Addicted to the Duke (Imperfect Lords #1)(83)
She hoped Alex was talking with her father right now.
Perhaps, now that they were out of danger, he was having doubts. She worried that with everything that had happened to Alex, he didn’t know how to love. She knew he had feelings for her, but could he love her?
“I have enough love for both of us,” she quietly said out loud to herself, praying she would be enough for a man so terribly hurt by life.
She had a fair idea now what Murad had done to him. It seemed he treated his male slaves similarly to how he treated his female ones. She had read Greek plays and understood how two men fornicated.
Hestia didn’t blame him for the bitterness and dissolution he felt. It was his inability to lay any of his horrid past to rest that broke her heart. She couldn’t erase his memories for him, but she could help ease the pain. On a sigh she realized that only Alex could get rid of ghosts from his past. And it seemed like he wasn’t willing or able to do so.
“Beautiful night.”
Hestia whirled around to find Alex leaning against a gnarled olive tree. His fair hair glinted silver in lanterns hanging around the walls of the garden, the setting highlighting both his earthly beauty and the torment in his eyes.
Unable to bear his expression, she turned away and closed her eyes, wrapping her arms around her waist. She wanted to scream at the injustice of the situation. Please fight for me…
“Do I not deserve a welcome?”
“It depends on the outcome of your talk with my father.”
“Your are a vixen at times, my sweet. I have yet to speak with him. There are things we must discuss first.”
She turned back to him and stared him in the eye. “I’m not sure how I should greet you then. How does one greet a man you have shared your body with?”
His lips curved into that heartbreaking smile of his. “Hello, my lover? Or, hello, my friend?”
She smiled. “Oh, you make me so mad…I’ve never wanted to be just your friend.”
Alex moved closer. “I know you can never hate me,” he teased. “It’s just not in you to do so.”
Hestia wanted so desperately to reach out to him, to wrap her arms around his neck and hold him close. She also wanted to pick up the heavy stick lying on the ground and hit him over the head until some sense entered that thick skull of his.
His smile dimmed. “I wish I could truly be the man you think I am. But sometimes we cannot escape our past.”
Hestia reached toward him. But he angled away, not wanting to be touched.
“It’s not escape from your past that you need. You need to embrace it, realize what you have endured has helped you become the man you are today. Murad’s dead; show everyone that your past won’t stop you from having a happy and fulfilled life.”
“They say war changes a man. The war with the Turks did change me. It made me realize that fighting for what you believe in is important. I was proud to have done my duty, until Murad’s pirates captured me. In captivity, I lost my pride, my heart, and my soul. I’m not sure I have anything left to give to anyone that is worth a damn.”
She wanted to scream that there was so much to love about him. Why couldn’t he love himself?
Murad had taken him to Bodrum, where he had been kept as a slave. Having met the pirate in person, she had an understanding of what that must’ve been like for Alex. She had once thought the vagaries of her life had been cruel, losing her mother, her father basically ignoring her, the lack of any siblings, and the loneliness she felt on a regular basis, but she had not known how deep cruelty could truly go.
“You have so much good in you. You worked hard to build your estate, you look after those who are loyal to you, and you helped me.”
Alex looked at her with pity. “I helped myself. I came for Murad more than to rescue your father.”
“You still protected me. Jacob told me why you went willingly with Murad. You allowed yourself to be captured again, knowing what he would do to you, just to keep me safe.”
He shrugged. “At least I knew what to expect this time. You have had a taste of how Murad operated. When he captured me the first time, he had me hooked on opium within weeks, and then he controlled me. I didn’t understand at the time what he was doing, what the drug was doing to me. Most doctors in England don’t understand either. I have seen women go crazy if the laudanum they have been given for their headaches runs out and they cannot get any more. Once you are used to the opium, your body wants more, more, and more, until you will do anything to get the drug.”
She closed her eyes and shuddered, grief rising inside her for a young man who had faced such evil.
Taking a step closer to him, she said, “Can’t you see that the man you were when under the influence of that dreadful drug was not really you? If Murad had to use drugs, it was not your soul or heart or body he controlled. The only way he could get you to do the things he wanted you to do was to distort the person that you were into somebody else.”
A long stretch of silence enshrouded them, filled only by the rustling leaves, until finally he said, “Do you understand the things I did with Murad? I’m damaged, perverse, disgusting—”
“Not to me,” Hestia said, interrupting. “Never to me.” A tear tracked down her cheek.
“Many think I’m a coward for surviving. Perhaps I am.”
“I think you’re the bravest man I’ve ever known. I might have been na?ve before, but not any longer. I don’t care what Murad did to you.” Hestia moved in front of him and reached up to press a kiss to his cheek. “All I see is a man strong enough, and brave enough, to survive. The man I love. Can you love me in return? That’s all I’m interested in.”