A Scot in the Dark (Scandal & Scoundrel #2)(83)

“That is not how it works.” She clutched the plaid to her breast, the fabric tempting him with little glimpses of shadow.

“You told me once that love is a powerful promise.” And it was. “My father learned that firsthand. As did I.”

Her eyes widened and he loathed the sadness there. “What happened?”

“She left us.”

Lily’s lips opened in a little, silent inhale. “When?”

He wanted to touch her more than he wanted to breathe, but this story, this prophetic tale, required telling. “When I consider it, she left our hearts long before she left us in truth. I cannot remember a time when she was happy.”

She did not look away from him. “Not even with you?”

“Especially not with me. I was all Scots. Too big. Too coarse. I would come in from the fields and she would shake her head in disappointment and say, to herself as much as to me, Nothing about you fits.”

Her brows were stitched together. “What does that mean? Fits where?”

“Here,” he whispered, the word harsh with memory. “The afternoon at the park. When you told me that you hadn’t received a birthday gift since you were a child?” She tilted her head in silent question. “I think you had the best of the possible scenarios. I doubt my mother ever even knew it was my birthday.”

What a ridiculous thing to remember. He was a grown man, four and thirty, and thinking on his childhood birthdays as though they mattered. He cleared his throat. Tried for calm. “She ran, eventually. She’d been sick for months—consumption—and she was convinced that it was Scotland that was doing it. Killing her.” He looked away. “I often wonder if she thought it was me.”

“She didn’t,” Lily said, and he could not help himself from looking at her. From meeting her grey eyes and drinking in the certainty in them. “It was not you.”

And for a fleeting moment, he wondered what might have become of him if he’d had Lily then, when his whole world had crashed down around him.

She might have saved him. Might have loved him.

Might have borne him a line of beautiful little girls, red-haired and perfect, who would have worn the little clothes she’d sewn and mended his heart.

Instead . . . “She died not two weeks after she returned to England.”

Lily gasped his name and reached for him, but he stepped out of her reach, not trusting himself in the wake of her touch. “You did not kill her.”

“I know,” he said. “But neither did I save her.”

She shook her head. “You cannot save us all.”

“The moment I was old enough, I fled as well. For England. For school. My father—” He stopped.

“What of him?” she asked, her gaze falling to his hand, where the scar reminded him of his father every day.

And then she was watching him. More beautiful than a woman should be. “When I was in school, they made us learn the myths.” Her brow furrowed in beautiful confusion, but he did not give her time to reply. “We were required to translate them from the Greek, and every boy in the course loathed the project. King did all he could to get out of it. He paid me to do the work for him on more than one occasion.”

She smiled, turning on her side, sending the plaid sliding against her, a whisper of wool on skin. “You did not attempt to escape your studies?”

“I did not have the luxury of it.”

She nodded. “Not yet a duke.”

The Scottish Brute.

He shook his head, watching as the fabric clung to the swell of her hip, to the curve of her breast. “Do you know about Selene?”

She smiled, small and sweet. “She was goddess of the moon.”

He nodded. “She was also sister to the sun and the dawn, the daughter of Titans and a beauty beyond words. She was the scandalous child—the one who was changeable and unsettling. She could move the tides and light the heavens and provide cover for the nefarious deeds of the world if she wished. The sun came every day, as did the dusk, but the moon, it was like joy. Purposeful and inconstant. She was queen of the night.”

Lily watched him with rapt attention, and his fingers itched to touch her, but still he kept himself from her.

“One night, as she moved across the sky, her light touched on a sleeping shepherd.”

“Endymion,” Lily said, the name a rapt whisper.

He nodded. “He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen—peaceful and good, and everything she’d ever wanted. Selene fell immediately in love, despite keen awareness of the impossibility of their match. She could not be with him, not every day. Not all day. Her time with him was limited. Ephemeral.”

She sat up then, clutching the fabric to her, covering all the beautiful, secret parts of her—all the parts he would give everything to see. “Alec—” she said, as though if she could stop the myth, she might be able to stop the course of their tale.

“He woke as she stood over him and, witnessing her unbearable beauty, fell instantly in love as well. But he could not bear to be without her, not even for a day. Not even for a moment. Not even for a breath. And so he begged the gods to grant him eternal sleep, so that he might never know what it was to live without her.” Alec lifted one hand, finally, lifting a long auburn curl from the place it draped over her shoulder, watching it slide through his fingers, tempting him with silken promise, making him want to bind his wrists in the stunning stuff and remain her prisoner forever.