That Kind of Woman (24 page)

“
I
defile? I
loved
him!”

“Loved? Until you found out that he wasn’t what you wanted him to be, you loved him. And now?”

“I—do—not—know!” He ground the words out between tightly clenched teeth. There were tears in his voice, but not in his eyes. “I didn’t know. I wondered. God help me, I wondered.”

“But before you knew, you loved him.”

“He was my brother. I idolized him in my youth. He was to be Danford, the continuation of the family name, the family honor.”

“And even when you looked up to him and dogged his footsteps, when he took you hunting and riding and all of the things he told me that you did together, he was what he was.”

“And you? Did you know all along? You
married
him knowing?”

She sat back down on the bed. “No, I didn’t know.”

It suddenly occurred to Andrew that he was naked with a woman he hardly knew. He had thought he had known her, just as he had thought that he had known his brother. Feeling defeat unlike any he had experienced at the hands of the French, he picked up his breeches and pulled them on. It sapped his energy, left him bone weary.

“But you lived here with the both of them, and obviously you found out. Rather early, I suspect. I can’t imagine a bride stays a virgin long without knowing that something is amiss.”

“Shall I tell you?”

He pulled the seat away from her dressing table and straddled it backwards, crossing his arms over its low back and squaring his shoulders. Braced for the coming assault, he nodded.

*

Miranda sat in the drawing room sipping tea. A slice of bread with jam lay, untouched, on a plate on the tea table. Her eyelids were swollen, and every time she blinked, they felt like sandpaper against her eyes. Since the fiasco the previous night, George had had the courtesy to stay away from her, but she knew that couldn’t last. She fully expected it to be him when she heard a man’s footsteps enter the room behind her and yet was not surprised to see a stranger instead.

She had only seen him before in a brief flash, and she felt oddly detached as she looked at him. He was tall and incredibly handsome. His face was round and cherubic, his hair golden, his eyes bright blue, and he was dressed to the height of fashion. Although he wore an expertly crafted coat of blue wool, he carried another in a vibrant shade of bottle green. This he set down on the couch next to her.

“How do you do, Lady Danford?”

She didn’t answer. What on earth could she say?

“My name is Reggie. Reginald Toller, actually, but my friends all call me Reggie.”

She set her cup down. “I am not your friend.”

He glanced at the floor. “I rather imagine you hate me just now.”

“I do not think there is a word for what I feel for you right now. Hate is such a lukewarm sentiment.” And what she felt was so cold, so hard, that it held her body rigid. She was certain that if she tried to stand, her limbs would simply snap off from the tension.

He cast an uneasy look around the room, his gaze finally settling on a clock on the mantle. “George has told me so much about you.”

“Has he? How odd. He told me
nothing
about you.”

“He told me what a warm and loving woman you are. About how cruel the ton were to you, and how you never allowed it to make you bitter. He said there wasn’t a hateful bone in your body.”

“Well, it seems I have discovered one. Just what is it you want, Mr. Toller?”

He looked at her again. “Don’t let me be the one to do it, make you hateful and bitter. I’m not worth it.”

The anger still didn’t surface. She felt like a block of ice. “Get out of my house.”

“I would really like to talk to you, first.”

“Who the—who do you think you are? I have absolutely nothing to say to you and no obligation to listen to anything you might have to say. My God! You walk into my home, sleep with my husband, ruin my life, and you would really like to talk to me about it?”

“Ah, there now, a little old-fashioned temper to melt the ice.”

“You vile, despicable—”

“It’s my latest acquisition,” Reggie said, gesturing to the coat on the couch.

She stopped short. “It is not the cut of your coat between us.”

“I haven’t even worn it yet. It is yours.”

“I do not want your ridiculous coat! What I want from you would fit very nicely in a little silver box on my dressing table, but I seriously doubt you’d be willing to part with them.”

He smiled. “Touché. And you’re right; I am rather too fond of those to sacrifice them. The coat, however, is not ridiculous. You don’t want to know the blunt I sank into that particular garment. I nearly salivated just trying it on. Go ahead…rip it to shreds.”

She stared, first at the coat, then at him. “What? Are you actually proposing that I destroy your coat as just compensation for what you have done to my
life
?”

“My life, Lady Danford, has been in tatters almost from the beginning. The coat is the best I can offer.”

“Am I supposed to pity you?”

“Not at all.”

Finally she stood. “You are only saying this because you know that I will not. George has doubtless told you how refined I am, how dignified.” She grabbed the coat, rumpling the fine, soft fabric in her hand. “Well, even I can take only so much!” Grabbing the sleeve at the top where it was attached to the rest she gave it a hard yank, the sound and feel as she ripped feeding her fury. She dropped the sleeve on the floor and stepped on it. Then she yanked off the second sleeve and threw it in Toller’s face.

“What do you think of George’s naïve, tractable little bride now?”

He caught the sleeve and sighed.

She set to work on the side seams. They were longer and took more work. She tore off the buttons one by one and threw each at him with all her might, forcing him to dodge the tiny missiles. One struck home on the side of his face and he flinched in pain but made no effort to stop her.

“How dare you come to me? How dare you walk in here and introduce yourself like this is some kind of perfectly civilized topic of conversation? I’ve never done anything to you. I don’t even know you! You and George have played me for a fool. You’ve taken heartless advantage—”

“We didn’t mean to. I swear to you, Lady Danford, that was never our intent.”

“Yes, yes, it was over. I’ve heard all that.”

“It was supposed to be.” He sighed again. “Have you ever been in love?”

