The Impostor (12 page)

“Why, Tessa?” he asked hoarsely. “Why did he take my memories of you? Why did you do nothing to stop him?”

She looked at him. He was pale and drawn in the half light, the skin of his scar tight and puckered. He had not been handsome even before his injury, but it did not matter. She had never stopped loving him, and knew now that she never would. He had branded her for life, and she would carry this mark to her grave.

Her eyes slid shut on a spasm of pain.

“Stop him?” Tessa repeated. “Why would I stop him, when I was the one who asked him to do it?”

In the silence that followed, time seemed to cease entirely. She opened her eyes again, holding his lightless, still gaze.

“You asked it of him?” Sebastian asked finally, after a long, uncounted interval, his tone carefully measured.

She ought to leave it at that. She ought to make him believe once and for all that she did not love him, had never loved him. But the lie seemed a furtive, shameful thing, too ugly to utter, and Tessa knew she owed him, at long last, the truth—the truth of why, six years before, she had destroyed her own life, and now, she was finally beginning to realize, his as well.

“Will you listen to me?” she asked. “Will you permit me to speak, without interruptions? I know I do not deserve it, but it will make it easier for me.”

“If it will make it easier for you,” said Sebastian.

Tessa nodded, rising to her feet to stand by the window and gaze out into the dark night so she would not need to look at him.

“It was Lord Wellington,” she said at last. “He was the one who came to me, and asked me not to meet you in the chapel at the Escorial.” She swallowed. “He was the one who asked me to release you from our engagement, and your promise to marry me.”

A movement sounded faintly behind her, as though Sebastian had sat up abruptly in his bed, but he must have remembered his promise not to interrupt, for he made no other sound.

“Somehow—I do not know how—your grandfather had learned of our attachment. Apparently he was not enamored of the notion of an alliance with a little nobody like me, the daughter of an insignificant soldier. He wrote to the duke and asked him to prevent the marriage.” She sighed. “You know how ambitious Wellington is. He wouldn’t have dreamed of offending a lord as powerful and wealthy as your grandfather. He went to my father. Told him that if he wanted to get anywhere in his career, he’d best persuade me to break off with you.

“My father would not agree to it. He said that if I loved you, I was to marry you. He said his career was not worth my happiness. But I was nineteen, and I believed Wellington when he said I was going to destroy your future.” How could she explain, so that he understood? “Father didn’t want me to do it, but I was insistent. Because I believed there would be more for you in this world than me. Because I did not trust that, after the war, you could still love me.”

Behind her, she heard Sebastian raising himself once again to a sitting position on the bed. She did not turn to look at him. She did not think she could continue speaking if she looked at him.

“I loved you,” said Tessa. “I loved you, and I knew you couldn’t marry me. You’re Sebastian Montague. You’re the Earl Grenville.”

He made a sound, but she rushed on, not letting him interrupt.

“But I knew you wouldn’t agree to it,” she said. “You were so absolutely convinced I was worth it, leaving it all behind. As your parents had done. We would go to Italy, you told me. We would be happy.”

Her voice broke.

“But I couldn’t do it, Sebastian,” she said. “I couldn’t take away your future. So I thought—if my father took your memories away, if we had never known each other, if I never existed for you—then you would be free.” She gave a soft, mirthless laugh. “I was young enough to find it romantic to be a martyr to love.”

She looked out into the night. Here and there, she could see kernels of gaslight, blurred in the fog.

“I begged my father to help me. To bury your memories of me so deeply that you could never access them again. When it was—when it was over”—her eyes shut briefly at the memory—”Wellington had you sent to Paris. So there was no chance we should ever meet again. That was all. You left. Father received his promotion.”

She clasped her hands together, drawing a deep, unsteady breath. Unshed tears swelled beneath her lids, but she did not let them fall.

And then he spoke for the first time that night.

“You took away my memories,” he said. “My memories of you. My memories of
us
. All of them.”

“Yes,” she said. She should turn her head and look at him, she thought. But she could not. How could she have the strength, once she started looking at him, to ever stop again?

“How could you?” he asked, and to her astonishment, she heard his voice tremble for the first time in all the years she had known him.

She turned. “What?”

“How could you?” He was shouting at her now. He had pushed back the covers of the bed and risen to his feet. He wore only buckskin breeches, and Tessa, to her shame, could not seem to tear her eyes away from all that smooth expanse of naked male flesh.

She took a step backwards and hit the ledge of the window. “Sebastian, please—”

He crossed the room to her in two strides, taking her shoulders in her hands, forcing her to look up at him. The anguish and rage in his dark, ruined faced made her heart stop.

“You took away a part of me,” he said. “You took away the best part of me and you left me alone.”

Her breath caught, and all her own pain and helplessness and fear bubbled to the surface, so that suddenly she was on her toes, shoving at his shoulders, shouting into his face, and her voice was as loud and as furious as his.

“I left you because I loved you! I left you because I could not be the wife that you needed and deserved! Look around you, Sebastian. You live in a mansion, employ dozens of servants, attend balls with the Prince Regent himself.” She shoved, hard, and he grabbed her wrists to hold her still. Her breath came in gasps.

“Let me go!” she cried. “Oh God, just let me go.”

“No, Tessa,” he said, and his voice was low and quiet. Confronted with her rage, all his own anger seemed to have left him. “I can’t do that. Not until you have heard what I have to say. I gave you that chance. Will you do the same for me?”

Staring up at him, the tears trickling down her lashes, she nodded slowly. And so, holding her close, he told her, without embellishment or abridgment, of his childhood and his grandfather. First of his childhood in Italy, and then of his life with his grandfather, before he had gone to Eton and met Francis. He told her of his dead sister, the first time he had spoken of her in twenty-four years. He told her of the canings, of the starvation, of the cold, casual brutality.

