What the Groom Wants (12 page)

“Not with the figurehead I intend to commission.” He winked. “Shall I have you bared to the world or dressed in a green silk that appears one splash from peeling away?”

She flushed, the admiration in his eyes unmistakable. But rather than address the idea of her as a figurehead, she slipped into safer territory. “Do you have the money to buy a boat?”

He shrugged. “Not the kind of boat I want. All the ready cash is going to help the village in Derby. Though I’m sure I have enough to commission a toy one. Come to think of it, I could probably carve one myself, if I set my mind to it.”

She thought back. “You used to carve boats as a boy, didn’t you?”

He laughed. “A few. Sank like a stone. Not to mention all the blood I shed nicking my fingers with the knife.”

She didn’t speak. They were walking at a leisurely pace. In the distance, a church bell rang ten o’clock. She ought to get a hackney, she realized. There wouldn’t be enough time to walk home, change, and then get to the hell before eleven. But there wasn’t a hack nearby, so she allowed herself to relax in the night air.

It was lovely walking like this, just the two of them. Her hand was on his arm, and the breeze touched her cheeks with enough air to cool her heated face. She let herself enjoy the silence a little longer. A moment more.

She sighed. She was a fool, and Caroline was right. This couldn’t work. As annoying as his mother was, she knew the one thing that Radley refused to understand. He was a duke now, and she didn’t have enough assets to balance that fact. She wasn’t beautiful enough, rich enough, titled enough, or any of those things that might make a marriage possible.

“You don’t have to walk me home,” she said. “It’s a long way, and now that you’ve escaped your mother, you can go anywhere. They’d never know.”

“But I want to walk with you.” He said nothing more, and so they fell into silence. Until they rounded another corner. “I’m always an idiot when I drink, Wind. I can’t apologize enough for what an ass I was last night.”

“You were,” she acknowledged, “but I understand.” And she did. He was a man, not a fairy-tale prince. He had flaws, and his life had been turned upside down. Even as she said the words, a part of her ached with disappointment. She didn’t want him to become a normal man in her eyes. She wanted him to remain the perfect prince.

“Every stupid thing I have ever done has been because of drink. If I hadn’t been drinking that night, then that bastard Damon would never have gotten hold of Caroline.”

“Not true,” she said firmly. “Damon would have found her eventually. He is like a dog after a bone, and nothing will stop him when he wants something.” She shuddered when she spoke, wondering if that was to be her fate as well—initials carved into her chest. That’s what Damon had done so many years ago to Caroline. He’d carved DP into the woman’s chest, and she would bear the scars until she died.

“I should have killed him. I still think about it, and I wonder why I didn’t slit his throat that night.”

She flinched. “You shouldn’t have! You know that! If you had killed him, you would have hung for murder. Even then, he had powerful friends. The only reason you escaped gaol was because you shipped off.”

“I abandoned my sister to a monster. Perhaps I should have hung.” He didn’t mean it. She knew that he was voicing what all men say when they are posturing. And yet, part of him still lay trapped in the events of that horrible night.

“Shall we look at what happened?” she asked, challenge in her tone. “Look at how it might have gone differently?”

He turned, his eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to—”

“It all began when you became friends with Damon’s older brother, Ethan. Would you change that? Would you stop that friendship? You were boys with a shared love of the sea. Day and night, you went to the docks. If you weren’t trying to sneak aboard, you were at the pubs, listening to the sailors’ tales.”

She saw him smile in memory. “Ethan died, you know. Fever. Ah, but he was the best mate I’d ever had.”

“Exactly. You two were inseparable. It was only Damon’s jealousy that made it ugly. A younger brother who couldn’t tag along.”

Radley winced. “We weren’t very kind to him.”

“He wasn’t very nice to you. He spread rumors about you. He always tried to make you look stupid.”

“Boys games. I knew he just wanted to join us, but he didn’t care about the things we did. So we hid from him. Told him one thing and did another.” He sighed. “It was cruel.”

“There was darkness in him even then,” she said.

