Too Wicked to Tame (The Derrings #2)(65)

Love brought out the worst in people, gave them free license to abuse each other. Yet Heath could never imagine hurting Portia—at least not as his father hurt his mother, not as they had hurt each other. Perhaps that wasn’t even love. He only knew that his parents had married for love, and then set about making each other miserable. Strife ruled their so-called love match, a hell on earth everyone, offspring included, inhabited. If he did love Portia, he had all the more reason to purge his life of her and save them both from the inevitable day when they turned on each other.

“You love her,” Della repeated, her voice quieter, a thread of resignation to it.

“No,” he answered forcefully, as if his denial would make it not so. Leaning down, he snatched his shirt off the floor. “I’ve no future to offer her. That much hasn’t changed.” He shrugged his arms back into his shirt with rough, angry jerks.

“Stuff and nonsense.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Your future is not as bleak as you think.” Her eyes clouded, avoiding his, looking somewhere beyond his shoulder.

“How so?”

She turned slowly, presenting him her back as she moved to the wingback chair near the hearth.

She lowered herself into its soft depths, her skirts a murmur on the air. Her fingers clutched the arm as if in need of support, the tips whitening around the healthy pink of her nails. “I suppose you’ll want to send me away.”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

She wet her lips and closed her eyes tightly. “There’s no risk of you becoming mad.”

“What?”



“You’re not in danger—”

“I heard what you said. Yet I fail to grasp your meaning?”

“I found a letter from your mother.”

His gut tightened. “Where is it?” he growled.

She averted her gaze. “It was addressed to your father. I assume he received it; I remember you telling me that your father stayed here near the end. That he was too volatile—”

“Yes, yes,” he cut in, not wishing for the reminder that his father, so far gone to madness, had to be removed from his family.

“Your mother must have sent it here.” Her brown eyes gazed at him in silent plea. Heath stared, beyond speech, head spinning, trying to make sense of her words, trying to make sense of why she should gaze at him with such deep entreaty.

In a hushed voice, she continued, “She spoke of your brother’s death—”

He cut her off with a fierce swipe of his hand, his throat constricting. He shoved back the memories, attempting to block out the ugliness, the perpetual night that swirled around him.

His fists clenched at his sides and he had to remind himself to breathe. Despite his determination to keep the memories at bay, they surged forth anyway, a battering ram to the walls he had erected. Wound upon wound. Grief upon grief. The sight of his mother, facedown in a pool of her own blood rushed into his head, fresh as the day he had found her. The feel of his brother’s little body, soft and frail in his arms, the thin chest expanding, lifting, fighting for a breath that was not to come, joined the image of his mother, both eating at his heart—his sanity.

Della rose from the chair. She paced before the hearth, arms swinging. The light of the fire cast her in a soft glow, gilding her fair hair to flaming copper. How he had once prized that hair, spent many a night running his hands through it. Now his hands ached for another. For hair as dark as slate, thick as a horse’s mane, sleek as oriental silk. Even now, his treacherous palms itched for their fill of those silken strands.

“It was such a shock finding the letter. I—I did not stop to think. I worried about losing you and my position should you be free to marry. Selfish, I know. Especially since I suspected you had feelings for this girl.” She shook her head severely, closing her eyes briefly. “I’ve been in torment from the moment I did it.”

“The letter,” he demanded. “Where is it?”

A long moment passed before she answered, “I burned it. I know I had no right. Please forgive—

”



“You burned it?” Fury spiraled through him.

“I’m so sorry, Heath.”

He took a step toward her and jerked to a stop. In one blink, he forced the tension to ebb.

Shaking his head clear, he asked, “What did it say?”

She faced him. “Your mother was furious at your father, cursed him for his infidelities, blamed him for your brother’s death, for his own condition”—she squared her shoulders, adding—”and hers.”

“Hers?” He blinked, not understanding.

“The disease—” Della stopped abruptly and closed her eyes as if gathering courage. Her chest lifted with a deep inhalation. “Your mother was afflicted, too.”

“My mother had porphyria?”

“No, Heath.” Della’s eyes drilled into him. “The pox. Your father infected your mother with the pox.”

Heath stared.

Della angled her head, her eyes searching his face. “Did you hear me?”

Oh, he heard her. Simply could not quite wrap his head around it. Not when he had been told otherwise nearly all his life.

Syphilis. His father went mad from syphilis?