Jess Michaels (16 page)

He hesitated and she shifted as she watched his mind work.

His voice grew softer. “Now, looking at you, seeing you use the past and realizing it is a lie…I wonder now if I did know the truth about why you left me standing in the rain, waiting for you to arrive and run away with me.”

“Why question the past?” she asked, her shoulders beginning to shake even as she tried to stop it. “Why revisit something that only caused us both great pain?”

“Because I want to know,” he growled. “I want to know why you didn’t come. I want to hear it from your lips.”

“No.” She shook her head. The pressure was almost unbearable, the memories struggled to break free, and the pain was returning to stab at her. She had overcome this! She didn’t want to go back. “
No
.”

He grasped her shoulders. “Tell me, Cassandra. If you want this to be done, if you want this to be over, then tell me the truth and then let us be done with it.”

She shook her head. It wouldn’t end with the truth. A new batch of questions and hurt would only just begin.

His lips pursed in utter frustration. “
Why
didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you even care enough to show up and tell me face-to-face that you had changed your mind and desired another? Why did you throw away everything we had promised? Built? Dreamed?”

She lifted her chin. In all the years since that night, she had never been ashamed of what she had endured. She refused to be ashamed now.

“You want to know the truth?” she hissed, feeling the blood heat her cheeks. “You want to hear it so bloody much, Nathan?”

“Yes!” he shouted.

“I was attacked, Nathan. I was raped! Is that what you want to hear? Is that what you want to know?”

N
athan released Cassandra’s shoulders and staggered back away from her trembling form. His ears were ringing and his stomach clenched and roiled as he digested those words she had said. Those horrible, horrible words. The ones he instantly knew were true as surely as he knew his own name.

“Attacked?” His voice was hardly audible, even in the quiet room. He swallowed hard before he could continue. “Raped?”

She nodded, her eyes still turned away from his. Then she slowly faced him, meeting his gaze head on. Although pain at the memories he had forced her to relive lingered in her green eyes, there was no hint of shame sparkling there. Not one iota of self-blame.

Her strength awed him, silencing him for a full minute as he merely stared at her.

“Tell me,” he finally whispered when he could force himself to speak.

He reached for her, but she moved away, refusing his comfort, refusing his touch. He flinched as he thought of how he had forced it on her, how he had held her against him more than once. The truth certainly explained her strong reaction when he held her captive the day after they made love. Why she struggled so much when he caught her wrist a moment ago.

He had made her think of horrible things, of a horrible man who had taken her body against her will.

She swallowed, her delicate throat working with the effort. “What is there to tell, Nathan?” Her voice started out hoarse but slowly gained in volume and strength. “I was on my way to meet you. It was late, it was dark. I was alone. A man stepped from the shadows alongside the road.”

Nathan sucked in a breath and shut his eyes as he tried not to picture the horror of what she was describing. She said the words so plainly, a recitation that could just as easily be a list for her grocer. Until she paused and exhaled a breath like a sob. Only then did he feel how much the memories haunted her.

“At first I wasn’t afraid. It was Herstale, after all, a place I had felt safe all my life. I asked if he was lost—” She stopped and her fingers clenched at her sides.

“You don’t have to—” Nathan began, wanting to know,
but unable to force her to relive this pain when he saw her struggling.

She shook her head. “No. Now that I have started, you might as well know it all.”

She drew a long breath and then continued, “He told me he was exactly where he needed to be. I saw his intent in his eyes and I tried to run, but he caught me. He was far stronger than I. I screamed, but no one was around to hear.” She clenched her fists as she glanced downward. “I fought, but he took what he wanted. He held me until the next day, when he let me go.”

“The next day?” Nathan repeated.

She lifted her gaze. “Yes.”

She offered no other explanation, but he did not need it. It was plain what she had gone through in those long, horrible hours.

“Why didn’t you find me? Tell me?” he whispered, longing to smooth her hair away from her face, to hold her, but her body language warned him away. Her stiff posture, her ramrod straight shoulders, they were a shield.

From him.

