A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet #2)(71)

She gave him a grateful smile. “I don’t mean to say I blame myself, because I don’t. Not any longer. But I should have known better.”
“Anne . . .”
“No,” she said, stopping his protest. “I should have known better. He did not mention marriage. Not once. I assumed he would ask. Because . . . I don’t know. I just did. I came from a good family. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t want to marry me. And . . . Oh, it sounds horrible now, but the truth was, I was young and I was pretty and I knew it. My God, it sounds so silly now.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Daniel said quietly. “We have all been young.”
“I let him kiss me,” she said, then quietly added, “and then I let him do a great deal more.”
Daniel held himself very still, waiting for the wave of jealousy that never came. He was furious with the man who’d taken advantage of her innocence, but he did not feel jealous. He did not need to be her first, he realized. He simply needed to be her last.
Her only.
“You don’t have to say anything about it,” he told her.
She sighed. “No, I do. Not because of that. Because of what happened next.” She walked across the room in a burst of nervous energy and grasped the back of a chair. Her fingers bit into the upholstery, and it gave her something to look at when she said, “I must be honest, I did like what he did up to a point, and after that, well, it wasn’t dreadful. It just seemed rather awkward, really, and a bit uncomfortable.”
She looked back up at him, her eyes meeting his with stunning honesty. “But I did like the way it seemed to make him feel. And that made me feel powerful, and the next time I saw him, I was fully prepared to let him do it all again.”
She closed her eyes, and Daniel could practically see the memory washing over her face. “It was such a lovely night,” she whispered. “Midsummer, and so very clear. You could have counted the stars forever.”
“What happened?” he quietly asked.
She blinked, almost as if waking from a dream, and when she spoke, it was with an offhandedness that was almost disconcerting. “I found out he had proposed marriage to someone else. The day after I gave myself to him, as a matter of fact.”
The fury that had been building within began to crackle. He had never, not once in his life, felt such anger on behalf of another person. Was this what love meant? That another person’s pain cut more deeply than one’s own?
“He tried to have his way with me, anyway,” she continued. “He told me I was . . . I can’t even remember the exact words, but he made me feel like a whore. And maybe that’s what I was, but—”
“No,” Daniel said forcefully. He could accept that she should have known better, that she could have been more sensible. But he would never allow her to think such a thing of herself. He strode across the room, and his hands came down on her shoulders. She tilted her face toward his, her eyes . . . those bottomless, deep blue eyes . . . He wanted to lose himself. Forever.
“He took advantage of you,” he said with quiet intensity. “He should have been drawn and quartered for—”
A horrified bubble of laughter burst from her mouth. “Oh, dear,” she said, “just wait until you hear the rest of the story.”
His brows rose.
“I cut him,” she said, and it took him a moment to understand what she meant. “He came at me, and I was trying to get away, and I suppose I grabbed the first thing my hand touched. It was a letter opener.”
Oh, dear God.
“I was trying to defend myself, and I only meant to wave the thing at him, but he lunged at me, and then—” She shuddered, and the blood drained from her face. “From here to here,” she whispered, her finger sliding from her temple to her chin. “It was awful. And of course there was no hiding it. I was ruined,” she said with a little shrug. “I was sent away, told to change my name, and sever all ties with my family.”
“Your parents allowed this?” Daniel asked in disbelief.
“It was the only way to protect my sisters. No one would have married them if it got out that I had slept with George Chervil. Can you imagine? Slept with him and then stabbed him?”
“What I cannot imagine,” he bit off, “is a family who would turn you out.”
“It’s all right,” she said, even though they both knew it wasn’t. “My sister and I have corresponded clandestinely all this time, so I wasn’t completely alone.”
“The receiving houses,” he murmured.
She smiled faintly. “I always made sure I knew where they were,” she said. “It seemed safer to send and receive my mail from a more anonymous location.”
“What happened tonight?” he asked. “Why did you leave last week?”
“When I left . . .” She swallowed convulsively, turning her head away from his, her eyes finding some unknown spot on the floor. “He was enraged. He wanted to take me before the magistrate and have me hanged or transported or something, but his father was quite stern. If George made a spectacle of me, he’d lose his engagement with Miss Beckwith. And she was the daughter of a viscount.” She looked up with a wry expression. “It was quite the coup.”
“Did the marriage go forward?”
Anne nodded. “But he has never let go of his vow for revenge. The scar healed better than I might have expected, but he is still marked most visibly. And he was so very handsome before. I used to think he wanted to kill me, but now . . .”