“No—”

“Yes.” Even as a child, younger than all three boys, she’d known that Damon could turn spiteful. That he had the devil’s own genius for playing pranks. She’d never been the victim of it herself, but she’d guessed even then. A girl who had been mean on Monday had her whole wash splattered with mud on Wednesday. A boy who refused to share his toy soldier found it destroyed the next day. No one could ever tell who did it, but Wendy guessed. She had been one of those children perpetually on the fringes, watching what happened in the neighborhood. And, while others wondered who could be responsible for such terrible acts, she had guessed the source. And had done nothing.

That was her secret guilt. She had known what was going on and told no one. Who would listen? She was a little slip of a girl, barely into her teens. Besides, she had enough to do learning to sew for her witch of a mistress.

Meanwhile, Radley wasn’t willing to release his own regret. “Even so. What brother—”

“Celebrates the night before joining the navy?” She squeezed his arm, turning him to face her for emphasis. “That was your party. You and Ethan were leaving in the morning. Of course you would celebrate. Of course you would drink.”

“But I shouldn’t have let her walk home alone!”

Wendy hadn’t been there that night. She’d been sleeping in the dress shop workroom where she’d been apprenticed. But even she knew the truth of what had happened. Even if she hadn’t heard it directly from Caroline days later, she would have guessed it nonetheless.

“Your mother never would have allowed Caroline to go to the pub that night. But she had a habit of sneaking out, as did we all.”

“But—”

“Don’t you see? Damn, you are so blind sometimes!”

It was her curse more than anything that had him stopping in the middle of the walk. “Wind?”

She huffed out a breath. “Don’t you remember what Damon was like? How charming he was? How the girls swooned for his crooked smile?”

Radley frowned as he tried to think back. But he had been a young man at the time, obsessed with sailing. If it wasn’t somehow attached to a boat, he didn’t notice it. After all, he’d barely acknowledged all the girls pining after him. Why would he see the girls looking at Damon?

“I don’t remember,” he finally said.

“Of course you don’t,” Wendy answered. “Trust me. He could be charm itself.” And his seductive skills had only gotten better over the years.

“But—”

“Radley, stop! You were having a party. Ethan was there, drinking and celebrating right there with you. Do you not understand how younger brothers and sisters wished to be part of that?”

He shook his head, his expression somewhat lost. “I suppose I don’t.”

He was an eldest son, and he had always had a place in the world. Handsome, a distant connection to a duke, and two parents who brought in money to keep them from starving. He didn’t know what it was like to be younger or poor. To want to be a part, but be blocked out.

“Damon wanted to get even with you. Caroline was losing her older brother to the sea. Of course, they would find each other. And, of course…”

“He would hurt her.”

She grimaced. The details of the evening were hazy. She had heard it directly from Caroline herself after the rescue, but even that had been interspersed with tears while shame hid the rest.

Damon had taken Caroline to a secret place, an evil room where women could be restrained. He had tempted her initially, promised her a surprise, and since she hadn’t wanted to go home, she had agreed. By the time they had made it to the place, she had been fighting him. But he was bigger and stronger, and he chained her up. Wendy didn’t know the words that were exchanged then. Caroline was no shrinking violet, and whereas she hadn’t been physically strong, the girl had likely fought viciously with her words. And Damon had still been young enough that words could hurt.

He hadn’t raped her, thank God. But he had done something arguably worse. He’d carved his initials in her chest deep enough—rubbing salt in the wound as well—so that it would scar for life.

Radley had returned home that night to discover that his sister had never made it home. He had gone immediately in search of her and had kept looking throughout the next day. He’d never joined the navy as he’d planned that day. It was well into the afternoon when a whore who had reason to be grateful to their father had slipped away to tell them of Caroline’s location.

They’d found her and broke her from her chains. That night Radley had beaten Damon to a bloody pulp. He hadn’t killed the bastard, and quite a few people had wondered why not. The crime against Caroline had been hideous, though of course, most people believed it had been her fault for walking with the man in the first place. Still, Radley was well within his brotherly rights to kill the blackguard who had done it, or so everyone said.

