A Passion for Pleasure(81)

“Clara.”

A smile tugged at her mouth. “I like her.”

“Why did you come back?” Sebastian asked, not wanting to discuss his wife with a woman who had severed her own marriage through infidelity.

“I came back to see you,” Catherine said.

“And I’m to be grateful for that?” Anger pierced Sebastian, and he leaned across the table to fix her with a glare. “For the love of God, you caused a scandal and ran away, leaving your family to clean up the mess. You forced the earl to divorce you. You left your daughter with all of society thinking she was no better than her dissolute mother. Did you not once think about what a wreckage you created?”

“Of course I thought about it.” Although regret weighted her words, Sebastian detected no trace of shame. His anger hardened at the notion that she would not be ashamed of what she had done.

“I thought about nothing else after it all came to light,” she said. “But what else could I have done but leave? If I’d returned to London, it would have made everything worse. I knew that if I fled, everyone would cast blame upon me and claim my children had fallen into misfortune because I was their mother. I hoped you would be spared any condemnation.”

“We weren’t,” Sebastian said bluntly. “But we might have withstood it if we’d known what happened.”

“Oh, Sebastian.” She looked down at her hands. Once soft and white, her hands were now browned and wrinkled. “I wish I could tell you it was a mistake. That I didn’t want it to happen. That I never meant for it to happen. But when it did, I felt like…I don’t know. Like something had broken inside me. Broken open.”

Like when I met Clara. Sebastian pushed the thought aside, not wanting to draw any more similarities between him and his mother.

“Catherine.” Sebastian tried to keep his voice level. “What did happen?”

“I fell in love.”

Bloody hell.

“I’d taken a trip back to St. Petersburg,” Catherine said. “Do you remember? My sister had an invitation to a Court ceremony for regimental troops. She didn’t want to attend, so I went in her stead. I met him there. Alexei. He was a captain in the army, younger than me by six years. He didn’t care. He was handsome, bright, courteous. He made me feel like the only woman in the room.”

“So you abandoned your family for him.”

She almost winced. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t…vulgar.”

“A married woman…a countess, for God’s sake, having an affair is the height of vulgarity, Catherine.”

“To you, perhaps. To society. Not to us. Do you have any idea what it was like being married to Rushton? We never loved each other, not really. I know he is not a cruel man, but he was so…rigid. So strict. He had no life inside him, no fire. Every day I felt as if I had to hold myself together so tightly or I’d otherwise break like glass. I didn’t even realize I felt like that until I met Alexei. In that moment, I knew I had to make a choice. I had to either plunge into a world of brilliant, dangerous colors that could shatter us all or return to a life in which I felt dead.”

“You didn’t think of us?”

“Of course I thought of you. But, Sebastian, you were all living your own lives. I rarely saw any of you, did you even realize that?”

“No, but how much did we ever see of you?”

“That didn’t mean I didn’t love you,” Catherine said. “I always loved hearing you play the piano, even when you were a child. Do you remember?”

He cleared his throat. “You used to play as well.”

Only when he had watched Catherine play the piano, her hands skimming with such grace over the keys, had she been real to him. Alive.

“I played more for myself than an audience,” Catherine said. “I so admired you when you began performing and earned such accolades. I wish I’d had such courage.” She traced a scratch on the table with her finger.

“You all grew up so quickly,” she continued. “And Alexander became busy with his company, Darius with his studies, you with your music. Even Talia spent all her time with friends and charities, and of course Rushton was never there. I drifted around his vast house like a ghost. Until I realized that it would be my tomb if I didn’t escape.”

Sebastian dragged his hand over his hair, hating the gleam of understanding that sparked to life within him. He knew well what it was like to feel as if you no longer had anything. And that if you didn’t do something about it, you would cease to exist. It was that urge, like a hammer striking a piano string, reverberating and echoing into his blood.