She shook her head. “I was bedridden for days afterward,” she whispered. “By the time I was
able
to speak to anyone, you were long gone. Off to India to stew on your betrayal.”

Nathan flinched. Jesus, what he had done to her.

“If I had known—” he began.

She cut him off with a sharp glance. “You
should
have known, Nathan. You should have known that I wouldn’t merely aban
don you without saying even a word of goodbye. You should have had that faith in me.”

Her direct statement cut into Nathan’s heart like a dagger. He had no words to give, nothing to explain or excuse himself. All he could do was stammer, “I-I am sorry, Cassandra.”

But the words were empty and meaningless.

She shook her head. “You don’t know how much I truly do appreciate that after all these years. But you needn’t say it. There was nothing in that horrible night that I am thankful for, but there is something to be said for realizing that you did not truly love me. Love involves faith. Withholding judgment. You didn’t do that. For some reason, you couldn’t.”

She turned away and moved toward the door. This time he didn’t stop her, even though he wanted to so desperately. But he was frozen by her confession. By her words. Her accusations. Her cool statement that he hadn’t loved her, or at least not enough.

Here he had spent the past few years believing the same thing of her.

She stopped at the entryway and her shoulders rolled forward in emotion and defeat. “We were never meant to be, Nathan. In the end, that would have been true whether I reached you that night or not. When I was
waylaid
, it only underscored that fact.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder and her gaze was so filled with sadness and heartache that he could scarcely bear it. But he looked. He owed her that much. He owed her so much more.

“I’m leaving now,” she whispered, turning the door handle. “I won’t be back. And I ask you not to come to me anymore. We’ve both suffered enough, I think.”

Then she slipped away, leaving Nathan alone in the empty room. Alone with his thoughts. With her words.

And he cast up his accounts into a waste bin.

Cassandra was in the carriage when she let the tears fall. She had been holding them back, choking on the pain, since Nathan began his relentless quest for the truth. Now they trickled down her cheeks as she lay on her side across the carriage seat and sobbed.

She had never told anyone the truth about her rape. Not even her parents or the doctor they had summoned when she arrived on their doorstep, battered and sobbing, once her captor released her. All she had said, over and over, was that Nathan hadn’t been the one to harm her. After all, she had assumed the man she loved…the man who loved her, would arrive to find out what had happened to keep her from their meeting. She hadn’t wanted her father to turn the dogs loose on him.

But he hadn’t come.

Her parents had known she was hurt, known someone had done
something
to her. But they had been more concerned about helping her heal than uncovering the details. People of their stature and class had little luck at finding justice, so they often didn’t bother to seek it.

After she had lain crying for a few long moments, Cassan
dra straightened up. Enough tears had been shed about that night. Ultimately, she had found the strength to overcome the horror. She had even become a mistress and forced herself to feel pleasure again. To remember that a man’s touch could be good, could be beautiful.

She had overcome the past. No one could drag her back to that place. Not even Nathan.

In the end, the truth had set her free. If nothing else could stop him from pushing her, forcing her to his will, it was evident her confession had finally done that. He was so horrified, so stricken by the knowledge of the truth that she had faith he wouldn’t pursue her again.

So it was over.

She smoothed her skirt as her carriage pulled to a stop in front of her pretty townhome. It was over. She had what she wanted.

Now she just had to forget about Nathan and move on with her life.

Nathan dug his heels into his horse’s side, urging the animal to ride faster through the streets of London. After he was sick, he had fled the house, just wanting to run. Far away. And his horse was up to the task, darting around the traffic of the darkened streets, his hooves clopping on the cobblestones.

But the wind on his face, the smell of soot, the freedom of riding…none of those things could make Nathan forget why he was running.

Cassandra’s confession had rocked him to his very core and
upended every belief that had driven him for the past four years.

Why hadn’t he known that she had been attacked?

The events of that night ran through his head as he dodged an overturned apple cart and steered his horse through an alleyway.

He had gone to meet Cassandra, and he had waited all night in the pouring rain for her to arrive. When he returned home, his father had been waiting for him, sitting in the foyer with a letter in his hand. He had berated Nathan, calling him all manner of fool for throwing away his future for a common tailor’s daughter.

