Page 24 of The Baron’s Halo

“I wish I could have seen that.” Isabelle closed her eyes, savoring the image of her stepfather bleeding on the ballroom floor. Small compensation perhaps, but at least she was assured he knew what it felt like to be beaten and humiliated.

“So why, Isabelle?” Sandy cradled her cheek with a gentle hand. “Why did you abandon me?”

Drawing his hand away, she grasped it instead, needing all the strength she could get for the coming confession. “Because I love you, Sandy.” The confusion on his face smote her, but she forced herself to continue. “Because I finally realized I couldn’t marry you without telling you the whole truth about myself.”

“The whole truth?” His brows furrowed, darkening his handsome face.

“About…my stepfather.” Isabelle had to bite back the gorge that rose in her throat. She would rather walk over hot coals than to confess this to Sandy, but she must do it. At the very least, she owed him that.

His thunderous look darkened further, if that was even possible, transforming his usual genial visage into that of a terrifying imp from hell. He squeezed her hands unmercifully. “What about him?”

Unable to look him in the eyes any longer, Isabelle dropped her gaze to their clenched hands. “I told you he beat me and my mother and that was true. He did that for many years.” Hot tears pricked her eyes. Oh, but she had hoped not to cry in front of him, although soon it would make no difference what she did. “But the last week before he sailed on the Cordelia, he…found a new way to hurt me.”

“Isabelle?”

She risked a glance at Sandy and immediately wished she hadn’t. His face had drained of color and drawn in on itself, the lines deepened as though suddenly etched with the sharpest knife. Yet she must continue. There was nothing else she could do. “One night after I’d gone to bed, I heard him arguing with my mother, heard her cries when he hit her repeatedly. Then the house became quiet, and I prayed he’d gone out or fallen asleep. But just as I’d begun to relax, the door to my bedroom opened. I braced myself to be pulled out of bed and whipped—he used a leather belt and made me count the strokes as they fell.”

“Dear God.” The utter horror on Sandy’s face made her cringe.

“But that night, he didn’t have the belt with him. Instead, he unbuttoned his fly and lowered his trousers…” Isabelle hung her head, unable to go on. That scene had played itself out in her mind over and over for more than a year after the nightly visits to her bed ceased, stopped only because he left to go to sea.

“Oh, my dear.” His soft, consoling voice broke her.

She burst into tears, sobbing as she’d not been able to since it had happened to the terrified fifteen-year-old Isabelle, violated and all alone in her ravaged bed. Crying also for the Isabelle who wanted so very badly to be loved by this kind, generous man, but who had known that could never happen once the truth came out, as it now had.

All of a sudden, she found herself cradled in his arms, held tightly against his chest. Her tears redoubled. He was so incredibly kind, so compassionate, toward her. The best man in the world, really. And she could have been his wife, could have had this love for all of her life, had her mother never married the monstrous Ambrose Grey.

At last she seemed to have cried herself out, the tears drying to a trickle, all swallowed up by the soft superfine of Sandy’s jacket. Panting to get her breath she sat up, as ready as she’d ever be to finish answering his question. “So you see, I’ve been living a lie these past three years. Pretending that I would be an eligible parti for the marriage mart when I turned eighteen. I never told anyone what had happened, not even Mama. With Ambrose presumed dead, there seemed no real need.”

“And there were no further…consequences?”

“No, praise God. Nothing changed…except I was changed. I stopped thinking that I would some day marry. No man would want me after discovering I wasn’t an innocent. I tried to tell Mama I wasn’t ready to get married, but I couldn’t put her off without telling her why. Then she coaxed me into coming to London for the Season and then staying for the Little Season. I’d hoped if I showed her how ill at ease I was, she wouldn’t make me return next year. So I consented to dance at some of the entertainments, thinking in November we’d quietly return to Kent, but then…”

“Then I stepped in and saved you from Barclay.” Sandy smiled ruefully.

“Yes, you did. I tried to get rid of you as well, but you were too—”

“Persistent.” He grinned. “A Quartermain trait.”

“You were so kind, so clever.” Isabelle couldn’t look at him or her heart would break in two. “I began to hope that perhaps you might be different, might be the one gentleman who would understand what happened to me wasn’t my fault. The one who might be able to love me despite the fact I was ruined.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before the wedding, my love?”

The endearment cut like a knife twisted in her heart.

“Because I thought if I did, I would lose you. All I could think was that I needed to escape Ambrose—I couldn’t allow him to…hurt me that way again. I had to get away and the only hope I had was to marry you.” She wiped her eyes again. So there were still tears to be shed. “I’m so sorry I tried to deceive you. And glad I couldn’t do it in the end.” Cupping his cheek, she gazed longingly into his face, the one she wanted to see every day for the rest of her life. “When I looked into your eyes when you were saying your vows, I knew I’d been lying to myself, and that could be forgiven. However, I couldn’t lie to you, Sandy. All I could do to make it right was run away.” Dropping her hand, Isabelle hung her head. “Please, don’t despise me.”

Defeated, she sat silently, waiting for him to leave.

Chapter Ten

As if all the air in the room had been sucked out, Sandy couldn’t breathe. Long before Isabelle’s woeful tale had taken its sudden hideous turn, he’d concluded Captain Ambrose Grey had to die. Once she revealed the extent of Grey’s depravity, the man’s fate was all but sealed. He’d wanted to kill him when Isabelle first told him of the abuse, but had put it off for another day. That day had now come. When Sandy returned to London, he’d challenge Grey and shoot him down like the rabid dog he was. Duels might belong to a bygone era, but if he sullied the man’s name badly enough, he’d be forced to fight or be branded a coward. Sandy fisted his hand, imagining it held a pistol aimed at Grey’s midsection. No clean shot to the heart for that monster. No, a wound to his bowels that would fester, causing him to sicken and suffer in excruciating pain for days still was not punishment enough. It wouldn’t compare to the pain Isabelle had endured these past years, but it would have to suffice.

The sound of weeping brought him back to himself, to discover poor Isabelle crying quietly beside him. Now who was being an insensitive brute?

“Isabelle?” He slid his arms around her, thinking to comfort her, but she only cried harder, her body shaking uncontrollably. At a loss to know what else to do to ease her pain, and suspecting nothing could, he elected to simply hold her tightly until her grief subsided.

He couldn’t pretend to know how horribly her stepfather’s perfidy had hurt her, both physically and deep in her soul. Wounds of that sort might take a lifetime to heal. His greatest fear, however, was that they might never do so.