Where Passion Leads (Berkeley-Faulkner #1)(95)

“Don’t!” Rosalie interrupted, torn equally between vast anger and sympathy. “Don’t say it anymore . . . don’t think it anymore! I don’t see her in you. I don’t see your father in you.” She sat on the arm of the chair and framed his face with her hands, her eyes meeting his in an electric gaze. “I’ve trusted you to take care of me, and you have. There are other people who need you, who depend on you. Don’t sit here and be consumed by selfpity. It’s not like you.”

He set down the bottle and took hold of her wrists in an effort to push her away from him, but Rosalie clung to him with determination. In the fleeting struggle she slid onto his lap, and he stopped moving as her warm silk-sheathed body pressed against him.

“She’s just a memory that you have to let go of. How can she have any influence on you now? This is a lovely home, a beautiful place, and with all the sunlight that pours in, don’t look in the corners for shadows that aren’t even there. Get rid of her, let her go.”

Her last words seemed to strike something responsive in him, for Rand looked at her as if really seeing her for the first time. It seemed as if he were about to speak, and then he shook his head slightly, staring into her bright sapphire eyes.

“Why do you feel as if you have to blame yourself?” Rosalie asked in a whisper. “What is it in your past that makes you feel so guilty?”

“Rose,” he said huskily, “I don’t want to talk tonight. Not about the past. Go back to your room.”

Her eyes searched his and her arms went confidingly around his neck. “Perhaps I am very wrong in this assumption,” she said softly, “but I think that you don’t want to lose me by revealing things I would not like to hear about you. But understand, you’ll definitely lose me by keeping your silence. I won’t let you shut me out. Tell me about the things you’ve done . . . Oh, Rand, they can’t be that terrible.”

The alcohol and the weariness seeped through him like poison, leaving him light-headed and vulnerable in a way that he had not been for years. He felt too soiled and tainted to be in the same room with Rosalie, much less hold her so closely, yet it would have taken the combined strength of a hundred men to force him to let her go. “Please, Rand,” she whispered, her hands softly touching the harsh, cleanly cut line of his jaw.

The arms around her waist tightened, and then tightened more until Rosalie fell against those wide shoulders with a gasp, allowing him to hold her so tightly that she could hardly breathe. She smelled brandy and the scent of his skin, and felt him bury his face in the loose, thick mass of her hair. She heard him begin to speak, muttering words that she could barely hear, saying things that she did not understand. His hands clenched in the folds of her gown and in her hair, fingers entwining in the softness, flexing as he murmured hoarsely. Once he began talking, he could not stop. The burden of keeping it all to himself, the blots of his past, the shameful exploits in London, became too heavy to endure, and he bared his soul ruthlessly to her.

She would not have believed him capable of the things that he accused himself of; if the words had come from someone else’s lips she would have thought them to be lies. He told her things that he had never shared with another living soul, secrets and admissions, fragments of stories that bordered on incoherence. Someone he had killed in a duel, a circle of friends that had been nothing better than a conspiracy of dishonor, someone’s marriage he had helped to destroy. He mentioned the names of people she had read about in the London papers, and he mentioned his brother’s and his parents’ names. It seemed that the litany would never end.

Stroking the back of his head and neck, Rosalie comforted him with meaningless phrases. Her cheeks were hot and flushed with embarrassment from much of what he said, things so intimate that she would never have mentioned them even to Amille, ribald and bawdy confessions that degraded the ears as much as the words that were used to describe them. His arms became desperate around her, a bruising vise that she accepted willingly. Most women would have run from the room in horror, for no lady would have endured such a scene. Rosalie listened without pulling back from him, her tender clasp becoming fierce as if she sought to absorb his despair with the tightness of her grip. She had heard that the young bucks of London usually led sordid lives, seeking adventure, pressuring each other into reprehensible acts of cruelty. She did not think that Rand had been any worse than those he had kept company with, but her heart ached for his remorse and self-condemnation.

“It’s all right . . . I understand,” she murmured over and over again, and Rand shook his head tiredly, his eyes gleaming with liquid gold.

“God, how could you understand? You’re too innocent . . . I never should have touched you.” As his outpouring faded into harsh, bitter whispers, the night matured and ripened into the deep lavender that preceded dawn. Rosalie lay quiescently in his arms, cradled against the hard, compacted muscles of his chest. Her forehead was tucked in the sloping juncture of his neck and shoulder, her fingers inserted between the buttons of his shirt to touch the warm skin underneath. Rand’s chest moved evenly and steadily as he sighed quietly, feeling as if he had been battered by a storm.

“You’re the only one who remembers,” she whispered, finding his heartbeat with her fingertips and letting them rest on that vital pulse. “Most people can’t afford to think about the past. They don’t care about what’s over and done with. I don’t care what you’ve done in the past . . . you see? I’m still here. I haven’t left, because I understand that you had to survive. But it’s not important now, it has nothing to do with you anymore. If I can forgive you so easily, can’t you forgive yourself?”