To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(30)

“Yours was not an answer.” It was a goodbye. Those were vastly different things.

Tension filled the air. At last, it was between them. The unspoken past that hovered and danced, finally breathed to existence.

He braced for her stinging, tart rebuttal. Instead, she passed her wide eyes over him, sadness emanating from within their endless depths. “I gave you all the words you needed.” Then, with stiff movements, she turned and started toward the doorway.

He suppressed the hungering to call out to her. For staring at her retreating frame, he finally realized it would not matter what words she gave him. It would not matter whether she spoke with love and longing for the man who’d claimed her hand and heart. It would not matter if she’d missed Marcus, even just a little in her absence. The dream of them was as dead and gone as the charred ashes in a dirtied hearth. And with that truth, he could embrace the freedom in that and hold on to the only safe sentiment where Eleanor was concerned.

Desire.

“I want you,” he called out, staying her movements.

Eleanor froze. The delicate span of her back went taut as she turned slowly around.

“I stopped loving you long ago,” he said, those words born of truth. In the years following her betrayal, he’d come to see that sentiment as an empty one, built on a child’s fanciful dreams and imaginings. Desire was safe. It was the only honest emotion. Eleanor stood stoic, unmoving, and just then he hated her as much now as he had years ago when he’d received that goddamn note. He hated her for being coldly unemotional and unfeeling. He gave his head a sad, little shake. How little he’d known her. “But I want you, anyway.”

She widened her eyes.

He took a step toward her. “I want to know you in my arms and in my bed. I want to know your cries as you find release and you want me, too.” He hooded his eyes. “And I promise you, Eleanor Elaine, before you run off and leave London,” again, “I will know those pleasures and more…you will know those pleasures.” Then, Eleanor would remember Marcus forever, no matter who came after Marcus and he could, at last, purge himself of this insatiable need for her.

Eleanor scrabbled her hands about her neck and gripped the collar of her modest, frilled, white nightshift. “Don’t you see, Marcus?” She lifted her palms up. “I am a widow, but that does not make me a whore. And I’ll not play the role of whore for you.”

Shame sent heat racing up his neck. He took a languid step toward her, even as a volatile tension thrummed inside him. “You speak of there being something wrong in renewing where we left off.”

A sad, quiet laugh escaped her. “Is this where we left off?” She raked a disappointed stare up and down his person. “With you determined to bed me and then move on to wed some proper English lady with a title and a spotless reputation?”

The air crackled and hissed with her stinging accusation and a curtain of fury descended over his vision. How dare she paint any intention he had to marry as dishonorable? She had been the one who’d turned him over for another. “Let us be clear, I would have wed you. It is you who left, so do not make my intentions of the past the dishonorable sort.” His harsh tone drained the color from her cheeks and, yet, she proved as courageous as she’d always been.

“What of now?” She quirked a golden eyebrow. “Are these intentions honorable?” Silence fell between them and Eleanor gave a sad shake of her head. “That is exactly what I thought, Marcus. Find some other willing woman to take to your bed, for that woman will not be me.”

Why? Why could it not be her? And was she even now, all these years later, still so hopelessly in love with her husband that she could not even countenance even the thought of another man in her arms or in her life? He balled his hands into hard fists, despising that such a truth should even matter.

She stopped with her fingers on the door handle, and then wheeled to again face him. “You speak of the man you became.” The moon cast a haunting glow on her pale cheeks. “But the truth is, I did not make you anything.” She motioned to him and he went taut at that dismissive gesture. “This is who you would have become. You are such a part of this world I never truly belonged to. Perhaps you would have married me.” I would have. I would have filled your days with laughter and turned the world upside down if it dared chased away your smile. Marcus curled his hands at the force of that empty dream. “But you would have become the rogue the world knows.”

“And is that why you left?” As soon as the words left his terse lips, his body jerked erect. How pathetic, how desperate, those words were, for this woman who’d never been deserving of him.

“Oh, Marcus,” she said softly. With an ethereal grace, Eleanor drifted over. “I left for the both of us. Neither of us could have ever been happy with one another. Not truly and not forever.” Another night bird called its song, haunting and sweet. She clasped her hands together and stared briefly down at the interlocked digits. “I should leave.”

Yes, she should. In fact, she should have never returned. Then he’d not feel any of the old hurt and pain of her betrayal. “Not at all,” he said stiffly. “I will leave you to your company. But before I do, Eleanor, know that before you leave London, we’ll know the pleasure to be had in each other’s arms.” A flash of fear sparked briefly in her eyes and then was quickly gone so that it might have been nothing more than a trick of the moonlit night.