To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke Book 8) (21 page)

Settling her hands upon her daughter’s shoulder, Eleanor made one more attempt at freedom from the humiliating agony of the exchange. “Marcia, it is time to return to see Aunt Dorothea.”

“But you said Aunt Dorothea was resting.”

At the knowing glint sparking in Marcus’ eyes, Eleanor pressed her lips into a firm line. “Surely Marcia might first share the fairytale of Lord Wessex,” he prompted.

“Is not about Lord Wessex, silly.” A giggling laugh escaped Marcia. Then with an impropriety that would have shocked any lords or ladies who happened to pass by, Marcia placed her palms on Marcus’ cheeks and spoke in very serious tones. “It is about King Orfeo.”

With matched solemnity he whispered, “Tell me about this King Orfeo.”

The world fell away as Eleanor stood transfixed, struck by the sight of Marcia’s small, delicate fingers upon Marcus. Any other gentleman would have likely stiffened or shifted with discomfort at the attentions given him by a child.

“Mama, do you wish to tell Marcus?”

But this was Marcus and he’d never been like any other gentleman, nor would he ever be—even with this natural ease around children.

Marcus leveled a piercing stare on Eleanor, blue eyes seeing too much; more than could ever be safe.

“Mama?” Marcia pressed, her tone befuddled.

Eleanor managed a jerky nod.

“Come, Mrs. Collins, will you not tell me your stories?” She’d have to be deafer than a dowager with cotton in her ears to fail to detect the suggestive twist of his words that sought far more than stories of pretend and legend.

Eleanor opened her mouth to call Marcia to her side when, with her small hands, Marcia forced his head back around to face her. “
I
will tell you, Marcus.”

And Eleanor, whose heart had broken for the loss of him and the dream of them, now broke all over, for entirely different reasons. He was a father Marcia would have been deserving of. Her throat closed with an aching regret.

“Poor Sir Orfeo lost his wife.” As her daughter launched into tales of make believe, Eleanor darted her gaze about, searching for intervention from a bolt of lightning, the ground opening, Marcus’ sister and the lady who’d been making eyes at Marcus.

“Lost his wife, did he? How does one go about losing something as important as a wife?” he teased, tweaking Marcia’s pert nose.

Well, mayhap not the friend making eyes, but Eleanor would settle for any other of the small miracles or interruptions.

Marcia giggled, her hands falling to her sides. “Mama said it’s very easy to lose someone.”

Tension jerked Eleanor erect and this time, with all traces of amusement gone, Marcus met her stare again with questions. “Did she?” he questioned.

Eleanor held his gaze. All the while, her heart thumped a hard, fast rhythm. She must have more care what she said to Marcia in the future. It would appear nothing was safe or private.

“Yes.” Marcia tugged at his sleeve, forcing his attention back to her. “The horrible fairy king stole her away from under the cherry tree.” Large, brown eyes formed moons as she became absorbed in her telling. “He brought her to the Otherworld where she could no longer see her king and poor Orfeo wandered and wandered searching for her.”

“What happened to them?” At his quiet inquiry, Eleanor folded her arms close to her stomach and held tight. Did he see her own story in the legend? Unnerved by the sideways look he cast her way, she glanced about.

Marcia captured his face once again in her small palms. “Why, he finds her, of course, silly.” Because in tales of fairies and make believe, love never died and hope lived on.

Silence met the innocent recounting. Eleanor was the first to break into the tense quiet. She cleared her throat. “Now, we really must be going, Marcia. His Lordship has been good enough to stop and speak with us, but he must rejoin his sister.” And Eleanor desperately needed to place distance between her and Marcus. For with every sweet, gentle interaction with her daughter, he threw her world into greater tumult so that the offer she’d put to him proved just another dangerous folly made.

With a smooth grace, Marcus shoved himself to his feet and captured her gloved hand in his larger one. He brought her hand slowly to his mouth. Yesterday, before her aunt’s ball, she would have seen this innocent, yet wholly seductive, gesture as a means of taunting her. “Mrs. Collins.” That smooth, husky whisper washed over her. Some great shift had occurred between them and as he placed his lips along the fabric of her glove, her breath caught. Marcus reminded her that she was still a woman capable of desire; for a touch, a caress, a kiss—proof that for everything stolen by the nameless stranger long ago, he’d not completely robbed her of this innate part of her.

