Lady in Red (26 page)

“Even though I wish it, you will never escape the past if you continue on this course. I was a fool to have not seen it immediately. For too many years I have lied to myself, but no more. Because I didn’t let it go, the past owns me. So please listen.”

Her face contorted with anguish. “Edward, after all you have done for me, after all this . . . I must ask again. Why are you doing this now?”

“Because you demanded to know what makes me the way I am. If you had not insisted, I would not have told you. But I see you on the same path, choosing to believe justice or vengeance will give you peace. It won’t.”

Her lips tightened. She tore her hands from him and thrust them over her ears as she lamented, “I will always hear your words now. The threat that I will never be free.”

Edward’s hands dropped to his sides, empty. “Forgive me.”

“At long last, we have found something that can’t be forgiven.” Her fingers slipped away from her face as tears sprang into her eyes. She shook her hands, ridding herself of his poison. “You are stealing back the hope you gave me.”

She had demanded to know his innermost hell, yet he should have kept it locked deep down in the blackness of his unsalvageable soul. There was no more selfish bastard than he. “Please—”

A sort of panic whitened her already pale features as she backed slowly away from him. “This evening has painted me the greatest of fools. I always knew that it was not me you wanted or truly hoped to right. I was a means to some end of yours. But I was so wrong. Oh, god, I was wrong.” Her voice pitched up. “I needed you for protection. You needed me for retribution of some kind. But in the end, Edward, we are only using each other. And you’re right in this—it’s time we stopped.”

T
he silence between them was full with her hope that he would negate her words, but he couldn’t. Because in the deepest part of his heart, he was afraid that they would never be able to defeat their demons. No matter what they did. And she was correct. They had been using each other.

The hollows of her cheeks, which had begun to fill out over the past weeks, intensified and her violet eyes—eyes that had ripped up his heart—stared with vacant acceptance. “I had thought that perhaps you had seen some part of me that was beautiful. Some part of me to love, and for a long time now I have believed that I would never be worthy of love. That there was something so wrong with me that my father sent me away. That I was ruined beyond loving with what had been done to me. I want more than just an
arrangement.
You will never give me that. By your own admission.”

More.

He didn’t know how to give her more. He’d let her in for brief moments, confessing his past, but the pain of it was so great he never wanted to discuss it again.

Love meant pain. Hadn’t his parents shown him that?

Oh, he’d had a sick alliance to his mother and father. Duty and kinship had drowned him in guilt for betraying them. But love? Love the way she meant it. He had never, nor likely ever would, experience it. “I am sorry.”

It was not what she had so wished to hear. Her face creased and her chest heaved as she let out a broken sound. “I cannot stay here. I cannot. I—” Her breaths came in great waves of anguish. “We have lost our understanding.”

Something rose inside Edward so fierce that it nearly blinded him. “I don’t care if you are using me, Mary.”

She lifted trembling hands, appealing to some invisible power before she fired out, “You should care. What are we if we are just using each other? Parasites. That’s what we are.”

Edward took a step forward, wishing he could hold her to him until all was at peace again. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her hands pressed to her temples. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Mary, whether you wish to hear it or not, whether you agree about vengeance or not, you belong with me. You belong
to
me. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the love you so desire.”

“Yes,” she sobbed, “it does.” The pain on her face contorted into a calm determination as she drew herself up and dropped her hands to her sides. “Edward, the only person I
belong
to is me.”

And with that, his Calypso darted from the room.

“I won’t thank you, Powers,” Mary clipped as her stomach twisted into a snake, coiling with determination and regret. The nauseous feeling didn’t direct her back toward the house, from where Edward had no doubt seen them enter the stables.

The dank smell of hay and horseflesh and the heady scent of rain clouds surrounded them. Mary drank it in, dreading and simultaneously savoring her impending escape. Now she just had to rid herself of Powers and be gone.

The viscount towered above her, his blond hair glowing pure silver in the moor’s moonlight. “And I can’t help the gnawing feeling I am making an irreversible mistake.”

