The Rogue and the Rival (27 page)

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Authors: Maya Rodale

BOOK: The Rogue and the Rival
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“Do you really think he will?” Devon asked Emilia.
“You know, I think he might try.”
“Hell must have frozen over.”
 
Three days later, Phillip personally escorted his despicable French companions onto a ship. He then waited on the docks until he saw it sail out of sight. Without taking the time to so much as sigh with relief, he turned and walked to the nearest inn. There he hired a horse (for Devon had given him plenty for traveling expenses) and rode off for the abbey.
He had been gone just over a week. It felt like a lifetime. His debt was cleared. His creditors were safely on their way to France, and he would have the funds to start fixing up Aston House. He and his wife would have a home.
Who would have ever thought that Phillip Kensington would put the words
wife
and
home
and his own name together in one sentence? Certainly not him.
He arrived at the abbey early the next morning. He wandered around, looking for her. She wasn’t in the kitchen. She wasn’t around the chapel, which was progressing nicely. He still didn’t know which bedchamber was hers. He took to wandering the corridors.
Where was she? He was dying to see her, to kiss her, and to hold her. He wanted to hear her yell at him, “Where the hell have you been?” They would argue, he was sure of it, but that prospect didn’t bother him, because that would mean she cared. About him.
Phillip knocked on the door to Lady Katherine’s study, after an hour spent fruitlessly searching for Angela.
“I can’t find Angela anywhere. Do you know where she is?” he asked, after Lady Katherine bade him to enter.
“Please sit, Phillip,” she said in a tone of voice that reminded him of his dead father’s whenever he was about to be lectured on one misdeed or another. He hadn’t heard that voice in years. Phillip had been quite young when his father had given up on talking some sense into him.
So Lady Katherine would lecture him for leaving without an explanation and then tell him where Angela was. Fine. Though waiting any longer to see her seemed unbearable, he would manage.
“Angela left the abbey,” Lady Katherine said plainly. It was a moment before Phillip could fully comprehend this.
“She left the abbey, or she left me?”
“You left, Phillip, suddenly and inexplicably shortly after issuing a marriage proposal. You have been known to—”
“I know what I’ve done in the past very well, thanks.”
“Nevertheless, she has left, partly because you left her.”
“I didn’t leave
her
, though. I didn’t want to go. But I had to, to save her and . . . It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
Lady Katherine did not issue any sort of response, instead letting his question hang in the air. The problem was not that he couldn’t fathom that this was happening but because it was all too believable.
He deserved this.
How many women had he left without an explanation or even a reason? A few. More than a few.
And it didn’t matter, obviously, that this was the
one
time he meant to return, to do right, to give himself to her completely and forever.
And she didn’t want him now, or forever. She didn’t want him enough.
She was the only person who had ever believed in him or come close to loving him. And if she had lost her faith in him, well, he had lost it, too, if he ever even had it.
You disappoint me, Phillip,
his father always used to say. But he could hear it in Angela’s voice now.
He deserved this.
He hated it, but he knew it was the truth. Phillip deserved to suffer, and he certainly did not deserve the happiness she made him think he could have.
But that knowledge did not make the pain less—not the tightness in his throat or the burning in his chest. There was a hot, queer, stinging feeling in his eyes, but he shut them for a moment, and the feeling abated. Slightly.
“You love her,” Lady Katherine said gently with a touch of surprise in her voice, after a moment of silence. It may have been news to her, but not to him.
Phillip shrugged.
“Why did you leave if you love her?” Lady Katherine asked him.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said firmly. She seemed to be waiting for him to contradict her and say that he hadn’t loved her, but he couldn’t lie about that. “I would have been a terrible husband. Likely I wouldn’t have made her happy, and she would have come to regret it. But is she happy now, wherever she is?”
“If she is not happy now, I think she will be, if . . .” Lady Katherine let her voice trail off, but Phillip knew what she was going to say anyway.
She will be happy if you leave her alone, to forget about a worthless man like you.
“She deserves to be happy. I’m just sorry I’m not the one to make her so.”