She wadded up what was left of the coat and pressed it hard into her stomach, trying to smother the sharp pain there. It didn’t help, and she doubled over, the sting of tears back in her eyes. She had never been in love, and now, she never would be.

Reggie stepped over to her and, with one hand on her elbow, urged her back onto the couch. “Sit down. You must be exhausted. If it helps, I didn’t sleep either.”

She snorted derisively. “Busy night?”

“I know you won’t believe this, but I am sorry. You are right. You have never done anything to me. You have done nothing but try to be good to a man I love very much. The fault is mine, not George’s. That is what I want to tell you. If there is any chance that you and he can make things right—”

She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “I do not know what kind of woman you think George married, Mr. Toller, but I am not as naïve as the two of you seemed to believe. I have traveled wide and lived a most unconventional life; I’ve met men like you and George. I am not about to delude myself into thinking I can change him.”

“He would change for you.”

“Then why didn’t he?”

“Because I came back. I had no right. I know that. I knew it when I came. I just—” He paused, his voice choked by emotion. “He is the other half of me.”

“But now, now that you’ve destroyed everything, now you’re willing to go away and never return.”

“Would you take him back if I did?”

“I never had him. He doesn’t want me.”

“He would if he could. He cares for you. He really does.”

She wanted to tell him that no one had ever really cared for her, but even to her own ears it sounded sniveling and pathetic.

“May I tell you a story?” he asked. She didn’t answer, and he sat down, seeming to take her silence as assent. “George and I met in school when we were fourteen…”

He told her about the beginning of their friendship and how consumed by guilt and shame he had been for the feelings growing inside of him. He had always felt odd, always noticed other boys in ways he knew he shouldn’t. But with George it became an obsession. He tried to end the friendship, but he couldn’t keep his distance, couldn’t bear the look of pain on George’s face every time he pushed him away.

It might have been easier if he hadn’t sensed the same thing in George. If he hadn’t noticed how George’s hand lingered on his shoulder, how much longer George held his gaze than any other boy he associated with.

When they were sixteen, Reggie came to Danford to visit for the summer, and they had gone to the river to fish. The day was hot, and there seemed nothing more natural for two boys to do than take a swim, but a young man’s naked body keeps no secrets. That day changed the face of their friendship forever.

“You would have thought it would have ended somehow,” Reggie said. “Lovers part all the time. I suppose we always thought it would end of its own accord, and George would go on to do as he must. Marry, have children…”

“But it never did,” Miranda supplied. As much as she hated to admit it, it was a touching story. If it had been a tale of a man and a woman, and her husband had not been involved, it would have been tender and romantic. If it had been class that had separated them, or family, or some more conventional encumbrance…

Reggie continued. “Andrew might have been killed in the war, leaving only a daughter behind. And Henry is…well…he is not earl material. This place, the title, they have been in his family for centuries. George had obligations, and he wasn’t getting any younger. He wasn’t the sort to wait and then ask some fresh-faced young woman to marry a man in his fifties or sixties. He hadn’t even met you yet when he told me that the time had come for him to take a wife. He is a good man, my lady. He never intended to do to any woman what he did to you. And he wouldn’t have with any man but me; he would have resisted. I just … oh God, Lady Danford, I just missed him so.”

Reggie’s voice broke, and Miranda felt the tears again, only this time they weren’t there from self-pity. Never in her life had she been able to bear to see others in pain. She felt for the man before her, bearing his heart to a woman he didn’t know and certainly had no reason to trust.

And she had meant what she had told him. Her parents had friends such as George and Reggie. Her father had mentioned once that he couldn’t understand how a man could resist a well-rounded woman, and her mother had waxed philosophical and said that she supposed love was something over which people had very little control. Montheath had merely laughed about the general uselessness of self-control and tossed his mistress over his shoulder, carrying her upstairs.

It never seemed to bother either of them. They never shied away from friendships with these people, male or female. The couple simply speculated about this person or that, many of them respectably married, and perhaps sighed about how much harder their liaisons were for them than even Barbara and Montheath’s had been, in terms of the judgment of others.

Miranda took another look at the dejected man seated next to her. “There is no sense in all three of us being miserable.”

He rose. “I know. I am leaving. I just wanted to explain.”

“Whether you stay or go, I cannot live a charade with George. I mean, I can live a charade for everyone else—I must—but not for myself. I cannot sleep with a man I know does not want me.”

“I am truly sorry you had to find out. I bear full responsibility.”

She stood. “Well, it is all out now. I certainly won’t be the first woman who turned a blind eye to her husband’s infidelity. Maybe I’ll take a lover of my own someday. All else is lost.”

“You might come to love George someday.”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Toller. He is yours.”

“You can’t mean…”

“No one knows better than I how precious and rare love is. Take my advice; do not squander it for something as unsatisfying as trying to fulfill other people’s expectations. I have had very poor luck pursuing that particular end.” She turned and walked to the door.

“You are giving him to me?”

Without stopping, or even looking at him, she said over her shoulder, “He was never mine.”

*

“I don’t know if I can explain how everything evolved from there,” Miranda said to Andrew. “All I can tell you is I have never felt more loved or accepted in my life than I felt with Reggie and George. You cannot pretend that kind of friendship. They welcomed my mother with open arms. Reggie even took my father to task for not eking out a few days to spend with us over the holidays. I wish I could tell you what it meant to me to hear him tell Montheath what a rare and special daughter he was missing out on. Me. Rare and special.”

“Guilt, Miranda. The man felt guilty as hell for what he’d done,” Andrew replied.

She snapped back fully in the present. “Don’t you dare say that! They
loved
me!”