Hadrian (30 page)

He felt the shift in her, felt the first, piercing light of truth dawn, and then she began to cry.

“Not his—not that part,” she got out. “You’re saying he jabbed at me with his fingers, not his—only his damned infernal fingers.”

“You were violated just the same,” Hadrian said, and in a way, it was worse that Avie had suffered confusion as well as assault, though perhaps the courts wouldn’t have termed such an attack. “Though excessive drink might have been responsible for the fact that he was unable to violate you with the part of him that could have got a child on you.”

Or a terrible, fatal, disfiguring disease
and
a child.

First came a hitch of her shoulders, a crack in her emotional dam, and then she cried in silent, wracking sobs. Finally, she succumbed to the noisy, undignified tears of great grief.

Through it all, Hadrian held her and prayed that knowing the truth of what had happened—parsing through it deliberately, searching for facts and conclusions she’d not been strong enough or well informed enough to face alone—would contribute to her peace more profoundly than all the kindly silences she’d endured in the past twelve years.

“I must be heavy.” Her voice was husky with tears.

“You are perfect.” But when she levered off of him, Hadrian let her go—difficult as that was.

“We’ve tarried up here too long,” Avis said, dragging the sleeves of her dress up over her arms. “I hope you can do something with my hair, Hadrian. I can’t present myself looking like this.”

Hadrian sat up, abruptly hating the dress, and hating worse Avis’s prosaic tone of voice. “This changes everything, my dear.”

“It changes nothing.” Avis wiggled her bodice into order with alarming detachment. “I was a fallen woman this morning, I’m a fallen woman now, except that you’ve at least shown me what pleasure there is to be had in my lapse and helped me clarify a few details of my past. Have you seen my pocket comb?”

He passed it to her, trying to think around the frustration roaring through him.

“Avie, this hasn’t been just a pleasant dalliance between a pair of sophisticated adults out to ease their mutual boredom. You offend me, God, and yourself if you imply that.”

Avis set the comb to the side. “Perhaps I’ll offend Him less do I finish dressing, for you seem disinclined to put yourself to rights.”

Enough was enough. “Avis Portmaine, this role sits ill with you. I can understand that you’re upset, and you deserve time to find your balance, but I took your virginity, and I will see the matter put to rights.”

“The matter?” Her tone was curious, merely curious, but in her eyes, Hadrian saw something indecipherable and pained. “There is no
matter
, Hadrian. All the world thought me unchaste before this, now I am unchaste in truth. Reality has become consistent with perception. You’ll have to do up my dress.”

Fuck your dress.

“I wasn’t Rue’s first,” Hadrian said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be damned if the only woman to allow me to be her first will yawn and stroll down the hill without at least promising me she’ll honor our betrothal. I don’t care if you want a perpetual engagement, or you set a date five years hence, Avis. In some fashion, you will acknowledge that we belong to each other.”

That little confession at least got her attention.

“I’m sorry, Hadrian,” she said, her tone softening. “You made a betrothal announcement without my permission. I am under no obligation to—”

He assembled his attire, his movements jerky as he rooted among the clothes and blankets.

“What’s this?” He held up a small piece of paper that certainly hadn’t fallen from
his
pockets.

“That is mine!” Avis tried to snatch the note from him, but he had it in a firm grasp. The look on her face wasn’t polite, or indifferent, or even sad. It was
desperate
, into the nearer reaches of unhinged
.

He surrendered her property to her rather than endure the sight of her torment.

“I suspect whatever is in that note affects us both, Avie, as much as what happened on this blanket has affected us both. I’m asking you to share this burden with me.”

The day was surpassingly beautiful, but Hadrian endured a taste of hell when Avis turned from him. As a vicar, he’d learned to deal in platitudes and appearances, and maybe a better gentleman than he would accede to whatever drove Avis now.

He could not accede, could not accommodate, could not
pretend
.

Perhaps Avis could no longer pretend, either. She put her face in her hands for a long moment, the picture of feminine torment.

“Avie, you’ve endured undeserved misery and injustice, year after year, and I cannot bear that you should endure it alone any longer.” He reached toward her, but let his hand drop rather than inflict an unwelcome touch on her. “Avie, I am begging you. What is in that note?”

She raised her face from her hands, her expression blank and eerily reminiscent of the morning Hadrian had found her after Collins’s assault.

“I had intended to betray you, you know,” she said. “I’d trade on your affection for me, exorcise a demon or two, then set you free. I would use you. When you demanded a recounting from me, I should have refused, but I used you for that too.”

Collins had used her. Hadrian could see her drawing the parallel. He brushed her hair back over her shoulder when he wanted to lash his arms around her.

“Collins was a selfish monster, my lady. You are hurting and overwhelmed, and you have every right to be furious, but you have used no one.”

She smoothed the note flat against her skirt.

“I intended to use you, and for that I apologize. Despite my behavior this morning, I care for you very much, Hadrian Bothwell. Please recall, on some future night when you regret your public declaration bitterly, when you loathe the memory of this day, that I tried to spare you.”

Avis passed Hadrian the bit of foolscap. She’d been to the sea as a child, stood in the frigid surf and been pounded by roaring, unstoppable waves, one after the other, and even the might of the ocean did not compare to the emotions swamping her now.

Relief was among them. Relief, to know the exact metes and bounds of Hart Collins’s crime, and a towering satisfaction, to learn that he’d had to resort to an improvised and imperfect sort of violation. As consolations went, that ought not to have mattered, but to grasp exactly what had happened, to sort causes and effects, had unknotted all manner of anxieties.