Wendy knew differently. Even filled with a righteous fury, Radley was no murderer. He might have killed when pirates attacked his ship, but self-defense was different from vengeance. Even as a furious teenager, Radley had not been one to kill.

She valued that, and she would not see him regret something that made him a prince and not a common thug.

“If you had killed him that night, you would have been sent to gaol and hung.” He had been questioned. In fact, someone powerful had pushed for him to be gaoled and hung anyway, but as Damon survived his beating, there had been no cause. “Caroline would still bear her scars, but she would have lost her brother as well. Your parents would have grieved two children, not just one, and your death would weigh on Caroline’s conscience. Do you recall how fragile she was at the time? Do you think she could have stayed strong if she knew her mistake cost you your life?”

Radley looked away. “He is a scourge and—”

“
He
is irrelevant.” She spoke the words with conviction, but she wondered what her own life would be like right now. If Damon were dead and gone, would she be free of fear? Or would she be paying off her brother’s debt to someone infinitely worse? “You needed to help her, and so you did.”

“I didn’t!” he huffed. “You did. You found her a position. You spirited her away when Mama would not see the reason behind it. And you—” His words choked off.

“And I saw that you followed your own dreams on board a merchant ship. Yes, I did.” It had been the only way she could assuage her guilt at being silent. At not warning Caroline—her friend—about how stupid it was to pine after a handsome face.

He stopped and looked at her. “Should I have stayed?”

“To what end?”

“To keep my father from dying of grief.”

She snorted. “Your father was proud of you. He died of apoplexy, and you couldn’t have stopped that.” She shook her head. “Why would you regret building your own life? Why would you think that shutting yourself away in guilt and shame would have helped anyone?”

Those were the exact words she had used back when she was sixteen. The exact words she’d said when she’d forced him to join a merchant vessel and take her older brother with him. She’d promised him that she’d look after Caroline, if he watched over Henry. And then, because she was manipulative, she’d gone and struck her own bargain with his mother for lessons in acting the lady.

“You were right,” he finally admitted.

“And Caroline is fine. They’re in love, you know. She and Lord Hartfell.” She said it wistfully. That was the one good thing to come from this evening. She had seen how much love flowed between those two. “I think they will be happy together.”

He must have heard the wistfulness in her voice. Either that, or he knew the loneliness that came from pursuing one’s dreams to the exclusion of all else. He touched her face, and his expression turned intense. “I was an ass last night, Wind. A terrible boor, and you were right to throw me out. But if you can forgive me, then I should like to try again. I should like that kiss now, if I may.”

She swallowed, her heart beating fast in her throat. She wanted to find out if he meant to court her or simply bed her. She wanted to ask about Lady Eleanor. She wanted to know so many things, but she didn’t dare ask. She didn’t think she could stand the answer.

So she simply nodded. Right there in the street, she nodded and lifted her face.

“Not here, Wind. I should like to do it in a proper way.”

She arched her brow. Even she knew that any kiss was not proper. He flushed, obviously knowing what she was thinking. Then he shrugged.

“I used to dream about you on watch. Every night, I would stand at the helm and dream about you beside me. Or perhaps, the two of us at the prow.”

She smiled, caught by the image. But she had two brothers, so she knew that his fantasies had not been nearly so tame. And that, of course, made her smile even more. It was a wonder that this man desired her enough to dream of her.

“We weren’t just standing, were we?” she asked.

He shook his head, his gaze wonderfully dark and intense. “Come to my ship with me, Wind.”

She blinked. “What?”

He shrugged. “The ship that would have been mine. The one that I would have captained. I want to show it to you.”

“I would like that very much,” she said, “but—”

He kissed her then—swift and hard—effectively swallowing her objection. Then he waved to a nearby hack that she hadn’t noticed. Before she could do more than gasp, he was tugging her inside the dark carriage and settling her close to his side.

She thought of Damon, of the gaming hell, and all that she ought to do. And then he touched her waist, his fingers quick and deft, as they caressed her up and down. All other thoughts fled.