A Rogue's Downfall Read online

  “I did not intend talking about that,” he said. “I did not intend talking about the past at all. I intended a day out of time.”

  “How can we pretend that we both came into existence only today?” she said. “And how can we pretend that we met only today? The past is there. The present cannot be divorced from it. The present is colored by it.” She listened dismally to her own words. She wished they were not true. She wished she could accept the gift of the day that he had offered. It would be some small something to take into the future with her. But she had spoken the truth.

  He sighed and ran his knuckles lightly back and forth across her neck. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “The past cannot be changed either, can it?”

  “No,” she said against her knees.

  There were several moments of silence. “How you must wish it could,” he said.

  “And you.” And yet, she thought, and was surprised by the thought, she was not so sure she would change the past if she could. There would be no James if the past were changed. There would not have been that night, whose ugliness had been apparent only after it was over. There would not be this day and this moment. She shivered under the light stroking of his hand.

  “Changed,” he said. “Not erased.”

  “Changed how?” She closed her eyes tightly.

  “Who was hosting a Valentine’s Ball that evening?” he asked. “Someone must have been. I wish it had been that one we were both attending. I wish I had asked you to dance at that. I wish we had been surrounded by the eagle eyes of a hundred chaperons. I wish I had sent you flowers the next day and called to take you driving.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “You never consorted with girls like me. You never even noticed us. You would have been bored. You would not have got from me what you want from women if I had not been unchaperoned and if I had not been drinking.”

  “Did you know what was happening?” he asked. “I have often wondered.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I knew.”

  “Did you know who I was?” he asked. “Either before or after I removed my mask?”

  “From the first moment,” she said. “Your identity was unmistakable.” She would not return the question. The answer was too humiliatingly obvious.

  “You must have been very inebriated then,” he said, “even to have agreed to dance with me. Were not all the little girls warned to have nothing to do with me?”

  “Perhaps,” she said bitterly, “you do not understand the attractions a rake has for girls who have been hedged about with dullness and propriety all their lives.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And so you had your brief moment of adventure and defiance, Amy, and are now hedged about with dullness and propriety again.”

  That was it in a nutshell. Perhaps that was life. She knew so little about it. Perhaps life was a dull thing interspersed with brief moments of adventure, defiance, and joy. Had it been a moment of joy, their coupling exactly one year ago? Yes, it had. God help her, it had. On the spur of the moment, she could think of only two moments of pure joy in her life. That was one. The birth of their son was the other.

  She was suddenly aware of a familiar tautness in her breasts. “James will be needing me,” she said, lifting her head. “I must go back.”

  He got immediately to his feet and held out a hand to help her up. “I did not intend the day to develop this way,” he said. “But perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps now that we have begun talking to each other, we have to deal with the past before there can be any present. But it is Valentine’s Day, and you are my valentine. Look at the primroses, Amy.”

  She turned her head obediently and looked. She had not been to the lake since last autumn. Perhaps she would not have come until summer if he had not suggested it today. She would have missed the primroses. How fleeting a thing joy was.

  “Now look at me,” he said.

  She did so, raising her eyes slowly from his chin. It was not easy to look into his eyes.

  “Smile for me,” he said. “Because there is spring, beauty, and hope. And because it is February the fourteenth, and you are my valentine.”

  She knew that however foolish it was and however painful it would be, she would look back on this day with longing. She knew she was still a naive girl and not the mature woman she had thought she had become. She knew that she was still as much in love with him as she had ever been. She smiled, though her eyes dropped back to his chin as she did so. She watched him raise her hand to his lips and turn it over to kiss the palm.

  If only, she thought. Ah, if only ... She drew her hand free and turned from him to scramble up the bank toward the tethered horses.

  He set a pink rosebud across her plate on the luncheon table—pink to suggest the warmth of afternoon. But she was still busy in the nursery. He paced.

  The day was not progressing at all as he had imagined it would. He was not at all sure that it was not quite disastrous, in fact. He had wanted to live through the day and to take her through it without either of them once thinking of the events that had brought them together and held them together. He had wanted to woo her as if they really had met for the first time today. It was an impossibility, of course, a romantic dream. It was surprising, he supposed, since he had never thought of himself as being even a remotely romantic person.

  Perhaps, he thought, the only hope for them was to delve back into the past and to come to terms with it—together. But he did not want that to happen today. Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. But perhaps there could be no today if one denied yesterday. He sighed and readjusted the flower so that the bud was on the plate instead of hanging over the edge.

  He knew what he wanted to do at this very moment. He had resisted the urge to follow her to the nursery. She would not like it at all. But she was his wife, and her baby was his son. He felt excluded and lonely. Not self-pitying. He had deliberately excluded himself after being unable to do so while she was in the process of giving birth. He had no right intruding on their lives when his own part in them had been such an ugly and guilty one. She had been forced to marry him. He would not force her to live with him forever after. He had given her the only gift that seemed of value—the gift of freedom from his presence. But he felt excluded and lonely now—as he had every day of the two and a half months since he had dragged himself away back to London.