And then, finally, he told her of his life since he had returned to England after the war, the isolation, and the loneliness, and the casual cruelty of Society.

“You never told me before,” she said, when he had finished. Her voice was unsteady. “When we were in Portugal, and Spain. You never told me all this.”

“I was much younger,” said Sebastian. “Young enough to be ashamed of my past—as you were young enough to believe in martyrdom for love. But do you understand now?”

“I understand,” she said.

“Then there is only one last thing I want to know, Tessa,” he said, “before I take you to bed and make you mine. I want to hear you say it. Tell me the truth. Why did you come searching for me?”

She lifted her face to his.

“Because I had to save you,” she said. “Because I still love you.”

He drew her into his arms then, his hands hard on her body, but she knew this man would not, could not hurt her. With perfect trust, she raised her arms and put them around his neck.

“Tessa,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

He carried her across the room and lowered her onto the bed. His hands trembled as he worked at the fastenings of her dress. She hardly noticed. She was too busy relearning the contours of his shoulders, of the strong flesh beneath her hands, of this man she had loved for so long she could hardly begin to imagine herself if she had not known him, because she would have been somebody else entirely.

He divested her of the cheap material of her gown, of her simple linen underthings, and now he stared down at her, his face tense, his eyes dark.

“Does your wound pain you?” he asked softly, running his hand gently along the bandage.

“Not very much, no,” said Tessa. She smiled. “I am not interested in my wound, sir.”

She reached for his breeches, attacking the buttons on the flap. The cloth tore, and then his hard, warm fresh sprang free into her hands. He peeled the buckskin off the rest of the way, and Tessa bent her head to kiss the long, ugly scar that marred his thigh. She said his name as urgently as he said hers.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I need to—I need to—”

She raised herself up again, wrapping her arms around his neck and ran a gentle hand down his spine, wanting only that he should come to her, and make her his as completely he was hers. She parted her legs for him, and pressed herself against him, and whispered, gently, “It’s all right.”

The words seemed to shatter the tight tether he had kept on his control. He reached down and positioned himself at the entrance of her body, and pushed himself fully inside her.

Her head moved on the pillow. She made an involuntary sound of surprise, and he held himself very still inside her.

“Are you all right?” His voice was harsh.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

He made a sound in his throat, his face flushed, and his eyes flickered shut for a moment. Sweat beaded his brow.

“Tessa,” he said, “I can’t stop, I can’t wait, I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right,” she said again.

She held him close as he made another harsh sound in his throat, and then he was moving, his hips moving in a heavy, rapid rhythm. He muttered something incoherent, and as Tessa kissed his shoulder, he spent inside her.

Afterward, the first and sharpest edge of desire sated, Sebastian drew her into his arms again, and Tessa held him very close, pressing her face into the damp curve of his neck. Without quite knowing why, she bit down on his shoulder, very carefully.

Sebastian smiled against her hair, and then he gently detached her, untangling her arms from around his neck. She made a sleepy, protesting sound as he raised himself up on his arms to look down at her in the moonlight. Though the room was warm, her body felt very cold where his no longer lay against her.

“What are you…” she began to ask, but her voice faded and her eyelids drooped as he lowered his mouth to the sensitive curve of her throat, dropping light kisses from her jaw to her collarbone.

She made a sound that was half sigh, half moan.

“Sebastian,” she said.

In the darkness his smile was a slash of white, like a pirate’s blade.

“I’m here.”

Her hands came up to clutch at his hair as the mattress shifted and he moved lower, his day’s growth of beard rasping lightly against the skin on the inside of her breast. And then he was licking and sucking and biting at first one sensitive nipple and then the other, and Tessa’s head thrashed against the pillow as warm waves of pleasure washed over her.

As he lingered over her breasts, one big, warm hand stroked slowly down the side of her body, igniting little shocks of pleasure. The callused edges of his fingertips brushed against the curve of her shoulder and slid beneath her to delicately caress her back, dipping low into the damp crease beneath her buttocks. Her entire body seemed to grow pliant, limp, as though drugged by his touch and the sound of her name on his lips.

She sank into a sea of sensation, lost to everything but the feel of this man against her. She wanted to lift her hands and touch him as he touched her, but she could not seem to force her pleasure-drenched muscles to work, and instead her fingers only opened and closed convulsively on the sheets.

She tried to say something, and heard her voice panting and ragged in the darkness, but the words were lost to her, and he only gave a low, dark laugh in response. Then he moved lower, the coarse hair on his hard flat belly rasping deliciously against her hip and then her leg as he made his way downward, trailing kisses on her skin.

Then his tongue dipping into her navel, and she couldn’t help it. She giggled, and the sound was foreign to her ears. She could not remember the last time she had laughed so easily.

“Ticklish?” he asked, his breath warm against her stomach, an answering smile in his voice.

“A little,” she said.

He pressed a kiss to the soft flesh of her belly, and then his hands were between her thighs, urging them apart. Still a little uncertain, and perhaps somewhat shy, she resisted for a moment, but he whispered encouragingly against her hip, and she remembered that this was Sebastian, the man she trusted and loved.

“Good girl,” he murmured, and then he licked gently at the quivering, sensitive flesh in which all her feeling seemed to have gathered.

At the first touch of his tongue she cried out, her hips bucking so hard she nearly came off of the bed, but he merely laughed again, low and dark, and used one big hand flat against her stomach to push her back down and hold her in place. With his other hand, he teased the opening of her body, and when she had grown damp and breathless and pleading, he pushed one finger inside her.