The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(71)
“Yes you are!” she insisted. He was worth his weight in gold, her pirate king. He had wounds deeper than the trenches of the Pacific. He wasn’t a monster, he was a man. A man who’d survived the unfathomable and emerged as a mountain of strength. “I thought you were the devil. I thought you selfish and brutal and cruel, but now…”
He pulled his hand from hers, gently, but firmly. “I am the devil, Lorelai. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I am selfish and brutal and cruel. All I’ve considered is what was best for me. What I wanted to do to you. What I wanted you to do to me. To feel for me. I thought I could live with you as my captive. That I was cold enough to ignore your protestations. But I’m not.”
“I know you’re not,” she encouraged him. “And that’s good. This is what we can build on.” She reached for his other hand, but he backed away. The rift in her heart widened, pouring hurt through her veins.
“No.” He shook his head in perpetuity, as though convincing his own body as well as her. “In taking you, I always knew I would corrupt you. Break you. Destroy you. That’s what I’ve been telling you. It’s why I waited so long. Perhaps it was better if I never came at all.”
“Don’t say that.” She threw the covers off her, struggling with her long nightgown to free her legs and stand. To follow him as he retreated.
“What kind of life would you have with me?” he demanded. “With Nemo, a man obsessed with and possessed of power and infamy? You were right, Lorelai. I have everything in the world, but nothing to offer you.”
“But…” Finally, her feet touched the floor and she struggled to put weight on them as he reached the door. She hobbled around the bed, too unsteady to let go of the bedpost.
Sorrow touched his gaze as he watched her, but he made no move to help. “You are an angel in a world full of devils. And I have made myself king of them all.”
He opened the door and turned away.
“Wait!” she cried. “Stay! Please stay with me. We can discuss this.”
He violently shook his head, gripping the door handle as one would a lifeline. “I thought I deserved you … that I’d earned you through suffering somehow.” His throat worked over a wretched swallow. “I find that I cannot take your purity from you, Lorelai. That I cannot claim the years you have left, shackling you to my side. I will not. I’ve come to realize it’s the one sin I cannot commit.”
“But what if I—”
“I used to love you because I thought you were weak, but I understand now, your goodness makes you stronger than us all.”
She froze. His words like daggers slicing through her heart until it bled into her extremities, turning them numb.
Used to love you.
“You may leave in the morning when it is safe. Take poor Veronica with you. I will make certain both of you are cared for but … I will no longer be your jailor. I will not keep you in chains.”
Lorelai slid to the floor in a puddle of tears to the sound of the bolt securing her door.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lorelai woke with a jolt, even though the hand on her shoulder was gentle.
Farah Blackwell’s gray eyes and silvery hair shone like a Fae creature’s in the sputtering lanternlight. “I’m sorry to wake you, but there’s something—”
A primal sound rent the night, full of both terror and warning. It was the sound a wounded lion might make when cornered by a tribe of hunters.
Lorelai had heard the sound before. On a stormy night much like this one some twenty years ago.
Ash.
Farah had a silk wrapper at the ready as Lorelai flung off the covers and slid from the tall bed. She belted the robe and limped after the Countess Northwalk, cursing the storm’s effect on her leg.
Sensing her distress, Farah offered her arm and they hurried as fast as they were able into a lavishly decorated, dark wood hallway. The plush burgundy carpets cushioned her bare feet as she made her way two doors down from her own, where the Blackheart of Ben More stood with a lone candle dancing gold over his bleak features.
Lorelai found the sight of him without his eyepatch disconcerting. A gash dissected his left brow down to the cheekbone, and the wound had left his right eye a milky blue instead of deep brown. The effect was stunning, on many levels.
He speared her with a desolate gaze upon her approach, and Farah left her side to go to her husband.
They all had scars, Lorelai realized. The pain they wore on their skin warning of deeper, more dangerous wounds within.
They stood for a moment as a crack of departing thunder overshadowed the roar of a man held prisoner by desperate nightmares. It chilled her to the bone and tore at her heart. It strained credulity to think that such a piteous, tormented sound could come from such a sinister and self-possessed man.
Blackwell put his hand on the wood of the door, as though testing it for the heat of a fire on the other side. “We all have them,” he said through a voice made husky with sleep. Or maybe with the lack thereof. “All of us who came of age in Newgate. It is hard to find rest, when sleep makes you vulnerable to the cruelty of others.”
The connotations of that sentence tore at Lorelai’s insides every bit as much as the raw, low cries of agony on the other side of that door. She truly couldn’t comprehend the depths of suffering a man must have borne in his waking hours to battle such demons in his dreams.