How to Romance a Rake (32 page)

Still he could not resist questioning her.

“So you aren’t afraid of me?” he asked, even to himself sounding like a petulant child.

“No,” came her calm reply as she turned her attention to his other boot. “I am annoyed, of course. You didn’t send word that you would be absent from dinner. And I was forced to send our regrets to Cecily and Winterson.

“I was somewhat worried as well,” she added, pulling harder than strictly necessary on his boot.

Once she’d removed them, he took his boots from her and stood. “If that is the entirety of your scold,” he said harshly, “I would like to go to sleep now. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a long day for me.”

Turning his back on her, Alec shrugged out of his coat, and unbuttoned his waistcoat, his dismissal of her as obvious as he could make it.

But it would seem that Juliet was made of sterner stuff.

“Your uncle revealed nothing outside of telling me that your mother died at your father’s hand,” she said with a frown. “Which, incidentally, is something I already knew before he told me.”

That brought him up short. “What do you mean, ‘you already knew’?”

“Oh, come, Alec,” she said wryly. “You have spoken of your father’s brutality again and again. It is not such a far reach to suspect the carriage accident you blamed for your mother’s death was a polite fiction invented to protect your sisters from the truth.”

He stared at her as if she’d gone mad. Had he really been so transparent? Was it so obvious that his sisters had figured out the truth? He dragged a hand over his face, feeling the prickle of stubble on his chin.

“What I do not believe,” Juliet continued, stepping closer to him, “is that you had anything to do with it.”

“Your championship is laudable, my dear,” he told her, holding her at arm’s length. “But you do not know what you are saying. I am reminded every day of just how much of my father’s blood runs through my veins. And through his brother’s as well. Indeed, you would do well to avoid being in company with either of us from now on. You should have a care for your own safety lest you suffer my mother’s fate.”

“Do not be absurd,” she argued. “You are nothing like either of them.”

Pushing away from her, he strode over to stare out the window into the darkened garden below. “I suppose you will not be content with simply taking my word for it?” he asked without much hope. Juliet was turning out to be more tenacious than he could ever have imagined when they’d first met.

“Not at all,” she snapped. “You have made some strong accusations against my husband. I cannot let that stand without some sort of proof.”

“You are relentless, do you know that?” he asked, turning to find her, not surprisingly, just behind him.

Tilting her chin, she nodded. “Yes, I am. So you’d better tell me the truth.”

Without a word, he took her arm and led her to the chairs before the fire. He would have preferred to drag her to bed and ravish her, but he could see from her expression that there would be no intimacy between them until he’d revealed all. Though, as luck would have it, he very much doubted there would be any further intimacies between them after he told his sordid story. With a pang of regret for what had been shaping up into a workable marriage, he began to tell her his story.

Nineteen

“My parents’ was an arranged marriage,” he began, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, as if resisting the urge to curl in on himself and hide his soft underbelly from predators.

Juliet resisted the urge to take him into her arms and soothe him. He looked so brittle. And she sensed that the slightest touch would shatter him. The planes of his face, so finely wrought, were made harsh in the firelight. As if the very act of revealing his secret had transformed his angelic countenance into something devilish.

“I believe at first that they were happy enough,” he continued. “My father was able to restrain himself a bit more in those days, I think. Or perhaps he was afraid of angering my mother’s family, from whom she received an annuity in addition to the bride gift she’d brought to the marriage. Whatever the case, they got along well enough and within two years I had come along, and with my birth my mother’s main duty of providing an heir had been fulfilled.”

Juliet ached to hear him describe himself in such terms. It might be true that as the heir he had been a duty, but no child should be made to think of himself as such. At least, she did not believe so.