And there was something freeing in that truth, only just now realized.

“T
he beginning is always today…”

The beginning is always today.

Seated on the nauseatingly pink sofa where she kept company with her Aunt Dorothea, Eleanor repeated those words in a quiet mantra, over and over. The black inked words of Mary Wollstonecraft stared up at her.

Following her meeting with Marcus yesterday afternoon, she’d arrived home and begged off attending the planned events for the evening. Instead, she’d reflected on this inherent weakness where Marcus, the Viscount Wessex, was concerned. Oh, she’d never ceased to love him. Not one day in eight years had passed where she’d not remembered at least one memory they’d shared.

However, the cool practicality of life had conditioned her to the cold, empty fact—there could never be anything between them. Not in the way she’d wished or dreamed of. That one night in Lady Wedermore’s gardens had shattered their present and any hope of a future. Such a fact had been an easy one to resolve herself to as the war widow, in the far-flung corners of Cornwall. Then, she’d accepted that their lives had continued and they’d been forced down two very divergent paths.

Only, seeing him with Marcia, waltzing with him, knowing the brush of his lips upon her palm, she wanted down the other path with an intensity that she’d crawl, kick, or beg for a right to travel once more.

The beginning is always today.

But that wasn’t always true. Not where Eleanor was concerned.
Or could it be true? Could her life begin anew—?

“What is it, gel?”

Eleanor glanced up suddenly at the old duchess, who wore a questioning frown on her face. “Do you disagree with Mrs. Wollstonecraft?” The stern set to her mouth indicated Eleanor would be wise to not question the esteemed philosopher so revered by Aunt Dorothea.

Dropping her attention to the handful of words that had frozen her, Eleanor traced the tip of her fingernail over each small letter. The writer, with her progressive, if scandalous, beliefs, spoke with an unerring accuracy on the injustices known by women and touted a world where women were not dependent upon men for their survival and happiness. Words that usually resonated, in this instance did not. “Today cannot undo yesterday.”

“Of course it can’t.”

Her aunt spoke with such a blunt matter-of-factness, a smile pulled at Eleanor’s lips. Shoving aside her distracted amusement, she sought to make sense of the writer’s words. “Yet, she speaks of each new day as a new beginning. By the sheer nature of yesterday, Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s words of today can never hold truth.” Even as Eleanor would have sold the only parts of her unsullied soul to make it so.

Aunt Dorothea leaned over and tapped Eleanor on the knee. “Those beliefs are not mutually exclusive, Eleanor. Yours and Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s. I believe the lady would not have spoken fanciful thoughts about erasing time and changing fate. Those are impossibilities.”

Eleanor knew that better than most. And yet… “But how can today represent a new beginning if yesterday—”

“It’s not a matter of changing the past, Eleanor. It is a matter of setting the past aside and
seeing
today as a new beginning.”

A knock sounded at the door and they looked up to where the butler, Thomas, stood at the entrance of the room.

The duchess spoke over him. “Never tell me it’s another of the scoundrels here to court my niece?” The older woman had become an almost vigilant protector of Eleanor, since gentleman after gentleman had come calling that afternoon.

“Er, no my lady.” The servant with his powdered hair scratched his brow. “Er, that is I don’t believe so.”

“Humph,” Aunt Dorothea groused. “I’ll decide if the bounder is worthy of Eleanor.”

At that maternal protectiveness in her aunt’s tone, some of the tension went out of Eleanor’s frame replaced instead with warmth. Her mother died when Eleanor had been just one. She’d known only a father’s unwavering love. Moved by her aunt’s parent-like devotion, she captured the older woman’s wrinkled hands and gave them a quick squeeze. “Thank you.”

“Come, enough of that,” the gruff woman patted her knee awkwardly in return. “Well,” she called out to the servant hovering in the doorway. “Who is here this time?”

