Letter From a Rake: Destiny Romance (27 page)

Turning to face him, she shook her head. ‘You tell me I am yours and want me for your wife, and yet you wrote a love letter to another woman. A fact you cannot deny. If you really did love me, Alex, it would have been sent to me, not to Clarice. As I said, you may be a fool, but I most certainly am not.’

She screwed up the sodden rags and dumped them in a pile next to him on the bench. ‘I wish you a speedy and full recovery, Lord Brooke, but as far as I am concerned, we are estranged and shall remain so. Goodbye, Alex.’

‘I didn’t write the letter,’ she heard him utter as she walked away. But with her heart so close to breaking again, she couldn’t bear to turn around and go back to face him. By sheer force of will, she managed to keep going until she reached Charles’ side.

‘As soon as David returns we shall have to leave. My outfit is no longer presentable,’ she said, and took hold of her brother’s hand.

With Alex laid low from the events of the garden party, Millie felt it safe to venture out for her walk the following morning. It was only on the return leg, that she realised how much she had missed the exercise. Upon her return, she handed her coat and gloves to Grace. Standing in the front entrance of her home she considered the quandary that had kept her from sleep nearly all of last night. Should she confide in Charles what Alex had said in the maze, or simply go and buy a passage back to India?

Still in two minds as to what she should do, Millie walked towards the staircase. As she passed the door of her father’s downstairs study, she noticed it was open. She poked her head inside and was surprised to see her both her parents sitting on the small leather couch that faced the window.

‘Hello,’ she said, giving them a cheery greeting.

Her father turned to her. ‘Good, I am glad you’re finally home. Close the door and come and sit with us,’ he said.

Millie closed the door behind her and came around to face her parents. The first thing she noticed was the distressed state Violet was in. Tears poured down her mother’s cheeks and she shook all over.

‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ she said, kneeling before her mother and taking her hands. She had never seen her mother so distraught and it frightened her. ‘You are not ill, are you?’

Violet shook her head as her bottom lip quivered.

Millie looked to her father, seeking an answer. ‘Your mother is not ill, Millie, she is heartbroken. I have told her what I have long suspected, and which has kept me up many a night. That you intend to leave England and return to India,’ James replied.

In his hand he held the list of scheduled departures for India that Millie thought she had hidden so well. The breath caught in Millie’s throat and her face crumpled as she burst into tears. How foolish had she been not to realise her father would have known. James reached out and lifted his daughter onto his lap. She flung her arms around her father’s neck.

‘I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I just wanted to go home,’ she sobbed into the lapel of his jacket. Violet stroked Millie’s hair as both mother and daughter continued to cry. ‘You are home, darling. This is where your family and your friends are, and where your future lies,’ Violet whispered.

Millie shook her head. ‘I just wanted to get away; I just wanted to be happy again. As I was in India. Every time I think I might be able to live here, it all comes crashing down around me.’

Her father held her tightly. ‘I will not lose my daughter,’ he replied, his voice full of conviction. ‘I stood by once and nearly lost you; I will not do that again.’

Millie pulled away and sat staring at him, searching his face. ‘What do you mean, you nearly lost me?’ she asked.

James looked at Violet, who nodded her head.

Her father sighed. ‘We have never told you this before, but as it seems pertinent to the current situation, it is only right that you should now know. The year after we arrived in Calcutta, your mother told me she was leaving me and going back to England. She intended to take Charles with her.’

Millie gasped and looked at her mother, who held her hand over her eyes as she sobbed quietly.

‘I didn’t argue with her. I just stood and let her go. Ours was an arranged marriage and I knew she didn’t love me. That no matter what I said, it wouldn’t make a difference. The morning she was due to take the ship to England, I left for work and we didn’t even say goodbye,’ James continued. He bowed his head in silence and Violet took hold of his hand.

‘I was a shrew, Millie, so full of anger and resentment at being made to go to India. I couldn’t see what I had. That my husband loved me and I would destroy him by leaving,’ Violet said. She reached over and gave her husband a gentle kiss on the lips.

Millie looked at her parents, stunned by the shock revelation that her parents’ marriage had not always been a happy one. ‘But you didn’t leave him, you didn’t go back to England,’ Millie replied. ‘Why?’

Violet took hold of Millie’s hand and placed it within James’ hand. She then laid her own hand on top. ‘I actually got as far as the dockside, but when I saw the ship I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take Charles from his father, they were devoted to one another. I also couldn’t take the child he didn’t yet know existed within my womb and keep it from him. A child he would likely never see. You.’

‘So what did you do?’ Millie replied.

Her father raised his head and looked lovingly at his wife. ‘She made an incredibly brave decision and decided to give happiness a chance. Millie, I cannot begin to describe the despair I felt when I returned home that evening, expecting to find an empty house.