“I was four when Kat was born, and it was then that I became aware of my mother’s fragility. She had Nanny bring us both down to her in the parlor one afternoon, and when Nanny was called away for a few moments, Kat began to fret, as babies sometimes do. And when Mama could not quiet her, I began to feel true panic from her. I was only a child of course but her anxiety…” He stopped, searching for the words. “It frightened me. I tried myself to convince Kat to stop crying. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did somehow, that her cries were distressing to Mama in a way that was more than the situation warranted.”

She had little trouble imagining Alec as a small child, his gilded curls shining in the sunlight, trying to entertain his baby sister from her tantrum.

“This was when my father arrived,” he continued, and Juliet felt her heart sink, knowing without words where this tale was heading. “He was foxed, though I only realized that later, and was annoyed at having his good mood spoiled by Kat’s wailing. He ordered Mama to make the crying stop. And already overset by the situation, and I think annoyed at her own failure, she said something sharp to him. I do not even recall what it was. All I know is that the next thing I saw was my father’s hand striking her face.”

Alec closed his eyes, as if to erase the memory. “I can still hear the sound of his palm against her cheek. And the way that Kat’s cries stopped suddenly as if she too were surprised at the blow. Of course she started up again almost immediately, this time with a wail fit to wake the dead, and by this time Nanny had returned and she hurried us from the room. But not before I looked back, and saw my mother cowering before his raised hand.”

“That must have been dreadful for you,” Juliet said quietly, trying to keep her tone measured and not reveal too much of her anger at both his parents for their handling of the situation.

“It was hardly the worst I saw between them,” he said with a shrug. “Over the years they fought again and again. Though as time dragged on my mother’s defiance became more muted. I believe there was something about pregnancy, or childbirth, that brought her low in some way. For she seemed to be at her most vulnerable point just after Kat, and later Lydia, were born. And there was something about her very fragility that seemed to bring out the worst in my father. As if he scented blood and knew it was time to go for the throat.”

To hear him describe his parents so hurt Juliet’s heart on his behalf. Still, she needed to hear it all. “Tell me the rest,” she said quietly.

With a slight nod, he continued. “Something happened to Mama after Lydia’s birth. Though she’d been vulnerable before, I believe there was something about her experience with Lydia that … broke her, for want of a better word. Though she’d never been a particularly social person she’d at least attended some society functions and events, but after Lydia’s birth, she became almost entirely housebound. Whereas she’d made some effort to spend time with us for a little while every day, she became distant. Barely looking up when Nanny brought us in to see her. Or worse, ignoring us altogether. It was as if the very life had drained out of her.”

What Alec described sounded very similar to something her own aunt, her father’s sister, had undergone following the birth of her child. It was a sort of ill humor that descended upon one following childbirth, and often led to megrims, a decline, and in some severe cases, death. She shuddered to think of what Lady Deveril’s children must have suffered on her behalf.

“I was around eleven, and preparing to go up to Harrow,” he said, his expression bleak, “and Mama was begging my father not to send me away. It was an old argument. And to my shame, I was desperate to get away from them both. I loved my mother, of course, but she was smothering at times and I was ready to go off and become a young man without having her coddle me.”

“Which is perfectly natural,” Juliet interjected with a smile. “I believe all children go through that stage at some point.”

“Well, as careful as I was not to hurt her feelings, Mama was determined to paint my wish to go to school as a betrayal. And of course, simply to thwart her wishes, my father took my side in the matter.” His eyes shadowed. “I do admit to feeling some discomfort at having him as my champion, but I was a selfish child and was willing to do whatever it took to get my way.”

Juliet would have argued, but she could see that he had made up his mind on the matter. Though she doubted he’d taken into account the fact that he was a child at the time, despite his description of himself as such. Her heart constricted to think of the too-serious, wary little boy he must have been.

“That day, she was more overset than usual about the situation. They had been bickering about it all morning, and I could see that she was growing more and more upset. I tried to calm her but nothing was working. Finally, my father said something particularly cruel, something about it being better for me to be away at school with other boys than chained to my bitch of a mother.”