“The Viscount Wessex has arrived for Mrs. Collins.” Eleanor scrambled forward on the edge of her seat, earning a sideways glance from the duchess. “I’ve taken the liberty of showing him to the drawing room, but I can very well explain Mrs. Collins is not receiving visitors.”

“No!” The exclamation burst from her. The embarrassingly loud and revealing denial bounced off the soaring ceilings. “That is,” she drew in a calming breath and resisted the urge to press her palms to her burning cheeks. Marcus’ visit was merely a product of the request she’d put to him; a pretend courtship to save her from unwanted advances and still, her heart thumped a too-fast beat as it always had when Marcus had been near. Aunt Dorothea pierced her in that assessing duchess-like manner that had terrified Eleanor when she’d first arrived in London all those years ago. “I will see His Lordship.” Eight years later it was no less terrifying.

The duchess said nothing for a moment and then she gave a slight nod. “You heard my niece, Thomas. That will be all.”

The servant sketched a bow and backed out of the room.

The usual frown adopted by her aunt turned up in an uncharacteristic, if rusty, smile. She picked up her cane and jammed the gold tip into Eleanor’s slippers.

Eleanor winced. “Ouch.”

“Run along, gel. The boy is waiting.” A wicked glimmer lit her eyes. “Not that I’m opposed to making a gentleman wait. But he’s a good boy, that one.”

He was. By station established at birth and then circumstances determined by a vile, black cad, Eleanor, however, had been placed firmly in an altogether different category than the one occupied by Marcus. She knew that. Eleanor pushed herself to her feet and silently handed the book over to her aunt. Forsaking gloves long ago as a sign of independence, she’d said, the older woman took the volume in her bent and wrinkled fingers. Eleanor started for the doorway. Aunt Dorothea had drawn the erroneous, but expected, conclusion about Marcus’ presence. Acknowledging for the first time since she’d enlisted Marcus’ support the deception she perpetuated against the woman who’d plucked her and Marcia from an uncertain fate, guilt sluiced through her.

“Eleanor?”

She paused at the front of the room and turned back around.

“Remember,” Aunt Dorothea held a finger up, “the beginning is always today.”

With those words echoing around her mind, Eleanor made her way through the long, narrow corridors of the lavish townhouse, onward to the drawing room. If she were still the hopeful sort who believed in the power of the fairytales that she now read to her daughter, perhaps she could allow herself the dream of Marcus. The woman she was now well knew that a powerful viscount with extensive landholdings, a man who was revered and admired, could never bind himself to a woman who’d been stripped of her virtue and left with a bastard child.

Nothing could exist for them, except for friendship; the only possible connection that could be was that of mistress.
I want more than that empty entanglement
. She wanted a life with Marcus, without the threat of her past lurking. But it would always be there. The jeering monster in her aunt’s ballroom had been proof of that. Voices within the ivory parlor brought her up short and she lingered at the edge of the door.

“Are those for my mama?”

Eleanor peeked around the doorframe and her heart caught painfully.

Marcus knelt beside her daughter. “No,” he said, his words carrying to the entrance of the room. With his back presented, the item in question Marcia and Marcus spoke of remained hidden from view. “Though I suppose I shall give one of them to your mama.” He shifted and dropped his arm to his side.

Eleanor’s gaze fell to the bouquet of wildflowers clutched in his hand and a vise squeezed about her lungs making it impossible to draw forth breath. Her daughter had been deserving of a father who spoke with the reverent gentleness in Marcus’ tone; a father who would carry her around on his shoulders and spoil her with laughter and love. She captured her lower lip between her teeth, hard. Marcus would have been that manner of father.

Nay, he will be. Just not to my child…

“They are not for my mama?” Disappointment coated Marcia’s words bringing Eleanor back from her agonized musings.

“They are not.”

He held out the collection of white and crimson blooms. “They are for you, Miss Collins.”

Oh, God.
Eleanor gripped the edge of the door and drank in the sight of his broad, powerful form, seduced not by Marcus’ masculine perfection, but by the sight of such a man so beautifully aware and kind to a mere child—her child. Tears popped behind her eyelids and she blinked them back furiously.

