Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(41)
She would never see him again even if he lived. He was leaving.
“I am sorry, Gwyneth,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
She nodded and looked down at her hands. How absurd, really. This time yesterday he was just a dream from the days of her youth. This time yesterday a scene like this was unthinkable. If all had stayed as it was this time yesterday he would not even have been on that hill to overhear his father and Mrs. Shaw in the pavilion. None of last night would have happened. None of this would be happening now.
And suddenly he was behind her and his hands were gripping her shoulders and she was turning and burying her face against him.
“I am so sorry,” he said again, his voice low and unsteady against her ear. “Forgive me for saying this, for I have no right and you must forget me immediately. Today. But I do love you, Gwyneth. With all my heart. I will always love you.”
“If you loved me,” she heard herself say, pressing her hands against his chest so that he would move back from her, “you would not have made that public scene last night, Devlin. I begged you not to, but you did anyway.”
The words, bitterly spoken, seemed not to be coming from her. They were not what she was thinking. She was not thinking at all, in fact. She was all pure, raw agony.
“Yes,” he said, gazing at her. “You did, Gwyneth. And I did. Accept my apologies, please.”
“And if you loved me,” she said, “you would not be leaving me in this cowardly manner. You would be staying here and fighting for me. You would be persuading Dad to let you marry me, and you would be taking me off to Wales or somewhere to set up a new life with me instead of with your stupid foot regiment. You know nothing about love. You have never loved me. You scarcely knew of my existence until suddenly yesterday you thought you fancied me and got stirred up by a bit of moonlight and music. And lust. And you called it love. You do not know the meaning of the word. A man does not leave the woman he loves.”
He gazed at her with that closed-off Devlin look of his—the one he had used on her a year ago when she had met him at the bottom of the hill while they were both out riding. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I cannot offer you so little. It would be the ultimate act of selfishness.”
“One’s heart is such a little thing, is it?” she asked scornfully. “There is no warmth in you, Devlin. No give. You are all inflexible righteousness. I have never loved you either. How could I have? The man with whom I have been infatuated does not even exist. I saw you, and I made you into the image of my dream man. You are not the only one who learned truth last evening. I learned it too. I saw that I have loved an illusion. I do not even like the real Devlin Ware. I am glad you are going away and never coming back.”
“Gwyneth,” he said, and reached out a hand for her.
She batted it away. “Go on,” she said. “Go. I have to get ready for church. Go.”
And he dropped his hand to his side, made her a formal bow, and strode from the room without another word.
By the time the sound of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels came from outside, Gwyneth was on her knees on the floor, her head bowed forward, the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes.
And now, she thought as the sound of the receding curricle grew faint and then disappeared altogether, it was too late to call him back. To tell him she had not meant a word of what had just come pouring out of her. To tell him, as he had told her, that she loved him with all her heart and always would.
Though she would never see him again.
* * *
—
It must have been close to noon when they made their first stop to change the horses and have something to eat, though Devlin ate less than half of his meat pasty and noticed that Ben ate very little more of his own. They had been back on the road for half an hour or so, Ben at the ribbons now, before Devlin spoke—the first to break the silence between them since they had left Cartref.
“So, what are you going to do, Ben?” he asked. “After we have reached London, that is.”
“Hang about there for a few days at least,” Ben said. “Then go with you.”
Devlin turned his head sharply and looked at him. “I’ll probably get sent out to the Peninsula sooner rather than later,” he said. “You know I am planning to purchase a commission. In a foot regiment. Perhaps the Ninety-Fifth—the Rifles.”
“I will go there with you,” Ben said.
“As a fellow officer?” Devlin asked.
“Not as a military man at all,” Ben said. “I have money. I suppose you are aware that our . . . father settled a tidy sum on me right after my mother died. It was in trust until I turned twenty-five, which I did earlier this year. It has grown into something of a fortune over the years. And then there has been my salary, which has been largely unspent. I will not spend any of what I have on a commission, though. I do not believe in killing people against whom I have no grudge. I could do it in self-defense perhaps if there was no alternative, or in defense of someone dear to me. But not just because I was ordered to do it in some senseless battle.”
“Then why would you come with me?” Devlin asked.
His brother did not answer for a while. Finally he said, “Because I think you might need me, Dev. You are a bit of a dangerous innocent. You see everything in terms of good and evil. Right and wrong. Truth and lies. With nothing in between. Yet in this world we live in almost everyone fits somewhere between those extremes.”