Elegant, formal, intelligent. A lady even when she was naked as the day she was born, perching on a piece of furniture.
“Well you must,” he argued, feeling beastly. “I want you gone from here.”
“Why? So you can pretend we did not just make love? So you can continue to feign indifference to me when your body has given you away for a liar?”
“You know a great deal about lies, do you not?”
“Perhaps not as much as you do.” Her chin was up again, her countenance taking on that stern mulishness which had become so familiar to him once upon a time. “Or have you forgotten your own lies?”
Her query sank its barbs into him just as she had intended. “I told but one.”
“Your name. Do you not think I have every right to hold on to my anger for what you did? You have never explained why to me, aside from Longleigh’s insistence I would not go along with his scheme if I knew you were his son. But you have never told me why you would do such a thing. Or why, after we had spent so much time together, after we had fallen in love and I was carrying your son, you still failed to tell me your name was Adrian Hastings instead of Robin Carstairs.”
Remorse was like a spike in his heart. He had long regretted his decision to keep the truth from her. Even through all the time he had spent in prison, through all the vast suffering, the anguish, the pain, the guilt had remained.
After what they had shared, he could not keep it locked away any longer.
“I am sorry for that lie,” he admitted. “I have no defense for what I did. At the time I agreed to Longleigh’s plan, I was adrift in this world, with scarcely a ha’penny to my name and no family to speak of. My mother died in an asylum thanks to Longleigh’s manipulations. My wife and son were gone. The duke approached me with the promise of ten thousand pounds for one month of my time. I intended to take the funds and sail to America, to begin life anew there.”
And instead, he had met her.
He had fallen in love.
He had been sent to prison.
“The name…it was your idea, or was it Longleigh’s?” she asked.
“Longleigh’s. He apparently had a nephew of that name. His youngest brother’s son. He was confident you would not question the arrangement. He said…he said he would make certain of it.”
As the words left him, he felt ill. Had Longleigh threatened Tilly into accepting an intimate relationship with him? Had he physically hurt her?
“He did not use force in this instance,” she said quietly, as if she had heard his thoughts spoken aloud. “He had in the past, but not then. He…I do not think he wanted to leave a mark, lest it should be seen.”
Rage soared through him. He wondered again if the bastard had ever beaten his mother, for he had long suspected it when he had been old enough to piece together some of his mother’s words. He had been nothing more than a lad when she had died at Broadmoor. He would not have known to ask. He had not understood that a man could do violence to a woman back then. His mother had always been sweet and kind and good to him. Even when the troubles came upon her.
“You should have told me he had raised his hand to you,” he said, wishing he could have gotten vengeance. Wishing, by no means for the first time, that he could make that son of a bitch pay for what he had done, for going through life using and abusing everyone in his path.
“It would have served no purpose. Look at what he did to you because we had fallen in love.”
Her quiet words sank into him.
The lingering doubts gathered steam. What if the assumptions he had made were wrong?
“You helped him,” he forced himself to say.
“Oh, Adrian.” Her voice was hushed. Sad. So bloody sad. “If you truly ever loved me as I loved you, then you would know I could never have betrayed you. I never would have chosen him over you. You were all I ever wanted.”
He noted the past tense.
Shehadloved him.
Hehadbeen all she ever wanted.
What of now? He wanted to ask. But he held his tongue.
“I am sorry for the lie,” he said instead. “Had I known…I would not have deceived you. I would have told you the truth as soon as we…”
“Fell in love,” she finished for him.