  He paced a few more times, glanced at the pink rosebud, which needed no further readjustment, hesitated, hurried from the room, and dashed up the stairs two at a time to the nursery floor so that he would not have time to think and give in to a feeling of guilt.

  She was sitting in a rocking chair by the window, her dress lowered to her waist and her elbow on one side, gazing down at their son, who was sucking contentedly. But she looked up, startled, flushed and glanced about her. There was no shawl or blanket to hand with which she could cover herself. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the frame of the chair while he shut the door quietly behind him.

  He watched in silence for a while before strolling across the room toward them. She kept her eyes closed and rocked the chair slowly. There was something almost tangibly intimate about the scene, he thought. His wife and his son bonded together—the son he had put inside her with such careless pleasure, the son she had borne in such agony while he watched helplessly as he watched now. Excluded. By his own choice. By the nature of what he had done to her. Could he ever atone?

  He reached out and touched the backs of his fingers lightly to the inner side of her breast, touching his son’s hand as he did so. The child was sleeping, his mouth slack about her nipple. She opened her eyes and looked up into his. It was a moment of unbearable sweetness. It was a moment, the merest moment of time, when the three of them belonged together. A family.

  “Amy.” He heard the whisper of his own voice.

  He watched her eyes grow luminous with tears before she lowered them to the baby, lifted him away from her breast, and covered herself with her dress. Th
e tears alit hope in him—and doubt. Why did she cry? Because she had felt the moment, too? Or because he had spoiled a time of intimacy with their son? He was almost afraid to hope.

  “Let me take him,” he said, and he lifted the baby off her lap, cupping the warm little head in one palm and holding the feet against his stomach. The baby’s mouth had fallen open. He felt that stabbing of love again. He had missed two and a half months. How could he miss any more? How could he let his son grow up at long distance? He lifted the child toward him and kissed his wet mouth. He tasted Amy’s milk.

  “You do love him, don’t you?” she said, getting to her feet abruptly. But her voice was agitated and unexpectedly bitter. “Is that why you came? Did you suddenly realize that you have an heir to carry on your line and your title? Is that why you have decided to make up to me? Because while he is young and helpless, I am necessary to him and therefore to you?”

  He looked helplessly about him. The child’s crib was in an adjoining room. He went into it, set his son down carefully so as not to wake him, and covered him with a warm blanket. He remembered to set the child down on his stomach.

  She was standing at the window of the nursery, looking out. “Yes, I love him,” he said. “Because he is my son. I do not think of him as my heir. I think of him as my son. And no to all your other questions. I came to see you. Your letter requesting permission to go to Hester Dryden’s reminded me of what anniversary today is.” He had come up behind her and set his hands now on her shoulders. “The anniversary of the conception of our son.” He heard her swallow. “I love him, and I cannot say truly that I wish he did not exist, but it is a ghastly anniversary for all that. And all that has followed it has been even more disastrous.”

  She laughed, though there was no amusement in the sound. “Ghastly. Disastrous,” she said. “Is it any wonder I held out against your first offer even though Papa threatened dire consequences? I should have held out against his insistence that I call you back. But I could not, of course. My baby did not deserve to be punished for my sins. He had to have a name and respectability. You and I do not matter. I do not care that you think your entanglement with me ghastly and disastrous. Perhaps you deserve to suffer. And I do not care that my life is an endless misery. I certainly do deserve to suffer. James is all that matters. I do not know what your game is today exactly, my lord, but it might as well end here. I want no more of it.”

  She turned suddenly and hurried across the room toward the door.

  “The baby?” he asked, going after her.

  “His nurse will be back in five minutes,” she said, opening the door and continuing on her way through it.

  He stopped on the threshold. Their baby was more important than they were, she had said. He could not leave the child alone even for five minutes. He went quietly into the inner room and gazed down at his sleeping son, whose head was turned to one side and whose bottom was elevated beneath the blanket. He must have drawn his legs up beneath him.

  Could he read hope into her bitterness? Into her misery? Into her accusation that he had come down only to see his heir? Did she want more from him? She had smiled at him at the lake, because he had ordered her to.

  Or was there no hope at all? Was it he who perpetuated her misery because she had been forced into marriage with him and could never be free of him?

  One thing was sure, he thought as he heard the nursery door open and strolled into the room to smile at the nurse’s surprised face, he was going to have some answers before the day was over. Perhaps Valentine’s Day was not unfolding at all as he had hoped or expected, but it had begun something. And something was better than the nothing that had characterized the rest of their marriage. Whatever it was that had begun was going to be carried to its conclusion—today.

  “He is fast asleep,” he said. “I shall leave him to your care.”

  It was sweet-tasting, he thought irrelevantly as he walked downstairs to the dining room, wondering what awaited him there. He had not expected a mother’s milk to taste sweet. He wanted to taste it again. He felt an unwelcome stabbing of physical desire.

  The sight of the pink rosebud across her plate shook her. What was he trying to do? What was this day all about? She could not help but be reminded of his reputation as a very successful rake. Did it amuse him to come here and punish her for asking to go to Hester’s party by making her ache for what could never be in her life? Or was she being unfair to him? She was afraid to hope that she was being unfair.

