A Gentleman Undone (40 page)

“So have you done to me. Do you want me?”

“Yes.” A great shudder seized her.

“And so do I want you. Are you mine, now?” Urgency burned bright in his eyes.

One word:
yes
. One scant syllable, but it might as well have been an operatic aria with multiple occurrences of high C, so absolutely was it beyond her power to voice.

Instead she gave him inarticulate cries, eager and savage, and she thrashed in his hands so he could know how he pleased her. Crisis was within sight, then within reach, then it was upon her, blinding her to the picture she made with him, shutting out whatever thing he was murmuring, robbing her of every sense and setting her ablaze like a pagan pyre.

When the flames died down she was limp, his arms across her chest and waist to keep her from collapsing. She opened her eyes and he’d been just waiting for that: he shifted his hold on her, arms behind her knees and shoulders, and lifted her up and carried her to the bed. Then he shucked his clothes, finally, and climbed in beside her.

“You’re a wicked man, Will Blackshear.” She could almost blush, remembering the look in his eyes as he’d watched himself drive her all out of her mind. “You try to act the gentleman, but you’ve got sin in your blood and your bones.”

He ought to reach for her now, roll onto her or pull her on top of him. She’d seen when he’d stripped that he was ready.

But he only smiled, a thin smile that went away as quickly as it came. His eyes grew grave and looked past her.

She’d said the wrong thing.
Wicked
. He had reason to believe he was worse than that, and she’d reminded him. And suddenly she felt able, as she had not that afternoon, to hear what he had to say.

She turned on her side. Her right hand reached out to take hold of his arm. “You can tell me now.” She waited until his eyes went dark with comprehension. “Tell me, Will. I want to know.”

F
OR AN
instant his every muscle tensed with the urge to flee. At least he ought to put out the candles. If her face paled in horror as he spoke, that might be more than he could bear to watch.

But of course her face wouldn’t do that. She never did wear her sentiments there. She lay on her side watching him with that unreadable falcon stare. Was that better than horror, or worse?

He filled his lungs. “It has to do with Talbot, the widow’s husband. I expect you’ve guessed that.”

She nodded. Her fingers flexed delicately on his arm.

He was going to tell her. God help him, though his love for her could meet with no answer, though they could not look forward to a future of relying upon one another, bearing one another’s burdens, being one another’s shelter from the world’s cold winds, he was going to tell her everything.

“He might have died in any case, Mr. Talbot.” So had the doctor said. There was no reason to doubt it. He fixed his gaze on the ceiling, where a crack in the plaster had worked itself from one corner of the room to the center.

“You blame yourself, though.” No warmth, no condemnation. She was simply stating a fact.

“I oughtn’t to have moved him.” He could feel some great sagging surrender at his core as every memory flooded in. Sights and sounds and scents and crushing desperation. “He’d been caught in a charge of cavalry and had damage to his spine, and …” He sucked in another breath, forcefully this time, as though he’d come up from three minutes underwater. “And he hadn’t died. He lay in the mud among corpses, in horrific pain, for hours before I found him, and more hours after.”

He threw her a look. Still the blank stare. One could believe she heard such stories every time she took a man to bed.

“And it was night. I was exhausted, and I couldn’t persuade any of the medical staff to carry him to the hospital. I ran out of hope that anyone would stop to help him, so finally I carried him myself, and … I made things worse with his spine. By the time the surgeon saw him he couldn’t move his limbs.”

Here was where she might have attempted absolution:
Surely anyone in your situation would have done the same. Surely all hope for him was already lost
. But no sound came from the presence at his right side but her steady breathing.

And God help him again, only now could he see just how badly he’d hoped she would bathe him in sympathy and tell him, with the full force of her deliberating mind, that for him to blame himself was irrational.

But it wasn’t. That truth thudded deep inside him like an underwater bell. She couldn’t pardon him any more than he could pardon himself.

“Go on,” she said, because her sharp falcon eyes read him and she knew there was more.

He took one more breath, to dive down again. “I carried him to three different field hospitals because I thought … I was so tired, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hoped another surgeon might give me a different answer. I didn’t want to give up.”

“Because you knew he had a wife and child.”

“Yes.”

“And because you hoped to undo the wrong you’d done in moving him.”

“Yes.” His voice came out raw and ragged, exactly as it had been that night. Memory had its claws in him and was dragging him back there; he could taste the sour torment of too many hours without water. “Most of all, though, because I’d promised him he’d be all right, and he trusted my word.”

“How did it end?” Calm and direct as a corporal interrogating a prisoner.

“I couldn’t do him any good.” That awful, awful sense of uselessness, helplessness, dropped back in to wrap him like a shroud. “I couldn’t even get him opium. I only dragged him about, prolonging his agony for hours. He ended by begging for a bullet to the head.”

A short silence as she absorbed this. “Did you oblige him?”

“We didn’t carry rifles, in our regiment. I should have had to use a musket, and I …”
I was fastidious in how I murdered the man
. “I used my hands.”

