Always Proper, Suddenly Scandalous (Scandalous Seasons #3)(63)

A wet strand of hair fell across her eye and she brushed it back.

Geoffrey ran a dark, cursory stare of that single lock. Her toes curled within her wet slippers as she considered how she must appear to him, with her hair hanging limply, shamefully down her back.

She cringed as Geoffrey’s gaze, teeming with hot loathing, scraped over her face.

“Geoffrey,” she said, hating the way her voice cracked.

The servant gasped, and a mortified heat rushed her cheeks at having been discovered calling upon a gentleman and using his Christian name.

“That will be all,” Geoffrey called, almost bored, from where he stood, hand resting casually, elegantly upon the rail. He made his way swiftly down the stairs, and all the hope, all the dreams she’d carried in her heart since Beatrice had made her mad prediction about the viscount’s feelings for her, died as he stopped before her.

He raked his cold stare over her trembling frame, and she tugged her muslin cloak closer. “Madam, I do not know the meaning of your visit.”

“I needed to speak to you Geoffrey. Please,” she implored him, holding her palms up.

He folded his arms across his broad chest, and arched a single, chestnut brow. He, in his dry, immaculate fawn-colored breeches and white cambric shirt, looked so coolly perfect and elegant. His perfection only served to highlight the fact that she now stood before him, a bedraggled mess amidst a puddle formed by the water that clung to her ruined skirts and soaking slippers. “Well, madam.”

Madam. He uttered that word as though it were a vile epithet.

“Please, Geoffrey…”

“Madam, it is late. I am tired. And you…” he peered down his aquiline nose at her. “And you are making quite a mess of my marble foyer.”

She flinched, his words hurt like he’d physically struck her. How can you be so coldly unforgiving? How when I love you as I do?

He took a step around her, and Abigail dimly registered that he’d reached for the door handle. “No.” Abigail held a hand up, begging him with that staying motion to please hear her out.

Geoffrey stopped, his hand remained on the door, as though one wrong word on her part, and he’d throw the door open and toss her onto the steps like yesterday’s refuse.

“Say what it is you’ve come to say and be done with it?”

Abigail’s throat burned with the realization that he’d not grant her a private audience. He’d make her spill her shame here upon his foyer. Her back went up. Well, that was fine. She’d braved a far greater humiliation than this.

“There was a man,” she blurted.

His body went taut. The well-chorded muscles of his chest strained against his white cambric shirt, the only telltale indication that he’d heard her words.

Abigail took a deep breath, and searched for the resolve to tell the story. “I loved him.” She grimaced. “Or I believed I did.” She hadn’t truly known love. Not until Geoffrey. She knew that now.

He remained silent, but he did not open that door and so she had to believe that meant something. She sucked in a breath. “He was my brother’s dearest friend.” Her gaze slipped away from Geoffrey. “I believe he saw me as nothing more than an inconvenience. He began to visit my brother more and more. Only I soon realized, it was too see me. He brought me flowers, and told me wicked, little jests, and teased me quite mercilessly.” Abigail’s gaze skittered off to the wood panel of the door just beyond Geoffrey’s shoulder. She focused on the white polish of the wood door to spare herself the wintry disdain she saw etched upon the sharp planes of Geoffrey’s cheeks. Odd, she’d expected the recounting of events to hurt greater than this. “Papa and Mama didn’t approve of him,” she said at last.

An odd, garbled kind of laugh seemed to work its way up Geoffrey’s throat and lodge there. She jerked her gaze up and found that mocking sneer on his lips. “Oh?”

Just that one derisive utterance; a clear indication that nothing she said next would matter, but still, she’d not leave until she’d said it all.

Abigail thought to the great many arguments that had ensued over the suitability of Alexander as a match. “He was the illegitimate son of a powerful and wealthy barrister from Connecticut. It didn’t matter,” Abigail said quietly. It had never mattered. Oh, it had to Mama and Papa but not to her. “My parents claimed he merely sought the wealth that marriage to me would bring.” All the burning resentment she’d carried for so long had gone, instead replaced by recognition with the decisions she’d made. “It turned out my mother and father were indeed, correct. Alexander had planned it all. We were attending a soiree at one of the homes of a leading member of society. Alexander lured me to the host’s library and fool that I was, I went.”

She could and would forever regret her personal folly, but she now accepted her own culpability in that one, great mistake. As a woman, she’d made the choice to follow Alexander. “We were…” She felt herself coloring. “Discovered,” she finished lamely.

Geoffrey’s already taut body, stiffened. A muscle ticked at the corner of his eye.

She rushed to have the whole of the story told. “My father threatened to cut me off without a penny. I didn’t care. But Alexander did.” Even now she wondered if the threat leveled by her father had been real. As a child, and until she’d been discovered in Alexander’s arms she had thought her father loved her with an unconditional love…after that moment, she’d begun to doubt the depth of that love.