The Day of the Duchess (Scandal & Scoundrel #3)(82)

“I knew before I booked passage on the damn ship that it was you. And I found you the moment I landed—went to Calhoun’s raucous tavern and made a fool of myself looking for you. I heard you, dammit. I heard you singing, and I knew it was you. And still, there was enough disappointment that you’d fled me and our life, that I believed them when they told me it wasn’t you, I believed them.” He looked away again. “It wasn’t disappointment. It was fear. Fear that you might not return. Fear that you might not want to. Fear of where we are, now.”

Silence fell, and then, “Caleb knew who you were?”

“He knew I was after you. He hid you from me. . . . Not before I broke his nose,” he added, evoking the one moment of light in the darkness.

Her eyes went wide. “You were the toff.”

“He never told you.”

“No.” She shook her head, and he could see the shock in her eyes as she added, softly, “It never occurred it was you. I had . . . admirers. We had a signal.” She paused, lost in thought. “I left the stage when men became too . . . forcefully interested.”

He wanted to murder someone at that, but he swallowed the rage. “You didn’t know it was me.”

She shook her head. “He never told me. If I’d known, I would have . . .”

His gaze found hers in the fading words. “What would you have done?”

The summer breeze was the only movement around them, her skirts whipping about her legs, clinging to them. To his, as though her clothing knew the truth she denied. He took the touch, a piece of her he could thieve.

“I don’t know what I would have done,” she said, and he clung to that honest uncertainty. She didn’t say she would have ignored him. Didn’t say she’d have sent him packing. “You were the past, and I wanted nothing to do with it.”

“You left me,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “You left me here, to live in the past, frozen in time, full of regret, and you took yourself off to the future.”

“Full of regret because you could not win me,” she said softly. “I was always a prize, Mal. Even when I was punishment.”

That much was true. He would take a lifetime of pain with her for a moment of pleasure. He pressed on. “But you didn’t find the future, did you?”

“Because I am not freed for it!” she argued.

Perhaps it was the memory of the past that made him say it. Perhaps it was remembering the way he’d ached for her. The desperation he’d felt. The desire to find her. To win her again. It did not matter. “For every moment I do not free you, Sera, there is an equal one in which you do not free yourself. You think I do not see you? I have always seen you. You have always been in vivid color for me. Glittering sapphire on the first night you found me. Emeralds and golds and silvers and red—Christ, that red. I am obsessed with that red. The red of the afternoon you came here. The red at Liverpool’s garden party, when you stood like a goddamn queen and watched me ruin us like a goddamn fool.” He stopped, cursing into the wind as he tilted his head back with the memory.

“We weren’t ruined then,” she said.

“No, we weren’t. We were ruined long before.”

“Before we even met.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw as he watched her, as he considered what to say next. “Don’t think for a second that I haven’t seen you since you returned—that I haven’t seen you in equally vivid color. In slate and amethyst and lavender and today, in aubergine.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “Don’t.”

“Last night, you told me I consumed you. You think I am not consumed as well? By our past? You think I do not see that you ache for it? For what we were once promised?” He paused and looked toward the trees, and then, soft as silk, “You think I do not mourn, as well?”

He reached for her, then, taking her by the hand with firm, unyielding resolve and pulling her into the trees. Into the clearing they surrounded, where a beautiful little garden was hidden away in a golden pool of light.

He let her go, watching as she moved to the monument at the center of the clearing. To the stone angel there, seated on a platform etched with two simple words. Beloved Daughter.

Silence stretched forever, until he could no longer bear it. She crouched, placing her fingers to the letters. “You did this.”

“I came to you after it was done,” he said. “My hands still frozen from the cold. My boots covered in snow and dirt. I came to tell you that I wished to start anew. You were asleep, but no longer at risk. I told myself there would be time to win you. To love you.”

She looked over her shoulder, urging him to go on.

“You slept most of the next day. And the day after, you were gone.”

She nodded, tears stealing her words, harnessing them at the back of her throat. “I had to leave.”

“I know,” he said. “I think I half expected you to be gone when I returned. But when I discovered it—that my mother had given you the money to run—I went wild. I banished her from the house; I never saw her again.” He approached, coming to his knees next to her. “It might be best I did not find you in those days. I am not sure I could have won you then. Your sisters saw it in me. They sent me east when I should have gone west. Calhoun, too, hiding you from me like a bone from a dog. And they all might have been right.” He reached for her, one large, warm hand finding purchase at her jaw. “I wanted you. Desperately. I wanted this.”