Another silence, this one long enough that he must finally turn his head to look at her. The only mark in her countenance was a thoughtful crease in her brow. “Will you show me how?”

Good God. The darkest deed of his life and her first concern was with the mechanics. She needed to fill in the outline his story made, or perhaps she meant to make use of the knowledge someday.

No matter. He’d chosen to confess himself to her, when he might have waited until he’d met a lady with a warm, sentimental nature. Patience and a hopeful disposition. All those qualities he couldn’t seem to want anymore.

He found her hands and brought them to his throat, feeling for the right place to set her thumb. “There’s a vein.” She frowned, faintly, watching the placement of her hands. “If you press on it you can stop the flow of blood. Then everything ends.”

Her eyes, empty and glittering, came again to his face. Her hands stayed where they were. For an instant it seemed possible she might—and would he resist her, if she did? Might he make that final surrender, and let her relieve him of all his burdens for the rest of time?

But she didn’t. She took her hands back, and this time
neither one settled on his arm. Both lay curled on the pillow under her chin. She didn’t speak.

He oughtn’t to have told her. Or he ought to have told her long ago. Before he’d touched her, pleasured her, fitted his body to hers.

“I wish you would speak, Lydia.” If there was a way to say that without sounding pathetic, he didn’t know it. He felt hollow, unmoored, lying beside her without the least idea of her thoughts. “I never could read you. I don’t know … I’ve no idea what you want, now. Whether you want me to …”
Help you dress and hire a hackney to take you home. Apologize for having lain with you. Shut my mouth and just go to sleep
.

Two silent seconds passed. Then she rose up and threw one knee over him. Her palms sank into the mattress at either side of his shoulders and her eyes stayed fast on his. “Fuck me,” she said. “I want you to fuck me.”

He recoiled to his core. To do this now, to follow so grim and solemn a confession with carnal enjoyment, would profane his last remnants of honor. “I can’t.” Could she really not grasp that? “Not after what I’ve just told you.”

“
Now
you mean to be delicate?” Her eyes shone cold and accusing in the dim light. “None of what you’ve told me is new. All of this was true the first time you kissed me.” She brought her hips down until she sat astride him, her wet warmth a taunt to all his pretensions of decency. “It was true when you bedded me at Chiswell. When you put your mouth on me. When you demanded I bring my whole self to bed with you. When I knelt for you in the hallway at Oldfield’s, and when I knelt for you in front of that mirror right there.” She was moving, barely, against him, and damn him to Hell, he was getting hard again. “Whatever you think must prevent you now, surely ought to have prevented you then.”

“I ought to have told you, I know, and given you the choice.” His whole body was declaring mutiny: his hands drifted up to settle on her arms. “But I couldn’t resist you. I can’t resist you. Even now.” There was his frailty, laid out before her.

“You’re not so honorable as you’d like to be.” Her hand left the mattress to feel for his cock—shamefully, indecently hard—and she slid it inside.

Of all the occasions when he’d tried to stop her—how many times had she had to hear
Lydia, this isn’t what I want
?—surely this was the occasion when he ought to insist, before he could drown in self-disgust. Instead he arched up into her and groaned aloud. Sensation aside, there was a bone-deep comfort in knowing she still wanted him. Knowing that, despite the worst he could tell her, she still had this use for him. A woman of kindness and patience and virtue never would have done.

Her hands braced herself on the mattress again and her icy gaze sank nearer. “You’re not a good man, Blackshear,” she whispered.

“I know.” It felt like a pound of flesh given up. He closed his eyes.

“You break your promises and you fuck other men’s women and you haven’t even a soul to your name.”

A shaft of hot, grief-tainted pleasure stabbed through him. “I know.” He jerked his chin in a nod.

“You went to bed with me in the guise of an honorable man, but you never were.”

He shook his head, jaw clenched tight. He’d betrayed her. He’d betrayed himself. He could make no earthly defense.

“You threw away your soul when you stopped that man’s blood and you can never, never have it back again.”

“I know.” One more pound of flesh torn away. He’d never wanted to own that truth aloud. He caught his
breath on another spasm of sensation, in spite of the despair, and shook his head side to side.
Stop. I can’t bear any more of this
. Those were the words he ought to say but he’d forgot how to form them. He opened his eyes.

And he knew there’d have been no point in asking for mercy. It was a word with no meaning to the creature whose gaze met his.

She stared down at him, his judge and his ravisher, appalling as the eagle who’d feasted every day on Prometheus’s liver, and he as powerless as that Titan, chained to the rock, rent open, his darkest, most unspeakable secrets laid bare to her view.

Her eyes hardened. Her lips pressed tight. She leaned an inch nearer. “I love you,” she breathed, just loud enough for him to hear.

He gasped, one great rush of sustaining air. And he seized her with unyielding hands, and rolled her beneath him and drove himself into her, into her truth and her terrible strength and the pitiless love that was his only redemption in this world.

And came, claiming her, giving himself up to her, a woman so beautifully broken she could love a soulless man.

Chapter Twenty-one