He exhaled. “I don’t recall the exact words. But they were the last straw for Mama. She rose from the chaise, and slapped him full across the face.”

Juliet covered her mouth to catch her own gasp.

“I think in all the years he’d been hitting her it never occurred to my father that she could or would strike back. The silence that fell over the room was deafening. It was unlike anything I’ve heard or seen since. But when he returned the blow, I could almost hear the bones snap in her neck. Of course that’s impossible, but I thought I heard them all the same.”

“What did you do?” Juliet asked, her stomach in knots as she thought of how awful it must have been for him to watch such scenes play out before him.

“I didn’t launch myself at him to protect her, if that’s what you’re asking,” Alec said harshly. Though Juliet knew his anger was directed inward, she still felt the sting of it.

“I cowered in the corner, hoping he would forget I was even in the room,” he said, a bit more softly. “Which he did.”

“Thank God,” Juliet murmured. “Else he’d have attacked you too.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But unfortunately for my mother, who had taken many beatings from her husband since the early days of their marriage, this time when she fell, she broke her fall in such a way that she hit her head on a table.”

His eyes were bleak now, distant.

“So, I may not have killed her myself,” he explained. “I may not have delivered that final crushing blow, but I did nothing to save her.” He wiped a hand over his eyes, which were suspiciously damp. “I did not kill her, but I am just as guilty of her death as the man who did the killing.”

But Juliet had had enough. “Don’t you think for one moment, Alec Devenish, that you are anything like the man who fathered you.” She stood up from her chair and put her fists against her hips. “You were a child! A child! Can you possibly think that you bear the same sort of culpability in her death as he did?”

“It’s no use, Juliet,” he said wearily. “I’ve thought and thought about this and I always come up with the same conclusion. Yes, I was a child, but hardly a baby. I could have stepped in between them but I was too worried about my own hide to do anything to save her.”

“For bloody good reason!” Juliet nearly shouted. “You were a little boy. You’d seen him beat your mother time and time again. Simple experience would tell you that you could not go against him expecting a different outcome.”

If he was shocked by her profanity he did not say so. “I appreciate your championship, my dear,” he said gently. “Truly, I do, but I long ago resigned myself to the role I played that day. I had, selfishly, hoped that you would never hear of it, but now that you have, I am grateful that, however misguided, you have chosen to take my part.”

“Foolish man!” she hissed. “Can you not see the logical fallacy of your own argument?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Are you not the same man who told me I was not to blame for my mother’s cruelty to me?”

He frowned. “Yes, but I don’t see…”

Juliet bit back a curse. “Do you not see the difference between a small boy cowering from the father who had beaten his mother before him, and the grown woman who cowers from the mother who has browbeaten her all her life?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Alec said curtly. “You were hardly able to defend yourself and—”

“If you finish that sentence by saying that I was a cripple I will scream this house down.”

His blush indicated that she’d guessed exactly what he was going to say. Damn him.

“So, am I really so incapacitated that as an adult female I am more powerless than a little boy?” she demanded.

“You’re trying to trick me,” Alec said finally, crossing his arms over his chest. “Into saying that we were equally powerless.”

A sigh pushed from her. “I am trying to make you see that you are no more responsible for your mother’s death than I am responsible for my mother’s manipulation of me.”

“But the situations…” he began.

Knowing she’d won, despite the fact that he was still making a token attempt to argue with her, Juliet moved closer to him.

“The situations both involved bullies bending their children to do their bidding,” she finished for him, unwrapping his arms from his chest and inserting herself between them. Reluctantly, he pulled her into them.

“You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Alec,” she whispered, caressing his face before she wrapped him in an embrace that was meant to comfort this man who had lived with a guilt that was as much a fiction created in the mind of a child as an actual culpability. To Juliet’s mind, Alec was no more responsible for his mother’s death than baby Lydia had been. The real culprit in Lady Deveril’s death had been the husband who had met her low spirits after the birth of her daughters with violence.