“For me?” For all the awe in Marcia’s tone, Marcus may as well have plucked a star from the sky and handed it over to her care.

“For you.”

The muscles of Eleanor’s throat worked under the weight of emotion and she pressed her cheek against the doorjamb. Why would he be so nice to her daughter? He didn’t know, nor would he
ever
know, Eleanor’s flight had been to protect him and save him from some irrational sense to do right by her anyway. All he knew was the betrayal of a hasty note and word of a marriage to another. Yet for all the pain she’d caused him, he would help Eleanor avoid the attentions of lascivious noblemen and also be so heartrendingly sweet to her daughter.

“Why?” Her daughter’s perplexed question echoed Eleanor’s very thoughts.

“Do you know why?”

Marcia shook her head.

“Your King Orfeo’s love—”

“Lady Eurydice,” Marcia supplied.

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “All she wanted was to steal those happy moments in her field of flowers.”

“Instead, she was taken away by the horrible fairy and brought to the Otherworld.”

Eleanor frowned at the cynicism of her small daughter’s recounting. In the telling, through the years, she’d told the story of a lady lost, stolen from her love, and then ultimately found. She’d intended to convey a story of hope and reunion for her daughter, when Eleanor herself had accepted a very different end to her own story.

“That is true,” Marcus said solemnly. He took the bouquet from Marcia’s fingers and slipped free a lone daisy, holding it close to her nose. Her daughter inhaled noisily. “She was lost to that dark world, but not at first. At first she danced and laughed amidst those flowers and then found her happiness after. That is what matters.”

Oh God. A shuddery sob worked its way up her throat and Eleanor buried it in her fingertips. Marcus stiffened. Heart hammering, Eleanor leapt backwards. She pressed a hand against her chest. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

“What was that?” Marcia asked.

Drawing in several, slow calming breaths, Eleanor pasted a smile on and stepped into the room. The two occupants of the room stood side by side. Marcus moved his inscrutable stare over her person and then settled those fathomless blue eyes on her face.

“Mama, Marcus brought me flowers.” Unceremoniously, Marcia tugged the bouquet from his long, powerful fingers and raced across the room to present the display to Eleanor.

“Did he?”

“Oh, yes.” With her chubby little fingers, Marcia held the single daisy up toward Eleanor. “You should have a flower, too.” She tossed a look back at Marcus. “Perhaps when you visit again, you’ll bring Mama flowers, too?”

“Marcia,” she chided, her cheeks warm at her daughter’s boldness.

He inclined his head. “You are, indeed, correct, Miss Collins. I have been remiss.”

“What is remiss?” Marcia asked, her little brow creased with confusion.

Eleanor bent down and brushed her lips over the crown of Marcia’s curls. “It means you need to return abovestairs to your lessons so you might learn all those words you do not know.”

With a very grown-up sigh, Marcia said, “If I must.”

“You must.”

She gave a jaunty wave and without making her proper goodbyes, sprinted from the room. Leaving Eleanor and Marcus and absolute silence in her wake. Fiddling with the lone flower, Eleanor wandered over and came to a stop beside the ivory sofa. “Hullo.”

“Eleanor,” he murmured.

Wetting her lips, she glanced about. How very comfortable she’d once been around him. Now she was a mere shell of the innocent woman she’d been. “Would you care for refreshments?” But one more thing taken from her by a stranger under the star-filled sky.

“No.” Other than that husky, one word utterance, Marcus said nothing.

To give her fingers something to do, Eleanor fidgeted with her skirts, crushing the fabric in her grip. “I-I wanted to thank you, Marcus.”

“Thank me?” He took a step forward and she retreated.

“For agreeing to help with a pre—”

In three long strides he closed the space between them and touched a finger to her lips, silencing the remainder of those words. “Shh.” He leaned down, shrinking the space between them.

Fear clamored in her breast and she battled through the fast growing panic. This was Marcus. He’d never hurt her and she’d wager her very life that he’d never harm her or another. Not a man who could speak so gently as he did to a child; the child of a woman he hated, no less. Marcus whispered against her ear. “Be careful, Eleanor. A wrong word uttered and a lurking servant, and your efforts will be for naught.”