‘But from the moment I opened the bedroom door and saw your mother’s things on the dresser and her standing in the evening light, I knew I would never let anything so precious escape again. I’m sorry, Millie, but you are going to have to make a life here in England. You cannot go back to India. I will not allow you to marry anyone who takes you from us.’

Millie bit her lip and nodded. She had known in her heart she couldn’t ever leave her family; that a life in India was only a faraway dream. A fantasy.

‘Promise me you won’t ever go back. I couldn’t bear to know we would never see you again. Charles would be crushed to lose you, as would we,’ her father said, as he put an arm around Violet and pulled her into his embrace.

‘Yes, Papa, I promise I shall stay,’ Millie replied, and gave both her mother and father a kiss. She shook her head and wiped away her tears. How could she ever have entertained the thought of leaving her parents and brother?

‘May I go now?’ she said. She needed to be alone.

Her parents both nodded. She stood up and took a deep breath. It was liberating to finally have the air clear with her parents, for them to know how she truly felt.

As she reached the door, Violet rose from the couch and came to her side. ‘I don’t fully understand what has happened between you and Lord Brooke, but as one who nearly walked away from the love of her life, I would counsel you not to be too hasty in pushing him away. There are things that don’t make sense here, and I suspect Lord Brooke is in a purgatory of his own creation, but you may wish to give him one more chance to make matters right,’ Violet said.

Millie nodded. After Alex had returned to London he had made repeated attempts to speak to her, but she had refused to hear him out. Once his injuries were healed and he was back in society, she would give him the chance to explain himself.

‘Sort it out with Brooke, or I shall pay his father a visit when he returns to London,’ Mr Ashton added.

Millie smiled, her mind now clear on what she had to do. ‘Thank you, I will, and thank you both for understanding how hard this has been for me. I appreciate everything you have done for me, and Mama, I am especially grateful you didn’t get on that ship back to England. We would have all lost so very much if you had.’

After leaving her father’s study, Millie went up to her room, where she sat on her bed and tried to recall every word Alex had said to her in the maze. She went to her desk and pulled out a piece of paper, writing down her recollections of their conversation.

‘One more chance, Alex,’ she whispered, as she put down her pen and stared at the written words.

Alex’s late-night dream was of a squirrel.

A tall one, which for reasons unknown to him kept throwing stones at his window and calling his name. He rolled over onto his back and tried to find a new dream. The insistent squirrel, however, would not go away.

Finally, he opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. The low-burning embers in the fireplace danced shadows across the ornate plasterwork.

Thunk.

A real stone hit his window, followed by a voice that called out ‘Alex.’

Some fool was in the laneway at the back of his house, tossing stones against his bedroom window. ‘Go away, whoever you are; I am not in the mood,’ he moaned, running his hands over his face and touching where the stitches still held his eyebrow together.

Another stone hit the window and he heard the glass crack. He was out of bed in a flash, grabbing a woollen blanket from the fireside chair and wrapping it around his shoulders as he crossed the icy bedroom floor.

‘Steady on,’ he yelled angrily at the stranger in the darkness as he threw up the window sash and looked down. ‘You nearly broke the glass.’

‘Thank God; I thought I was going to run out of stones before I found the right window. Let me in, it’s freezing out here,’ came a distinctly female voice from below.

He pinched himself – surely he was still dreaming. There was no way on God’s green earth that Millie Ashton was standing under his bedroom window in the middle of the night.

‘Millie?’

She let out a frustrated growl.

‘I don’t see any other girls down here. Well, except for the orange-seller back on the corner, but I am certain she doesn’t make house calls. Now, will you please come downstairs and let me in at the kitchen door before I freeze to death?’

Alex let the window drop back down and hurriedly began searching for some clothes. In the days since the attack in the maze, he had stayed at home and mostly slept. Naked. He pulled open the top drawer of his tallboy and quickly put on the first shirt and trousers he found inside. With Millie waiting outside in the dark, he didn’t stop to consider shoes or a jacket.

‘Finally. I was beginning to think you had gone back to bed,’ she grumbled, as he opened the door and let her inside. ‘There’s certainly no such thing as a balmy English night.’

She was wearing a black greatcoat, which must have belonged to her brother, and had a gentlemen’s tall hat pulled down low to hide her face. With pair of ladies’ boots and a skirt on underneath, she would only pass for a young man at first glance.

‘Millie?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t start that again, or I shall go straight out the front door and hail the nearest hack.’

He laughed. She was such a tiger when she was angry, and so bloody sexy. He felt his manhood go hard. Luckily his shirt was long enough to cover all evidence of his desire. He closed the door.

‘You do know it is the middle of the night?’ he asked.

‘Actually, it’s around one o’clock,’ she replied.

‘And yet you have come unaccompanied to visit a single man while he is still abed?’

