Do you know, Your Grace, how my son’s face was scarred?
He was attacked from behind, cudgeled over the head, and woke to the knife on his cheek.
The man responsible has not been imprisoned.
That meant…my God, it meant…
“No,” she said again, louder this time. “No, I will not believe it.”
“You will not believe what?” He was before her, his expression fierce, jaw rigid, eyes burning with intensity. But when he took her face in his hands, it was with the gentlest of touches. “Tell me you didn’t know. Tell me you didn’t know he would send someone after me.”
“I…” she began, only to falter. She reached up, stroking slowly over the vicious scar. A scar he wore because of her. But his explanation did not make sense. “I never told my father, Clay. I never told anyone what we had planned. Even when you didn’t come for me and my mother’s carriage found me, it was because she was traveling to visit my Aunt Charity and not because they knew I was eloping with you.”
He stilled. “Of course they knew, Ara. They knew because you confessed everything to them. It was all there in your letter. Perhaps you have forgotten what you wrote in the years that passed since, but I can assure you I have not.”
Icy tendrils of dread shot through her. Nothing made sense. And yet it did. “Clay, I never wrote you a letter. How did you receive it?”
His lip curled. “The man who attacked me from behind while I waited for you was kind enough to slip it inside my coat.”
Dear God.
Her mind struggled to comprehend the gravity of what all these unfettered revelations meant. “But you were not there when I arrived, Clay. I waited for hours.”
She wanted to believe he had been there, that he had gone to meet her with every intention of making her his wife, just as they had planned. But if that was the truth, it also meant he had been savagely attacked and taken away before she had arrived. And worse, that it had all happened because of her, that her own father was responsible. The dread blossomed and grew, spreading in her chest, lacing around her heart.
“You went to meet me?” he rasped, his voice low, redolent with a host of emotions she could not identify.
There was no way to answer other than honestly. “I waited and waited for you.”
“Ara.” He closed his eyes for a moment, wincing as if he were in physical agony. “Bloody hell, Ara. All this time…all these years, I thought…the damned letter said you felt guilty and ashamed, that you did not wish to shame your parents or your family. It said you never wanted to see me again, that you were going to marry someone from your station, that you had seen the error in your judgment. That I was beneath you.”
Each sentence he uttered was worse than the last, sinking into her with the painful proficiency of an assassin’s blade.Dear God, little wonder he had loathed her on sight. He had spent all these years thinking she had jilted him because she was ashamed of him, that she had been complicit in her father’s plan to have him attacked.
She caressed his scarred cheek slowly, tenderly. “I would never say those things. I never did. The letter was not from me. Tell me what happened, Clay. Please, I need to know.”
His eyes slid closed once more. A long exhalation escaped him, as if in preparation. When his eyes opened again, they glinted with so much naked pain she almost had to look away. “I was waiting for you. I was early, and it was dark. I heard a footfall behind me, and then pain exploded in my head. When I came to, my hands were bound, and then he was carving my face.”
“No, Clay.” The pitiful denial was all she could manage to say, and it was not a denial of his story but of what had happened to him. What had happened to the both of them.
Tears blurred her vision as she thought of the young man he had been, handsome and honorable and sweet. Of the Clay who had given her his heart and his body. Of the man she had loved waiting for her as he’d promised, only to be so brutally beaten, his beautiful face cut and marred for life. How betrayed he must have felt, how alone.
He gathered her to him, tucking her head beneath his chin and holding her tightly against his warm, bare chest. His heart thumped into hers in steady reassurance. She wrapped her arms around his waist, holding him every bit as much. And then she wept. She wept for the Clay and Ara they had once been, she wept for the lies they had believed, she wept for the time they had lost.
He held her in his strong, beloved embrace, his hands stroking over her back in comfort. He held her as if she were the one who had endured what had befallen him rather than the opposite.
“Do not cry for me, Ara mine,” he said softly, kissing her crown and breaking her heart with the old diminutive he had once given her. “I have had eight years to heal.”
Eight years.
That was how long they had been apart.
Eight years too long.
She could never regret knowing Freddie—he had been a light in a time of bleak darkness for her. But she did regret all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years she had spent living her life without Clay in it.
“Please believe that had I known—had I an inkling—I would have done anything and everything within my power to keep you safe.” She understood why he had believed her complicit all this time. They had been so careful with their assignations. How else would her father have known when and where to find Clay? Of course he would have believed her guilty. He had been given a letter he thought was from her. “I wrote everything in my journal. My mother or father must have been reading it without my knowledge. I never told them about that day. I never would have. You were all I wanted, all I needed.”
He was still all she wanted, all she needed.