 

BOOK 2
EIGHT MONTHS LATER

 

Chapter 14
ASTON HOUSE, BEDFORDSHIRE
MAY 1822
 
Phillip
poured the contents of his glass into the fire. After a sudden, intense burst of flame, the fire settled into a slow, gentle burn. He set his now-empty glass on the mantel next to the letter.
Eight days earlier, he had discovered it in the cellar tied to a bottle of brandy. “
Lord Phillip Kensington, Marquis of Huntley
” was written across the front in a handwriting that Phillip didn’t immediately recognize. The seal of the Duke of Buckingham, however, informed him that the letter was from his now-deceased father.
The placement of the letter told Phillip exactly what his father thought of him: a drunken wastrel. Which, to be fair, he had been when his father was alive. And for a few more years after the old man kicked it.
Phillip removed the letter to the mantel in the library, where he stared at it for eight days and nights, trying to find the courage to read a lecture from beyond the grave. His father had only ever lectured him. Though Phillip tried, he could not recall one word in the realm of pleasant ever uttered from father to son.
But tonight . . . tonight Phillip had nothing to lose.
That gray, nagging feeling that had followed him around, as consistent as a shadow, all of his life, was darker, more insistent than ever. If that dark and heavy shadow could talk—and Phillip was damned glad it couldn’t—he knew what it would whisper:
You are a failure. You are a disappointment. You are not good enough.
He believed it. He had spent his entire life going to great lengths to prove those whispers correct. Because he so badly wanted to do something right, even if it was to be as wicked and worthless as everyone expected him to be. He succeeded, yet there was no sweetness or satisfaction in his accomplishment.
Phillip hadn’t felt this wretched since that first week in the abbey. He couldn’t even manage to die when someone wanted him dead, because he couldn’t do anything right. And so in his wretchedness, pain, and loneliness, he had made Angela’s life a living hell. But when she was around, that damned shadow retreated just a little . . . and then more and then . . .
Well, it didn’t matter now. He’d just get used to living in the dark. And he really couldn’t stand to look at that letter any longer. He would read it now, and then burn it, and then . . . Well, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t really much care.
Phillip settled into his chair by the fire. The vellum was old but still spoke of quality. Phillip broke the seal and unfolded the sheet, and something fell into his lap.
A ring. Great. Jewelry. Just what he had always wanted, he thought sarcastically. Like he had any use for a woman’s gold ring set with diamonds and pearls. Well, he could sell it for a nice sum. That settled, Phillip pocketed the ring and turned his attention to the page of perfect script.
 
April 1816
 
Dear Phillip,
 
If you have found this letter, it means that you have learned the truth of your birth order, of which I had
only recently become aware, and which I had a duty to remedy. I have left the Aston property to you, because though you are no longer my heir, you are still my son, and it would not do to leave you with nothing. More importantly, it is my hope that owning something of your own will give you a sense of duty and devotion toward something other than yourself and your vices.
Aston House was purchased for your late mother, God rest her soul, in the event that she survived me. When she passed on during the birth of you and your brother, it became my intention to provide this unentailed property for my younger son. I must confess that it does strike me as more appropriate that the property go to you, for you were always just like her.
Your preferences were always the same: for company rather than solitude, for card games and wagers, for the social whirl of London, as well as the wildness and openness of the country. Your tempers are the same, too, stemming from the same passionate nature. Unlike you, however, she always knew when to stop before causing a scandal, or causing hurt to another, and when to walk away from a wager. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will have gained the temperance and restraint you did not possess in your youth. Oddly enough, I do have faith that you will achieve these things.
Your mother, Madeleine, was everything that I am not, everything I needed to feel whole. If I said to you as a child that you should be more like your brother, it was my own way of wishing you were more like me, or less like her. When I looked at you, I could only see what I had lost and not what I had gained. I am dying as I write this, although part of me thinks that I died the day your mother did. I was not fair to you or good to you. I am sorry.
Regret is a wretched thing to live with, Phillip. If I have one wish for you, it is that you never know the feeling as I do. If I could have a second wish for you, it
is that you do become truly like your mother and find the goodness and love within you that she, too, possessed.
 
With Love,
Arthur Phillip Archibald William Kensington, Duke of Buckingham
 
Included is your mother’s wedding ring. Sell it, and risk her wrath in the afterlife.
 
Well, if that wasn’t everything he had ever wanted, right there, wrapped around a bottle of brandy, resting in the cellar of his house. And here he had thought it was what was inside the bottle that would answer all those questions.
The irony of that did not amuse him.
He read the letter again to be sure it was real and to be sure he had read it all correctly. It must be true and real, judging by the tightness in his chest and that odd, hot, stingy feeling in his eyes that he had only felt once before, on the day he realized Angela had left him.
Perhaps one day he would be glad to have found it. But tonight he only wished that he had found this letter years earlier, because it was too late for him now. He already knew regret like the back of his hand.

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