“He would know better than to insult a lady by offering money,” said Anthony. “No, he’d appeal to something else. Your sense of honor. Your profound decency.”
He didn’t say the rest, but she knew he was thinking the same thing: her love for Anthony. Yes, the man had appealed to all of that, and she’d been the one to pay every price while bearing his son’s hatred.
“I don’t know how he convinced you,” said Anthony, pushing a comb about the top of Letitia’s dressing table. “Had my mother been alive, I can imagine he’d have—”
“Your mother wasn’t alive then?” asked Letitia, all air escaping her lungs at once.
“Of course not. She’d been dead since I was but three years old. I recall nothing about it — why, I probably never even mentioned her to you.”
A sob escaped Letitia before she could master her feelings. That man had indeed begged and pushed her on the grounds that Anthony’s mother’s health was failing fast as reports of their romance reached her.
“Letitia, why—”
She couldn’t contain the wracking sobs as years of lies and hurt slammed into her body like a falling chandelier. Letitia had turned her back on the love of her life…because of a lie told by his father?
He was next to her in an instant, his arms wrapped around her as if that day had never happened. “Letty, tell me, tell me,” he begged.
She nodded and cried; the sobs seeming to come from her thighs as the truth punctured layers of grief. Letitia wiped her face with the doctor’s handkerchief and stilled just long enough to look at Anthony’s masked face.
Behind it, his eyes were red and wet, as if he understood the lie that had separated them without her needing to say what his father had done. He didn’t look away, just regarded her as sadly as he’d done the day she had departed their home.
This time, it needn’t be like this.
Letitia lifted her hands to his mask, moving slowly so he might jerk away should he wish to remain covered. But he let her untie the damned thing and pull away the front.
Below it, his face was streaked with tears.
“Anthony,” she breathed, placing her hand on his cheek for the first time in years.
“Don’t,” he said, jerking away. She drew back her hand sharply, not wanting to hurt the man.
Anthony took her hand in his own, studying both sides of it for a moment. Then he brought her palm to his mouth and kissed it.
“Don’t touch me unless you mean to give me forever.”
Letitia thought she knew what crying meant, thought she had wept before. But it was nothing compared to the wailing she couldn’t contain as Anthony pulled her close after all those years of estrangement.
She took his words literally and ran her hands over his face and hair, planting kisses on those wet cheeks and struggling to draw nearer to him. He took mercy on her and pulled her into his lap, then pushed his fingers into her short locks so he might turn her this way and that as he kissed her face with abandon.
Her nose dripped, and she cast about for the doctor’s handkerchief. Instead, she felt another pressed into her hand.
“Take mine,” said Anthony, stroking up and down her spine as he had for hours in their youth. “From now on, take mine.”
Chapter 7
As he carried herin his arms towards his bedroom, Anthony thought of something he had been saving for Letty all these years, but he set it aside for now, not wanting to alarm her. They had so many wounds to heal and all the time in the world now to recover their love.
Upon settling her in his bed, in the Corbet townhouse for the first time, he was awash in anger at his father. Anthony could have had this every day for years. Instead, his father had wasted their young lives and doomed Anthony to a haze of brandy and sex, hoping to dull the pain of Letitia’s betrayal — when she had not betrayed him at all. Meanwhile, Letitia had spent years dependent on laudanum and mistreated by the worst of men thanks to his father’s deceit.
It still stung that she’d respected his father’s wishes when doing so had irrevocably broken his heart. It was the last splinter in the stake he was pulling out of his chest.
“Why didn’t you say something to indicate that my father was behind our estrangement? I could have accepted it had you simply told me he was the instigator. Instead, you chose the cruelest method imaginable to say your goodbyes.”
It would have hurt worlds less. Instead, he lived for years with the memory of finding Letitia — and her packed things — on the front steps of his house, where she’d told him she’d found another protector. Another man who suited her more.
She gazed at him as if weighing her words carefully.
“I believed myself to be doing the correct thing,” she said. “And I would not have been able to make it down those steps had I betrayed the truth of the matter.”