At that point, Nathan had been ready to agree. It was hard not to when he was soaking wet and abandoned to the cold light of dawn. But perhaps, once he was dry and warm again, he might have considered the many reasons Cassandra would stay away from a meeting they had planned and anticipated for so long.

Except then his father had given him the letter. Something the Marquis had said was intercepted between Cassandra and another man. It had been in her hand, Nathan would have recognized it anywhere, for they had kept contact through love letters.

Even now, riding through London,
knowing
that the letter had been some kind of manipulation, Nathan still felt the anger—and the pain—just as keenly as he had all those years ago.

And he had believed it. When his father suggested time away from London, time away from England entirely, he had been
more than happy to board the next vessel to India and lose himself in spices and drink and the foreign life he had led.

He jolted as he turned his horse one more time and found he had, without thinking, steered the animal to his father’s townhome in London. Lights glittered from the large, clean windows. The family would likely be having supper, sharing wine and stories just as they had his entire life.

They would welcome him in, but he didn’t want welcome and family comfort. He wanted the truth. The truth he had a sneaking suspicion only his father could provide.

A servant met him as he brought his horse up sharply before the marble steps that led to the front door. Nathan tossed him the reins without comment and stalked to the house. He pushed the front door open before the butler could reach it.

“Good evening, my lord,” the servant stammered.

“Where is the family?” Nathan asked, but it was an empty question, for he was already making his way to the dining room where he could hear their voices and the clink of silverware and crystal.

“My lord, I can announce you, my lord—” the butler said, jogging to keep up with Nathan’s long strides.

But Nathan had already slammed the door open, letting it hit the wall behind it with a satisfying, jarring smack.

The family turned at the loud noise and Nathan finally stopped his forward motion. His father sat at one end of the table, his mother at the other. His sisters sat together on one side and his place was empty on the opposite one, waiting for him to join the family tableau.

And it was somehow tempting to do so. To try to forget that everything in the past four years of his life had been built on a lie. A lie his father had perhaps been a part of.

But he couldn’t forget. He needed the whole truth. Everything.

“Nathan,” his mother said, getting to her feet and moving toward him. Her face was lined with concern the closer she got. “What is it? What is the meaning of barging in here with such dramatics?”

“Tell Adelaide and Lydia to go up to their rooms to finish their dinners,” he replied, meeting his mother’s eyes.

Was
she
involved in whatever trickery had been employed to make him lose faith in Cassandra? She had despised the idea of him marrying someone so common as much as his father had.

“Nathan?” she said softly, grasping his arm.

“Do it,” he said, forcing himself to lower his voice.

She glanced down the table at his father. The Marquis hadn’t gotten up, but his face had paled, almost like he wasn’t surprised to see Nathan in this state. Nathan flinched at the guilty expression he had never seen his father possess. It was hard to look at when coupled with the gauntness illness had brought.

“Lydia, Adelaide,” his father said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. “Do as your brother suggests.”

He motioned to a servant to take the girls’ plates.

“But—” Adelaide began, even as she pushed to her feet, her eyes wide and filled with fear and curiosity. Lydia rose
beside her, clutching her elder sister’s arm as she stared from her father to her brother.

Nathan shot Adelaide a glare that silenced her immediately and the two girls left the room with only quick glances over their shoulders. Once the servants in the room had followed and shut the door behind them, Nathan moved forward, his focus on his father.

“You gave me a letter,” he said with no preamble.

His mother moved to sit beside his father and she looked at Nathan with confusion. “A letter? What letter are you talking about?”

“He knows.” Nathan speared his father with a stare and his father did not look away. “He knows what I am referring to. That night, four years ago, you gave me a letter that your spies had supposedly intercepted from Cassandra.”

His mother flinched at the mention of her name. “Oh Nathan, are you still obsessed with that woman? I thought we discussed this, that you understood how wrong she was for you.”

Nathan shook his head. “Everything I believed in regards to her was based on a lie and it was a lie
he
handed over to me. Answer me, Father.”