Another wave slapped her with grief, for the ignorant girl she’d been, for the precious, tenacious friendship Hadrian offered, friendship she had trespassed on as far as she could stand to.

Shame swirled through her too, because she’d planned this assignation with cold calculation, the way a master of hounds assesses footing, distance, and speed when approaching an obstacle on horseback. She’d intended to use Hadrian’s attentions to vault over some yawning emotional incompleteness, and then gallop on her way.

As Hart Collins had galloped off. The comparison nearly choked her.

Sheer mortification lurked beneath the surface too, because even Hadrian should not have to know the intimate details of what had transpired twelve years ago—more of the details.

And rage. She was well and truly ruined, had been for years, but the day’s developments revealed to her a fraction of the joy and pleasure her ruination had denied her.

None of which was Hadrian Bothwell’s fault.

She waited while Hadrian read the note, but being Hadrian, he had to read it aloud.

Tell Bothwell that marriage to the whore of Cumberland will make his family’s title a laughingstock and Landover synonymous with debauchery and sin—assuming he survives the ordeal.

“Where did you find this?” His tone was clipped to within a hairsbreadth of murder.

“Can you at least put on some clothes while we discuss it?” At least cover up the bounty Avis would never plunder again?

She added a perverse gratitude to her list of emotions—gratitude that she’d plundered Hadrian’s treasures once—for grief and gratitude were sides of the same coin.

“Help me,” he said, holding up his shirt. “I’ve breeches somewhere in this mess.”

Silently, they got him put to rights, and then Avis sat with her back to him so he could do up her hooks. She presumed further by using the pocket comb on his hair, but didn’t ask Hadrian to tend to her similarly.

“Where did you find this note, Avie?” How stern he sounded, the wrath of God come to Cumberland.

“In my sitting room when we returned from church.”

“You’ve carried that note around for two days?” The rest of the question hung in the crisp afternoon air:
Without telling me
?

“I’ve received other notes,” she said, finger-combing her hair into three skeins. “I doubt it will be the last.”

His brows knit, suggesting even the wrath of God was subject to puzzlement. “Is the handwriting the same as the others?”

Her hair was a right disaster. “I beg your pardon?”

“The handwriting on this one.” Hadrian fussed with his cuff-links when Avis knew he wanted to bellow and shout and stomp about. “Was it the same as the others?”

“I don’t—well, yes, the same as some of the others, as best I recall.”

“You’ve a bloody collection?”

Bloody,
from Hadrian Bothwell—though his word choice was apt. “Yes, Hadrian, I do. A collection going back years.”

“Oh, Avie.” The wrath and sternness went out of him, replaced by sorrow? Disappointment? Very likely, the emotional seas buffeted him too.

His arms came around her and he knelt up, folding his body over hers.

“You haven’t said a word to your brothers, have you, or to Harold, or the magistrate?”

His embrace felt heavenly, but his protectiveness would be his undoing. “What is the point? Advertising these notes would only serve to further my shame.”

He should have repaired to his side of the blanket, and then disappeared down the hillside. Hadrian was bright. The magnitude of the mess that was Avis’s life would soon become apparent to him.

And yet, his arms were still around her, and the damned tears crowded Avis’s throat again.

“Hadrian, I can’t—You shouldn’t feel as if…” A shudder passed through her, the result of tears that would not remain unshed.

“No more of this nonsense, Avie,” Hadrian admonished as he lay back and drew her against his side. “No more bearing up heroically on your own, no more keeping secrets, no more soldiering on to protect everyone else’s sensibilities. You have me now, and I will be damned if you’ll push me away again.”

Stubborn, awful, wonderful man. “But that note—”

“Threatens my life,” Hadrian finished for her, proving he’d comprehended every vile word. “And obliterates your right to happiness as my wife. As a work of nastiness, it’s brilliant. You will show me the others, and we’ll find the culprit and lay information.”

“Being nasty isn’t a crime.” They would not lay information.

“Threatening a man’s life might be,” Hadrian countered. “Publishing lies regarding a woman’s good name surely is.”

“They aren’t lies. I’m not chaste, and nobody would have believed me had I insisted I was before today.”

Hadrian gently shut her jaw with one finger. “That is a matter for another argument, Avie Portmaine. You will honor our betrothal now more than ever, for somebody means you harm in your own home. You need the protection my name can afford.”

She pushed away from him and sat up, because next his hand would start up with those caresses, and Avis’s skirts would soon be around her waist and her wits missing altogether.

“You are wrong, Hadrian. This note was delivered directly
after
you afforded me the protection of your name, as you put it. Engagement to you won’t keep me safe. It will anger those who think I ought to retire to Blessings in permanent obscurity and you in harm’s way.”

Hadrian sat up too and scooted around behind her.

“Good. If they get angry enough, they’ll do something obvious, and we’ll know who threatens you. Hold still.”

Avis wanted to argue with him, because this degree of zeal had likely sent countless good men into peril, and yet, his confidence fanned the small, uncertain flame of hope that even after twelve years, Avis had been unable to extinguish.

Hope that she could be free of the past.

Hope that her neighbors, people she’d grown up with, weren’t as mean and judgmental as their behavior suggested they were.

Hope that Avis’s family could someday be whole. Vim checked on her, Ben looked after Alex, and Ben and Vim occasionally crossed paths. Nonetheless, their strongest connection had become shared avoidance of the past—and each other.

And now her stubborn hope was complicated by a private, wonderful joy.

“I liked it.” She spoke barely above a whisper, when Hadrian put the last pin in her hair and drew her back against his chest.

“Beg pardon?”

“You’ll mess up my hair if you keep cuddling me like this.”

“Then I’ll tidy you up again. What did you like?”