The frustration in her voice lifted a notch. ‘Yes. I couldn’t wait any longer.’

He scowled and shook his head in disapproval. Millie raised her head and stared hard back at him. As he followed her gaze, he saw her making a careful study of his bruised and cut face. When she got to the large cut above his left eye, her hand began to reach out. His breath caught as she stopped, curled her fingers back into a gentle fist and let her arm drop to her side.

‘Nice stitches. I do hope you have been putting a cold compress on those bruises. I’m not surprised I haven’t seen you in the park these past few days. You may be interested to know, Lady Clarice and her father are not on speaking terms, so I think word of what he had done to you got back to her,’ Millie said.

Alex attempted to raise his eyebrows, but a sharp sting above his eye made him think the better of it.

‘To be honest, I have pretty much slept since David brought me home from Richmond. Fortunately, the face is the worst of it. Whether by design or good luck, the earl’s thugs only managed to wind me, rather than break my ribs. And by the way, thank you for coming to my rescue. I still owe you for your ruined clothes,’ he replied.

They walked into the hallway and Alex motioned towards the kitchen door. ‘Can I make you some tea?’ he offered, remembering the cosy evening they had shared in the warmth of the tiny kitchen.

She shook her head. ‘Thank you, no. I have not come for tea, I have come for answers. And I would rather we were not disturbed by any of your household staff.’

Before he could stop her, Millie had climbed the stairs, and when she reached the front hall, she continued on up the main staircase, turning left towards his bedroom. The room where he dreamed nightly of her.

‘Corner window, corner bedroom,’ she muttered.

He caught up with her at the top of the stairs and, taking hold of her arm, he attempted to steer her away from the bedroom door. ‘I think we should go into one of the sitting rooms, I don’t think you want to end up in my bedroom.’

‘Really?’ she replied, with a grin. ‘Are you certain?’

His breathing faltered once more. Who was this girl, who looked just like the new Millie, but was standing in his house in the middle of the night, making suggestive remarks?

‘I think your bedroom is perfect for talking, and also for when we are done with talking,’ she added. She pulled out of his grasp and with a confident wag of her hips she strolled into his bedroom. He followed behind, his mind in a whirl. In the centre of the room, she stopped and turned to face him.

He closed the bedroom door behind him and locked it. He doubted very much that anyone would come looking for him at such an hour, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He pointed towards the locked door and Millie nodded her assent.

‘We won’t be disturbed that way,’ she said.

‘All right, what do you want to talk about?’ Alex said, as their gazes met and he fought an inner battle with the most private of his sexual fantasies. Any moment now, it would win and he would be powerless to stop it. He wondered if she realised the danger she had placed herself in by coming to his room, and if so, did she care?

She put a gloved hand inside the pocket of the greatcoat and after digging deeply, she pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it. Then holding it in her hand, she gave a flick of her wrist and the paper opened fully. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked, waving the paper towards him.

Alex shook his head, and prayed she would not ask him to read it.

‘It’s a passage to India on the merchant ship Apollo, which sails from London a week on Sunday. If you look closely, you will see the ticket bears my name,’ she said, her expression suddenly turning grim.

A thunderbolt of shock hit him and coursed violently through his body. He swayed on his feet.

Millie was leaving!

While she remained in London, he still had a chance to repair their relationship, but if she took her place on board the ship, all was lost.

‘No, you cannot leave! I won’t let you,’ he shouted, not caring whom he might wake.

A wicked smile appeared on her lips. He had not seen this coming, and she knew it. She wagged a finger at him and stuffed the ticket back into her coat pocket. ‘I thought that might get your attention. Now listen, Alex Radley, and listen well, for this is the very last chance you shall ever get with me. You are going to tell me the whole truth about you and Lady Clarice. The moment I suspect you are lying to me or have left out an important detail, I shall walk out that door and you will never see me again.’

Alex immediately regretted leaving the key in the door. ‘Yes,’ he replied, as his mind went completely blank.

‘Good, finally we are in agreement on something.’ She pulled her gloves off and stood slapping them against the side of her coat.

‘First things first, when I left you in the maze, you said you didn’t write the love letter to her. I think that comment alone deserves its own full explanation.’

Alex closed his eyes and let out a tired sigh. The time had finally come to tell her the truth, to reveal his humiliating secret and watch as she walked out of his life forever. Of all the places he had imagined this scene would be played out, he had never considered it would be here in the privacy of his bedroom.

‘I didn’t think you heard me,’ he replied.

She pulled the tall hat from her head, and with no pins or ribbons to bind her hair, her long brown tresses fell freely down. Wherever her maid was, it was clear she was unaware of Millie’s secret late-night ramble. She threw the hat on a nearby chair.

