To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(69)

She hugged herself tight and he wanted to be the one to hold her in his arms, to take the nightmares and demons she battled and own them, so they belonged to him alone. But that could never be. This horrible thing had happened to her, and no matter how strong, powerful, or wealthy he was, it was an act that he could not undo.

Silence descended and yet the rustle of leaves and ragged, broken breaths deafened him. Marcus opened and closed his mouth several times. He shook his head. Once. Twice. A third time. As he worked through the horror of her revelation, no matter how much he shook his head, no matter how much he willed her words out of existence, they remained, and there they would stay.

No.

She nodded once. “Yes.”

Had he spoken aloud? How was he capable of words when his entire world was crumbling about him like an ancient castle blasted by cannon fodder? “Oh, Eleanor,” he managed to rasp. How many years he’d spent hating her, when all along he should have hated himself. Self-loathing unfurled inside him. He had failed her in the worst possible way; and for that, she had suffered the greatest pain and hurt.

He looked down at his chest. Where was the crimson stain upon the fabric if his heart was bleeding so?

She made a soft sound of protest. “Do not look at me like that. I knew you would look at me like that when I told you and I cannot bear it, Marcus.” Tears welling anew in her eyes, she shook her head hard. “So stop. Please.” At that desperate entreaty, a strangled groan stuck in his throat.

He covered his mouth with his hand, and stalked over, obliterating the remaining distance between them, and then stopped, at sea. He was like a child’s toy, stuck in a vicious squall, and it was ratcheting his world down about him. “How can I look at you with anything but love?” For even as he’d hated her for an imagined betrayal, he’d loved her beyond thought.

“Do not say that.” She closed her eyes and a little cry burst from her lips. “Do not. I don’t want that from you. Not here.”

Not now. She’d deserved that profession from him years earlier. She’d deserved it the moment she’d reentered his life. Instead, he’d given her nothing but his scorn, and…

Bile climbed up his throat and he nearly choked. Oh, God. He’d tried to seduce her. With his every word, his every promise and pledge, he’d offered her nothing more than a place in his bed. A sob escaped him. The weight of his shame brought his eyes closed. There was a special place in hell for men like him.

Her husband had been worthy of her, after all. Worthy in ways that Marcus never had been. Suddenly, his dead rival, the man he’d hated since discovering his existence, earned Marcus’ unending gratitude. She’d deserved the honorable Lieutenant Collins, a man he was grateful to for having been what Marcus had not.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “That is why you left,” he said woodenly. Of course it was why she left.

Her slight nod dislodged a curl. “That is why I left,” she said softly. “He took everything from me. I was powerless, in every way. If you hated me, I wanted it to be for reasons within my control. I wanted you to hate me for decisions I made and not for something that was forced on me by a man I did not even know.”

Marcus dug his fingers into his palms with such ferocity, he ripped the flesh. The sticky warmth of his blood coated his hand, and he welcomed the pain. “Did you know me so little that you think I could have ever hated you for that?” His voice emerged broken. “That I could have ever held you to blame?”

A single tear trickled down Eleanor’s cheek and she moved over in a flurry of gray skirts. She captured his hands and forced them open. “How could I know that? How, when I hate myself even still, all these years later?” she whispered. In the way a wife might care for her husband, she reached inside his pocket and withdrew his monogrammed kerchief. She brushed the white fabric over the jagged wound left by his nail, gentling cleaning away his blood. Eleanor turned the cloth over to him and incapable of words, he tucked it away. She broke the silence, proving herself, once again, stronger than he had ever been or ever would be. “It is because I thought so much of you that I left. I do not doubt you would have done the honorable thing. You would have never been free until you found him and then you would have dueled him.” Eleanor lifted his hand to her cheek and leaned into his uninjured palm. “And I would never have allowed that for either of us.”

“I would have married you,” he gasped out. I will marry you.

Her shoulders shook from the force of her silent tears. “I know you would have, which is also why I left.”

What if he’d arrived in time? What would life be for either of them, both of them, even now? “Yet you gave another man that right.” A right that should have belonged to Marcus.

Except I failed her. I was late meeting her, and she was alone, unprotected, and raped for my tarrying. He groaned and the sound tore from deep inside where agony and regret dwelled.

The sadness glowing from within her eyes blended with surprise. The potent emotion there stuck in his chest twisting the dull blade of agony all the more. “Oh, Marcus, you still do not know?”

He no longer knew up from down or right from left. “Know what?”

“There never was a Mr. Collins.”

A night bird sang. Crickets chirped. No Mr. Collins? “Marcia…?” And the air left him on a whispery hiss.