Mary arched a brow, every limb, every essence of her tired and so bitter she could manage nothing more. All she longed for was to climb onto the waiting gelding and tear across the heath. “You? You don’t make mistakes, my lord.”

Powers’s glacial eyes stared into hers with the power of some eternal being. “Let me go with you. Please, Mary.”

Her breath puffed out white in the cold night.
Please?

“Powers—”

His usually so impassive face softened, showing her a face without a mask. “I’ll never forgive myself if you go alone.”

She eyed him carefully, sure this was some ruse. “I’d no idea you had such qualms of conscience.”

Powers’s gloved hand came up and paused just by her cheek. “There is much to me that I don’t show the world.”

Mary’s skin prickled with the intensity of his gaze and the promise of his touch. The possibility of his hand cupping her cheek was harrowing enough, but it was his look that devoured her. There was no mockery, no promise of bite. Just the clarity of a man about to throw himself into the abyss.

“I realize now I must do this alone, my lord.” Slowly, she lifted her fingertips to the charcoal sleeve of his riding coat, lightly pushing his hand away. “And Edward will need you.”

Powers melted under her touch, the ice sliding away from him. His big body closed the gap between them. His head bent down, closing several inches of the considerable distance between their faces. “He will hate me,” he whispered.

“No. He won’t. And I must go. It is right.” The words tore at her throat—if they had had physical shape, she was sure they would have left her windpipe bloody, like flesh raked with thorns.

His strong hand closed over hers, his fingers as large as Edward’s, as warm as Edward’s, and as sure—but wrong. “I am not here with you now because it is right,” he said.

“Then why?”

Powers’s sensual mouth worked, the conflict on his face revealing he was just as much at odds as she. “Because if you two cannot be together, then perhaps . . .”

Without warning, Powers dipped his head down, his scent of erotic spices and leather surrounding her.

Mary froze, unable to believe what he was about to attempt. Just as his lips were about to caress hers, her wits barreled down upon her and she stepped away. With a determined growl, he caught her shoulders, keeping her firmly in place. She jerked her head to the side and his lips smeared across her cheek.

At the failed kiss, Powers hung his head for a moment, resting it against her forehead. Only the sound of his ragged breathing pierced the night’s silence. “The unthinkable is happening to me, Mary.”

It took everything she had not to slap him, for betraying Edward with such ease. “Have you lost what little sense you have?” she hissed.

“I set out to seduce you . . . To prove to Edward it could be done.”

If she’d been a fanciful woman, she’d have sworn she heard her heart breaking. But she wasn’t fanciful and she shouldn’t have been surprised. Yet the pain sliced right to her bone. Still, she hoped . . . Perhaps Powers had done it entirely of his own accord . . . “Did Edward know?”

“Not in words, but I think he wondered.”

She had known that Edward’s soul was strangely bruised, had let her heart open to him in spite of that, but she had never considered he might have doubted her loyalty.

“Mary,” Powers said, his breath teasing across her cheek. “I am coming to care for you.”

She snorted. “That is a ludicrous thing to say especially after your previous declaration.”

He lifted his head, his blond hair flicking over his furrowed brow. Hopelessness shone from his cold eyes. “I thought it would be so easy to defeat you . . . but every moment I spent peeled away my resolve. I found myself feeling not apart from you, but one.”

Not apart, but one.
Mary bit back the answer that she understood. “I can never care for you in that way.”

“Let me come with you.” His icy eyes were piercing in their intensity. “I will protect you. I know you. I know you as no one else can. And perhaps out of this, there could be love.”

If she could have staggered away, she would have, but he held her with a fierce need. Now there was nowhere to run. Impossible though it may be, he was offering her what Edward never would. And the pain was enough to nearly break her. Her veins seemed to close, turning her blood to frigid liquid.

How had her life come to this? How had it come to such a painful decision in which, to save herself, she’d have to betray the man she loved? But there it was. Edward would never love her. Without him, she still needed revenge in order to be free and Powers would be a perfect ally for such a thing. She lifted her chin, ready to make the most treacherous deal of her life. “If you take me to my father, I will let you accompany me.”

