Again the Magic (Wallflowers 0.5)(85)

With every word he had spoken, Aline felt despair twist inside her. She could hardly draw breath around the huge choking knot in her chest. “You must believe me when I say that it would impossible for us to be happy together. I care for you, McKenna, but I…” She hesitated and took a pained gasp before forcing herself to continue. “I don’t love you in that way. I cannot marry you.”

“You don’t have to love me. I’ll accept whatever you can give.”

“No, McKenna.”

He came to her, dropped to his haunches, and took one of her cold, perspiring hands in his own. The heat of his flesh was startling. “Aline,” he said with difficulty, “I love you enough for the both of us. And there must be something about me worth loving. If you would just try…”

The need to tell him the truth was enough to drive Aline insane. As she considered it wildly, her heart beat so hard that it hurt, and there was an icy prickling all over her skin. She tried to envision it, showing him the disfiguring scars right here and now. No. No.

She felt like a creature caught in a net, struggling in vain to break free of the filaments of the past, which tightened around her with every movement. “It’s not possible.” Her hands clenched into the soft silk of her dress.

“Why?” The word was harshly spoken, but there was a vulnerability behind it that made her want to weep. Aline knew what McKenna wanted, and needed—a partner who would gladly yield herself to him, in and out of bed. A woman who had the wisdom to take pride in all the things he was, and never mind about the things he could never be. Once Aline might have been that for him. But now that could never happen.

“You’re not of my class,” she said. “We both know that.”

It was the one thing she could say that would convince him. An American he might be, but McKenna had been born in England, and he would never be able to completely rid himself of the class awareness that had permeated every aspect of his existence for eighteen years. For such a comment to come from her was the ultimate betrayal. She looked away, not wanting to see his expression. She was dying inside, her heart turning to ash.

“Christ, Aline,” came his ragged whisper.

She turned away from him. They stood like that for a long time, both struggling with unexpressed emotion, fury feeding on hopelessness. “I don’t belong with you,” she said hoarsely. “My place is here, with…with Lord Sandridge.”

“You can’t make me believe that you would choose him over me—not after what’s happened between us, damn it! You let me touch you, hold you, in a way you never let him.”

“I’ve gotten what I wanted,” she forced herself to say. “And so have you. After you leave, you’ll see that it was for the best.”

McKenna nearly crushed her hand as his grip tightened. Turning her hand up, he laid his cheek against the soft cushion of her palm. “Aline,” he whispered, mercilessly divesting himself of all pride, “I’m afraid of what I’ll become if you won’t have me.”

Aline’s throat and head ached, and she finally began to cry, tears sliding down her cheeks. She jerked her hand from his, when all she wanted to do was pull his head to her br**sts. “You’ll be fine,” she said shakily, dragging a sleeve across her streaming face as she walked away without looking back. “You’ll be fine, McKenna—just go back to NewYork. I don’t want you.”

Mrs. Faircloth arranged a row of rare crystal glasses on the shelves in her private room, where the most fragile household valuables were kept under lock and key. Her door had been left half open, and she heard someone approach the threshold in a slow, almost reluctant tread. Leaning out from the shelf, she glanced at the doorway to behold McKenna’s large outline, his face shadowed. Poignant regret filled her as she realized that he must have come for a last private talk.

Recalling McKenna’s offer to take her back to America with him, Mrs. Faircloth was conscious of a small, unheeded wish that she could accept the invitation. Foolish old hen, she scolded herself, knowing that it was too late for a woman her age to consider uprooting herself. All the same, the prospect of going to live in another country had kindled her blood with an unexpected sense of adventure. It might have been wonderful, she thought wistfully, to experience something new as she approached her sunset years.

However, she would never leave Lady Aline, whom she had loved too dearly and for too long. She had watched over Aline from infancy to adulthood, sharingin every joy and tragedy of her life. Although Mrs. Faircloth cared for Livia and Marcus as well, she had to admit privately that Aline had always been her favorite. In the hours when Aline had hovered closest to death, Mrs. Faircloth had felt the despair of a mother losing her own child…and in the years afterward, watching Aline grapple with fearful secrets and broken dreams, the bond between them had strengthened even more. As long as Aline needed her, there was no thought in the housekeeper’s mind of leaving her.

“McKenna,” Mrs. Faircloth said, welcoming him into her room. As he stepped into the quiet lamplight, the expression on his face troubled her, reminding her of the first time she had seen him, a poor motherless bastard with cold blue-green eyes. Despite his lack of expression, fury and grief clung to him in an invisible mantle, too profound, too absolute, for him to give voice to. He could only stand there and stare at her, not knowing what he needed, having come to her only because there seemed to be no other place to go.