  She picked up the rose and crossed the room to stare out of the window. Morse was fussing at the sideboard. She relived that brief scene in the nursery, that brief moment in time when dreams had become sweet reality. Unbearably sweet. It had started when she had had her eyes closed to hide her embarrassment and had felt his fingers against her breast. It had not been a sexual touch. James had been there, too, asleep.

  She had opened her eyes to find herself looking directly into his. And something had happened—that momentary sweet something to which she could put no name. That sense of—oneness. Three in one, almost like the Trinity, she thought guiltily. That sense of family. But no. There was no real word to put to what had happened. It had been overwhelmingly powerful, though. Surely she could not have felt it alone. And he had whispered her name.

  Would he have done that if he felt nothing? But was it not in just such situations that rakes excelled? She turned to face him as she heard him enter the room, but she did not look fully at him. She hurried to her place and set down her rose beside her plate. She wanted to thank him for the rose, but she could not bring herself to say the words.

  They reached for conversation, but could find nothing but banal comments on the weather and on the earliness of spring and the possibility that winter would yet return before they could consider it quite over. It was a silly conversation, as most conversations were, in which they mouthed the obvious and said nothing at all.

  “Thank you, Morse,” the earl said at last. “You may come back later to clear away.”

  Morse bowed and left the room with the footman who had been assisting him.

  Her hand was on the stem of the rose. His hand reached out so that he could touch his fingers to the back of hers.

  “What shall we do this afternoon?” he asked. “Walk? Jenkins tells me the daffodils are beginning to push above the soil.”

  “I said the game was over,” she said, watching his fingers. Long. Very masculine. She remembered exactly how and where they had touched her a year ago, while she was conceiving their son. Or just before she had conceived, to be more accurate. “I want no more of it.”

  But the lie struck sudden panic into her. She wanted the game to continue. Oh, she did. The rest of today might be all she would ever have. She did not care what his motives were. Sometimes pride did not seem to matter. She wanted the rest of the game, whatever it was to be. She lifted her eyes to his, and his face blurred before her suddenly. She bit her lip.

  “Why?” she asked him, her voice high-pitched. “Why? Tell me why.”

  “You have been a millstone about my neck for a full year,” he said. His fingers curled about hers and held on tightly when she would have scrambled to her feet. “When I saw you and recognized you at that masquerade, I could not believe the evidence of my own eyes for a moment. I could not resist dancing with you. I believe I had some idea of protecting you from all the unsavory characters that were surrounding you. Comical, no?”

  It was a rhetorical question. She looked at their hands. She wondered if he knew he was hurting her.

  “You were drunk,” he said. “You did not slap my face when I whispered things into your ear that I had no business whispering. You did not shove me away when I danced indecorously close to you. And so I decided to attempt kisses. Yet when I drew you apart, you came so willingly that I decided to attempt more. I was not drunk. Irresponsibly inebriated, perhaps, but I plotted your ruin with cold intent. Knowing you both unchaperoned and incapable of protecting yourself, I ru
ined you. And impregnated you into the bargain. Wonderful gentlemanly behavior. Wonderfully protective.”

  She wanted to point out that she was at least as much to blame for what had happened as he. But she said nothing.

  “I did the honorable thing too late,” he said. “I married you in all haste as soon as you accepted me, and I brought you here where you would be safe from the gossip and the malice that would have followed upon the arrival of our son less than eight months after the wedding. And then I returned to my life in London. To find that it was impossible to return to. You were a millstone.”

  “You abandoned me,” she said, abandoning in her turn the pride that should have kept her mouth shut. “Can you imagine what it is like to be a woman nineteen years old, with child, newly married, and abandoned on her wedding day in a strange place among strange people?”

  He was a long time answering. “Better that than being stuck with my company,” he said.

  She did not ponder his reply. “It was suitable punishment,” she said. “I deserved punishment for what I had done. And I will not blame the drink. As soon as I saw you, as soon as you asked me to dance, I wanted you. I was excited by your reputation and excited by the fact that you had taken notice of me. I was excited by your words and your touch. And by your suggestion that we be alone together. I was excited by what you did to me. All of it. I found it all utterly wonderful. As if I had never been taught about propriety or sin or the consequences of sin. I have deserved all the consequences—the terror of knowing myself with child, the humiliation of begging you to marry me, the misery of being abandoned on my wedding day and again only two weeks after the birth of our son. I have deserved it all.”

  “Amy—” he said. He seemed to realize finally how tightly he was holding her hand. He loosened his grasp.

  “But I will no longer pretend that it was ugly,” she said passionately. “I have been accustomed to call it so because it was sinful and ought never to have happened. But I lie to myself when I call it ugly. I will not have it said ever again that my son was conceived in ugliness. He was conceived in beauty. I don’t care who you were or are or how carelessly you seduced me—though no seduction was necessary. I don’t care. It was beautiful, what happened. I was not so drunk that I cannot remember. I can remember every moment. Even though it was sinful and even though I must be punished for it every day for the rest of my life, I will no longer deny it. It was the most wonderful experience of my life, and I am glad James came of it. I am glad.”