His grip hardened. “Absolutely not.”

Her resolve tempered to something so hot she was amazed that she could endure the burn of it. “Then I go alone.”

Powers pulled back and drove a hand through his wild hair. “Damn it, Mary.”

“Please do as I ask. The man who helps me in this will always have my gratitude.” She hated herself with every word. She was just as dangerous as Powers. She had become someone who would do anything, say anything to gain her vengeance.

Perhaps she’d been a better student than even Edward could have imagined. But she wouldn’t regret it. Not now.

For the years she’d lost, beaten and broken in the madhouse, and for her mother, bullied and stolen from this world too soon, she’d proclaim words she didn’t mean.

Powers’s face turned grim, but he said nothing as he offered his hand to toss her up onto the saddle.

She slipped her knee into his cupped hands and grabbed the reins and a bit of the gelding’s mane. She was in the air, flying up, and then she landed softly on the polished leather.

“Wait for me,” he said.

Powers headed down the stable yard and chose a russet stallion. It took little time to saddle the horse; then he mounted it. Grim determination lined his eyes and mouth.

He returned to her and said, “Perhaps we are both mad to do this.”

There was something unspoken, though. The word “mad” stung, but Mary couldn’t argue. She was ruled now by something far more powerful than she could ever have imagined. The need to avenge herself and her mother. And for that, she’d leave everyone else behind.

In Powers’s haunted gaze there dwelled a broken hunger, and if she were a better woman she would have pursued it. But right now all she cared about was driving a wedge between herself and Edward so permanent that he would let her rot before coming for her again. For if he came for her, she didn’t know if she’d have the strength to deny him again.

No matter that he wished to own her.

She let herself take one look back. Candlelight glowed forth from the windows of the house, beacons in a sad, cold world. Though Edward would never love her, he would always be with her. As long as he was alive. As long as she knew he was out there somewhere, standing upon the same earth as she, she would be content.

She sat silent, her back rigid while she snapped the reins. The gelding raced out under the low black sky full with the promise of slashing rain. As she cracked the reins again, the gelding beneath her surged faster, eating up the earth beneath its hooves. Riding away from her heart and its master in the house behind them.

T
he torchlight outside the coaching inn sputtered under the torrential downpour, its glowing fire barely penetrating the ebony night. Barely lighting the road that led back to Edward. Arms limply at her sides, Mary glared out onto the soaked moor bordering Yorkshire. Loss pressed at her throat so crushingly she could barely swallow.

Powers’s Northumberland estate was far enough from London that it would take a significant journey to reach their destination. They’d only made it to the Durham county line.

With a sigh of resignation, she turned away from the mud-slogged yard and entered into the long, tunnellike passage that led past the courtyard and through to the inn beyond.

Powers was negotiating accommodations somewhere within.

Frankly, she would have preferred to keep riding. If they’d thought the horses could have traversed the roads, she would have pushed forward.

Now that she knew what she wished to do, anything that stood in her way was infuriating. She’d waited long enough to confront her father. It seemed unreasonable that rain should hold her back now.

The dreary light and the rushes beneath her feet gave the small passage a closed-in feel. She shivered. On such a night, the inn was most likely packed, but given the lateness of the hour, most of the occupants had turned to their beds. The stillness, punctured only by the drumming rain, was disconcerting.

Boot steps entered the passageway behind her. She was tempted to glance back, but she kept her gaze ahead, even as her skin prickled with an intense awareness and her own breath suddenly boomed to the volume of thunder in her ears.

Increasing her pace, she attempted to ignore her follower, but once the dull thud of footsteps continued down the passage, she could not. Rapidly, she assessed her options. She could run or scream for Powers, but he might not hear in this storm.

There was but one choice. Mary whipped around, confronting her follower. Despite the fear brewing within her, she forced herself to stand strong and throw her shoulders back.