‘I heard it; I just didn’t understand it. I have run so many different possible explanations through my head since then and it has taken me until today to make sense of everything, and to come up with a plausible answer. But before I tell you what I think, it is only fair that I let you give your version of events.’

‘All right,’ he replied.

Everything hinged on what he was about to tell her. His whole future would be defined by her response. He tried to paint a mental picture of her, a memory of what she looked like the moment before he told her the awful truth. Alex took a deep breath and summoned his courage.

‘I didn’t write the letter to Clarice; David did. I asked him to write a love letter to you and I mistakenly thought he had. I then mailed it. Lady Clarice received it and the rest of the unholy disaster you know as well as I do.’

Millie raised an eyebrow, but stayed where she was. ‘Except for the obvious question as to why you got your brother to write the letter in the first place. Your prose couldn’t be that bad. And you most certainly are no wallflower when it comes to women.’

‘I asked him to write a letter because I could not. Why couldn’t I write a letter to the woman I love?’ He stammered as he struggled to find the right words. ‘Because I cannot read or write.’ He closed his eyes. If Millie left now, he could not bear to watch her go.

He heard her footsteps as she crossed the hard wooden floor. Her skirts brushed against his leg as she came to his side. He opened his eyes and watched with wonder as she took hold of both his hands. ‘Was that so hard?’ she whispered, as her deep sapphire-blue eyes looked up at him.

She smiled and Alex lived again.

‘You put us both through weeks of misery and torture, simply because you cannot read? I don’t know whether I should be relieved that you have finally told me, or if I should kill you.’ She squeezed his hands.

Alex swallowed deeply. How could she be so calm? He was astonished to find her still standing in his bedroom, let alone so close. In all the versions of this encounter he had imagined, never once had she stayed. ‘The words on the page, they dance around when I look at them. I can never make head nor tail of them. I can barely write my own initials; I cannot even read a street sign,’ he replied.

She stepped in closer, and standing on her tiptoes she murmured in his ear. ‘Or the fables on a ceiling, or even a dance card. It all makes perfect sense now, but why Alex, why didn’t you tell me? Did you really think I would see you as less of a man just because you cannot read or write?’

He searched her eyes for the slightest sign of insincerity, but they shone with a blinding honesty. She now knew his darkest secret and it didn’t seem to make the slightest difference to how she saw him.

‘You don’t think I am some sort of village idiot because of it?’ he said.

A warm kiss was planted on his ear and Alex chuckled as it tickled him. ‘I said you were a fool, I never said you were stupid. You must have a brilliant mind to be able to recall all that knowledge of ancient Greece. I was impressed beyond words with your performance at the museum.’

He winced. ‘You don’t think me a terrible brother because I press-ganged Stephen into telling me all he knew of the Elgin marbles and then dragged him out in the cold to come to the museum?’

She smiled. ‘No, I thought it was rather sweet. You should have seen your brother’s face when you gave your informative lecture to the assembled crowd; he was positively beaming with pride,’ she replied.

Alex unlocked Millie’s fingers and withdrew his hands. Reaching out, he put his arms around her and pulled her close. At the same time, her arms wrapped tightly around him. Her head came to rest against his chest and as he bent down to kiss her hair, he took a deep breath. The heady scent of Millie filled his lungs.

Memories of the night he had first kissed her came flooding back. From now on there would be no need to steal away from ballrooms to be alone with her. He knew she would not let go. ‘You have no idea what this means to me,’ he murmured.

She gave him a playful punch on the back. ‘It means you won’t ever lie to me again.’

‘And you won’t be going back to India,’ his replied with conviction. Before she could stop him, he had pulled the ticket out of her coat pocket, screwed it up into a ball and tossed it into the fireplace. It landed in the embers and burst into flames.

‘Oh,’ Millie said. ‘It took me all afternoon to handwrite that ticket.’

Alex laughed. Whether from relief or joy, he didn’t care. Millie was here with him and that was all that mattered. She wasn’t going anywhere without him. ‘I promise to pay you double for the cost of the ticket,’ he replied with a smile.

She shook her head. ‘Considering how hurt my parents were when they realised I was planning to book a passage back to India, if it had been a real ticket I would consider it an act of karma. I cannot believe I was foolish enough not to realise my father would have known.’

‘You did once tell me he could read your mind, and here I was thinking I was about to take on an intelligent wife,’ Alex murmured.

Millie gasped, but Alex held her tightly. She would not be getting a second punch in.

‘You haven’t actually asked me to marry you,’ she replied.

‘Yet.’

She pulled out of his embrace and took a step backward. Alex congratulated himself for the second time on having had the good sense to lock the bedroom door.

‘Only if you are sure, and only if I am your first choice,’ she replied. All the humour in her voice was gone and he could tell she was still in need of some convincing. He could not blame her for having her doubts. His behaviour over the previous weeks would give anyone reason to have second thoughts.