The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides #1)(78)

Helena closed her eyes, swaying against him, and allowed him to right them again.

The music drew to a stop, and as couples politely clapped and began to file from the dance floor, Helena stood, a bundle of throbbing nerves and feelings, wicked and wanton as her mother.

Only . . . frozen before Robert, with their chests moving in a quick rhythm, she understood. Understood what had driven her mother. She could no sooner stop loving this man than she could stop the earth from moving and send it spinning in the opposite direction. It was Robert who managed to pull her from the spell. Shifting her arm to his sleeve, he led her from the dance floor.

As he guided her to the edge of the room, the duchess, a determined glint in her eyes, stood in wait, with Diana at her side.

“Lord Westfield,” the duchess said with forced cheer when Helena and Robert stopped before her. “As promised, Diana is free for the next set.”

The charged energy between Helena and Robert on the dance floor may as well have been conjured by Helena’s own yearnings. With his patent grin, Robert captured Diana’s hand and raised it to his lips. “Lady Diana, it is a pleasure,” he greeted her, and Helena curled her toes so tight her arches ached.

“Likewise,” Diana said, blushing a delicate pink, and not the splotchy red Helena had always managed through the years.

Jealousy stabbed at Helena, vicious and ugly and dark. Her sister’s giggling responses were lost to Helena. What would it be like when Helena left and he found another? How did one live with the jagged agony of wanting and love and loss?

Oh, God, this was the hell her mother had known. She’d spent her life hating Delia Banbury, who’d forsaken all to be a nobleman’s pleasures. Loving Robert as she did, Helena saw how very easy it would be to throw away all for any fleeting joy to be had with Robert. So many years she’d judged her mother, had held her to blame for their circumstances. Now, with a woman’s eyes, she saw that her mother’s smile had been partly broken from the pain of that loss. More, Helena now knew that pain herself.

As Robert guided Diana upon the dance floor for a country reel, he cast a final look at Helena, his expression inscrutable, but then his partner said something requiring his attention.

As the orchestra struck up the lively set, Helena stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the duke’s wife, immobile.

“They make a lovely couple, do they not?” the duchess murmured, not deigning to look at her husband’s by-blow.

Helena kept her face deliberately blank. But then she caught sight of the rosy-cheeked Diana and smiling Robert as the steps brought them together again. The hell of it was, the Duchess of Wilkinson was correct. They did look splendid as a pair: he, tall, powerful, golden perfection and she, a dainty model of English femininity.

Then there was Helena, with her too-tall height and pale cheeks and scarred face and hands.

Never had she despised those marks more than in this moment.

“As I said, Miss Banbury,” the other woman continued conversationally, with no apparent need for comment from Helena. “Lord Westfield will wed a lady, never one who was carved up quite handily by a street ruffian. What was it he did?” She flicked a bored look over Helena’s cheek. The scar throbbed at the old memory and the woman’s vitriol. “Burn you?” she guessed.

The air left Helena on a swift exhale as the duchess, with her casual, throw-away supposition, dragged Helena from the present to that dark, ugly past she’d spent years fighting down. She searched her hands about for the nearby column as memories crept in. The acrid smell of burning flesh. Her flesh. Diggory’s cruel, maniacal laugh.

Spinning jerkily on her heel, Helena stalked off. Gaze trained forward, she eyed the back exit of the ballroom with a hungry desperation. Not here . . . Not now . . .

Please, don’t . . . Don’t . . .

Her own cries echoed around her mind and she sucked in a deep breath, unable to draw air past the pressure squeezing about her lungs. Helena knocked into someone and managed a murmured apology, but continued her lurching flight.

At last free of the ballroom, she tore down the hallway, sprinting through the corridors, onward. Escape. She needed it with the same desperation she’d needed it as a child in Diggory’s clutches. When the nightmares came, there had been Ryker and Calum and Niall and Adair. They’d pulled her from the precipice of madness.

Quit yer croyin or oi’ll give ye something to cry for . . .

She clamped her hands over her ears to blot out that coarse cockney. Helena’s muffled sob filled the quiet halls, blending with her quick, panting breaths, and she quickened her pace. She reached the door to freedom and frantically shoved it open.

Warm air slapped her face, and she collapsed on the graveled path, sucking in with deep, gasping attempts to breathe, and retched.

Someone sank down beside her. Strong hands settled at her back, and crying out, Helena turned, and drew back her fist.

Robert easily caught her wrist in his hand, halting the blow.

She blinked wildly. Robert. Not Diggory. Helena slid her eyes closed. “Robert,” she whispered, as the terror receded and she was left in the duchess’s prized gardens with Robert at her side.

Emotion darkened his eyes, and he gently released her hand. “Did someone hurt you?” The lethal edge of steel underscoring that whisper promised death with it.

Through all the horror of remembered pain and the nightmares that would always be, tenderness unfurled within.