Forever Betrothed, Never the Bride (Scandalous Seasons #1)(75)

Drake jumped up and began to pace.

Emmaline cocked her head. “Drake?”

“Hmm?” He continued his path. Back and forth. With as close as he’d come to losing her, Drake would imagine he should have found if not the perfect words, then something suitable.

“Are you all right?”

“Uh-, I…fine. Fine.” He stopped abruptly in front of her. With a jerky movement, he leaned down and tugged Emmaline upright.

She pitched forward landing hard against his side. “Oomph.”

Emmaline pulled back and eyed him with a healthy dose of concern. “Uh-are we done with the picnic?”

Drake directed his eyes skyward. He needed Cupid’s intervention to salvage this sorry, sorry proposal.

Sir Faithful chose that moment to sidle over on his belly, effectively wedging himself between Drake and Emmaline.

Apparently Cupid was otherwise busy.

“The moon is in the sky…”

Emmaline looked up in confusion, and shielded her eyes against the glaring sun high in the cloudless blue sky. “It is? Where?”

“Uh-no, not now. That is to say, it is not in the sky at this precise moment. What I intended to say is…” A black curse fell from his lips. Mayhap Sin was right and he should forget all the nonsense with poetry.

Emmaline’s eyes widened the size of saucers.

This was certainly not a proposal for the ages. Frustrated with the debacle he was making out of the moment, he dragged a hand through his hair. “My apologies,” he muttered. “What I meant to say is—”

Except those words also eluded him and Drake was once again left with a dry mouth and incoherent thoughts. Who would have imagined he, the otherwise unflappable Marquess of Drake, should find himself bumbling his way through a marriage proposal?

“I need to speak to you about the day your father died.” He winced. Hardly the stuff a young lady preferred to hear when a gentleman was asking for her hand. Maybe he should go back to the stuff about the moon and the stars.

“Drake?”

Suddenly the prospect of facing down a line of French soldiers seemed vastly less terrifying than sharing the truth with Emmaline and risking rejection at her hands.

Emmaline slid her hand into his and from the gentle squeeze she gave, found strength and courage. “I don’t want to dwell on the past. I—”

As tempted as he was to bury the story that had haunted him since he’d returned from the Peninsula, he would not be able forgive himself if he withheld this truth from her. “No. I need to have out with it.” He drew in a deep fortifying breath. “I was coming to see you. I need you to know that.” The words were guttural, wrenched from somewhere deep inside him. “I became used to walking during the war. When I returned, I walked everywhere. I was coming to your residence that morning. There was a carriage accident. A broken axle, I suspect. I heard shouts and cries. Something happened to me in that moment. I forgot where I was. I came to hours later, in an alley, not knowing what had happened. That is why I did not go to you the day your father died. And I am sorrier for that than you can ever know.”

The only indication Emmaline had heard his confession was the subtle pressure she applied to his hand interlocked with hers. Time crept by. He awaited her rejection, her pity, and what was more, he would understand that rejection.

Her eyes flitted back and forth across his face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His words emerged on a hoarse whisper. “How could I have shared that with a young lady I barely knew?”

Emmaline sat back on her heels. “I thought it was because of me. I thought you didn’t want to see me.” It seemed those words were directed more to herself. “I thought…” She shook her head and gave him a sad little smile. “To think, I took your absence as a personal slight. I believed you were too engrossed with your own merriment, that you couldn’t take time to pay your respects. How odd, to now know, you needed me just as much as I needed you.

Drake stared at a point over the crown of her hair. He inhaled the faint scent of lemons, which always clung to her. It represented purity and filled his senses with the heady aphrodisiac of hope. “How many what ifs there are. What if you had sent your letters? What if I had written you? What if I had shown up and paid my respects the day your father passed away? What would our life be like at this moment?”

The amount of regret he carried seemed enough to fill the Thames River.

But he had to tell her the whole of it. He could not offer her marriage without the truth laid out between them. Even if the truth could cost him—her.

“I still have nightmares…and as you witnessed, the episodes.” He studied his hands a moment. “They come less frequently than when I first returned from the Peninsula, but they are still there. I…” He swallowed. “Fear the war turned me into a madman. The day I visited you in your garden, I put my hands on you and it almost killed me. I cannot make you my wife, without you knowing everything there is to know.”

She reached a tremulous hand out and with a fleeting caress, stroked his tense jaw. “I wrote you a note. It was about a dream I’d had. The war was over—”

“I was wandering about a field, lost.”

“I wrote, if you are lost—’”

“I will help you.” He finished and felt his throat bob up and down under the force of his emotion.