his own arms earlier and carrying him over to the window in order to shut her out. She had resented the way he had said, “Then he must be fed,” as if she would not have thought of it for herself. How did he think she had managed without him?

  “He is my joy,” she said, not realizing until the words were spoken how theatrical they sounded. “Of course he is no trouble. He usually sleeps through the night now. That is good after only three months.”

  The conversation seemed to be at an end. What if he wanted another child? The possibility had not struck her before. There were plenty of women who had babies yearly. The thought of becoming pregnant again so soon, of going through the birthing process again, terrified her. And humiliated her. She would have no cause to complain if that was his reason for coming home. She was his wife. She had not fully realized the helplessness of her situation until this moment. The helplessness of all wives. Perhaps he intended to stay until the deed was done, and he could return to London and all his other women until the time came to come back to claim ownership of another son. He would doubtless want another son.

  If that was why he had come. He had not said why. Perhaps only to spoil Valentine’s Day for her when she might at this moment have been enjoying it with Hester and some of her other friends.

  “Tell me about our son, my lady.” His voice was soft, but the command was unmistakable.

  He might have been there to know about James for himself. But he might miss too much pleasure in London if he did that. She looked at him. His dark eyes— she could remember how they had gazed
down into hers while his body moved in hers—looked steadily at her.

  She licked her lips. “He likes to sleep on his stomach,” she said, “with his legs drawn up beneath him. He looks most peculiar. He was a very unhappy baby before I discovered that.”

  “I sleep on my stomach,” he said.

  She almost laughed and then did. Her laughter sounded nervous and quite out of place.

  “It is strange what can be inherited,” he said. “Perhaps I should tell you some of my other peculiarities so that you will know what to expect.”

  What to expect of James or what to expect of him? She looked up at him.

  It seemed that he almost read her mind. “As he gets older,” he said after a pause.

  “Do,” she said. “I know nothing about you.” The admission brought a flush to her cheeks.

  Quite unexpectedly he began to talk about his childhood and about his boyhood at school. It sounded as if he had had a rather lonely childhood and as if he had enjoyed his years at school.

  “I always vowed,” he said, “that if I ever had a child, he or she would have brothers and sisters.”

  So she had been right. Oh, dear God, she had been right. She had not thought of it. She had not prepared for it. It was so long. Although she could remember it very clearly, it was rather as if it must have happened to someone else. And with someone else.

  He got abruptly to his feet. “You have finished eating?” he asked. “Let me escort you to the drawing room.”

  “I am sorry.” She felt humiliation again. “I should have left you to your port some minutes ago.”