Treacherous Temptations(64)

“Your stepmother came to your bed?”

“Engaging in acts beyond my wildest imaginings. She bewitched me, Mary, just as she had my father.”

“But that is incest!”

“Yes,” he confessed. “By English law it is.”

“Why did you not turn her away?”

“Why? Because I was too weak-willed, too smitten to resist her. Men and women are vastly different, for a man is easily controlled by his baser passions. A woman who understands this can wield an all-consuming power with sex, especially over a man who lacks any prior experience. I was a virgin, Mary, and I lost my head.” He faced her with a plaintive look. “Can you not understand that?”

She understood far better than she would ever admit. Had she not also become bewitched? Had she not lost her head? She had married him, after all. But she had acted out of misplaced trust, and had harmed no one but herself. “We all err, Hadley, yet you persisted in what you knew was an iniquitous, incestuous, and adulterous relationship.”

“Yes, we persisted. My father knew by then that she had a lover, but turned a blind eye, so we grew careless. And then one night…” He looked away with a shudder. “You know that part.”

“You speak so coldly, Hadley. Have you no remorse at all?” she asked.

“Bloody hell! How can you ask that? Not a day has passed that I have not suffered guilt and remorse. It has eaten at me incessantly! I began by drinking heavily. I abandoned my studies only months from graduating, and eventually left the country to roam the continent like a gypsy, only to immerse myself in a cesspool of debauchery. I sunk so very low. I don’t know how I didn’t perish.”

“Barbara went with you?”

“God no! I broke relations with her immediately, yet I was still financially dependent on her. When my money ran out after two years, she came to me in Italy with a proposition for my maintenance.”

“What kind of proposition?”

He hesitated. “You have suspected me of keeping secrets from you. You have accused me of being two men. In truth, Mary, I am half a dozen different men.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I am a spy, Mary, I have spent the last five years living a life of petty intrigues, betrayal, and lies, and Sir Richard, the very man who ruined my life, controls me. It has become a detestable existence, one from which I cannot seem to extricate myself. I was young, reckless, and desperate for money when I accepted the commission to go to Rome. It seemed easy enough at the time. At first, I was only to ingratiate myself into the Pretender’s circle and report on Jacobite doings, but eventually I was taken in to James’ confidence and began carrying his private letters between Rome and Versailles, but first copying them for Sir Richard.

At the time, it seemed little more than an amusing game of intrigue. I never considered the repercussions of revealing names and exposing the plans of those who had grown to trust me as a friend. I betrayed them, Mary. Men died horrible deaths for my perfidy.”

“Were they not traitors to the king?” she asked.

“Were they?” he asked. “They never acknowledged, or swore allegiance to King George, and their allegiance never wavered from the one they believed was their true king. So I ask you—were they truly traitors?”

“Are you a Jacobite, Hadley?”

“Perhaps I have been converted,” he gave a cynical laugh. “In my experience, the one they call the Pretender is a far more worthy man than the king who presently commands the English throne, and it sickens me to continue in this role of deceit. I want out now. I want my damned life back and Sir Richard won’t allow it! I admit that I first saw you only as a means to an end—to reap vengeance on Sir Richard and to recover what I had lost, but then you became so much more. Can you understand that?”

Everything had changed. He had changed. God, how he wanted to make her understand that, yet it was even beyond his own comprehension. He only knew that he had claimed her as his own and was not about to let her go. Hadley desperately resolved to make her relent, to accept him even as flawed as he was. “You wanted truth, Mary? As unpalatable as it is, I have bared all to you.”

…

Mary searched his face, recognizing the pain it had caused him to re-open the old wounds. He had indeed laid himself bare, but how could she ever trust a man who had done what he had done? His entire life was built on lies and deceit, from fornicating with his own stepmother to betraying those who most trusted him. Perhaps his contrition was genuine, but for Mary it was still too little, too late.

She broke away from his gaze on a strangled sob, “I can’t. I can’t go with you, Hadley.”

“Damn it, Mary!” Anguish dulled his eyes. “What do you want from me? Tell me.”

Her eyes burned and her throat felt like sandpaper. “Nothing beyond the use of your name.” She barely voiced the lie over the lump in her throat. She wanted more, so very much more, but the chasm was too deep.

“You will not be safe from them. I can protect you.”

“Your name alone will protect me, for now they cannot wed me to another.”

“Sir Richard will contest the marriage in the courts,” Hadley argued.

“As you said, that will take time,” she countered. “I only need a good attorney to stall the proceedings. In the interim, my status as a married woman will allow me to return to Welham Grove.”