She could not have gone home.
She should have gone somewhere else, then. Anywhere else. But she had not been thinking. She had been acting purely from instinct. And she did not have the will or the energy to go somewhere else now. She leaned her arms along the roof, as he had done on another occasion, and rested her face on her hands as he had done then.
Except that then she had known him only as Geraint Penderyn, Earl of Wyvern. She had not known . . .
But her mind shied away from what she had not known.
She knew he would find her there. Perhaps that was why she had come, though she wished herself a thousand miles away. She had never been one to shirk reality or to avoid confrontations.
A confrontation was inevitable.
She did not hear him coming, but she was not surprised to hear his voice close behind her.
“Marged,” he said.
“Go away,” she said without raising her head. The confrontation might be inevitable, but there was no reason why she should not fight the inevitable.
“No,” he said. “I am not going anywhere.”
He was speaking Welsh, she realized. In Rebecca’s voice. She shuddered. “Then I will go away,” she said.
“No.” His voice was soft, but she knew he meant it. He was behind her. A quite solid building was in front of her. He was not going to allow her past. Well, she had known it was inevitable. But she was not going to lift her head or turn to him.
“It was rape,” she said.
“No, Marged,” he said.
“I did not consent to lie with the Earl of Wyvern,” she said.
“I was Rebecca,” he said—and oh God, he was Rebecca. Why had she never realized it was the same voice, speaking a different language? “You consented to lie with Rebecca, Marged.”
“Rebecca was a mask,” she said. “There is no such person.”
“You always knew there was a man behind the mask,” he said.
“But I did not know it was you. I hate you. You know I hate you.”
“No,” he said. “When I asked you yesterday to marry me, Marged, you almost said yes. I saw the tears in your eyes and the agony behind the tears. You want to hate me, but you cannot.”
“I hate you,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. “Give me the reasons.”
There were too many to number. “You killed Eurwyn,” she said.
“No, Marged,” he said. “There was a whole tragic set of circumstances there and they took the life of a courageous man who fought for his people. I was only one link in that chain. I accept responsibility for my ignorance and neglect, but I did not murder him. Does your hatred rest solely on that?”
It did. She did not want to think of the rest. It was too painful.
“Marged?”
“I thought you had come to apologize to me,” she cried, surprising even herself by the passion in her voice. “I thought you had come to reassure me, to tell me that you loved me. But all you could do was talk with Dada and looked me up and down as if I had forgotten to put my clothes on.”
He had nothing to say for a moment. “Ah, Marged,” he said, “I was such an insecure, guilty, embarrassed young puppy. You looked so proud and so scornful and I was so terribly ashamed.”
“And then you went away!” All the pain of it was back again, as if she was still sixteen and wore all her emotions on the outside. “You just went away without a word. You never wrote. You stayed away for ten whole years. And when I wrote to you—twice!—about Eurwyn, you did not even reply. You will never know what it cost me to write those letters, to write to you when I had married Eurwyn. You did not even acknowledge receiving them.”
“Because I did not, Marged.” There was pain in his voice too now. “I went away with raw emotions. I did not know who I was. The only anchor of my existence—my mother—was dead and I had made a total disaster of my first love affair. I felt unwanted here and yet did not know where else I was to belong. I only knew it was not here, though my heart ached for this place and these people. And for you. I was too young to deal with the pain. I thought I could end it by cutting it off instead of suffering through it. So I put it all behind me. When I inherited, I appointed Harley to run the estate for me. He had strict instructions to keep everything concerning the estate from me, and my secretary in England had similar instructions to deal with any correspondence from Wales without showing it to me. I thought it had worked. I thought I had forgotten Wales. And you. I was wrong on both counts.”
