The earl left him then, but there was a determined look in his eye as he slipped from the library.
Not so very far away, the cool, collected young woman who’d so calmly broken off her engagement earlier that afternoon threw herself onto the grass beneath her back garden badminton net and commenced to sobbing.
It was ridiculous, Caroline knew. It was ridiculous that she couldn’t stop crying. It was even more ridiculous that she couldn’t weep in the privacy of her own home.
But there was enough weeping going on in there, and for entirely different reasons than hers. Thomas had still not been found, nor had they received any word of his whereabouts. Lady Bartlett was beside herself. And her suffering was only going to be compounded when, in a day or two, she got word that Caroline had called off her engagement. Then Lady Bartlett was going to suffer no mere apoplectic fit. Oh, no. She would quite probably succumb to an ague, or even a fever, that would carry her off, ending her travails forever.
But now, knowing only that her son was missing, Lady Bartlett had called for her physician, her apothecary and a surgeon. These individuals were so busy banging in and out of the house with various remedies for her palpitations and fainting spells, that Caroline had finally realized she’d get no peace indoors, and, knowing Emmy was out on another one of her protest marches, fled to the privacy of her garden.
Where she wasted no time giving full vent to her emotions.
Had her mother’s physician seen her, Caroline knew, he would have told her that she was overwrought. The apothecary would doubtlessly have prescribed hartshorn. She had no idea what the surgeon would have said, since there was no way to set a broken heart, but she supposed the man would have felt obligated to try.
But there was nothing any of them could do. Caroline had brought her sorrows down upon her own head. She had had Braden Granville. For twenty-four glorious hours—maybe a little less—she had had Braden Granville, felt what it was like to be loved by him, felt what it was like to be alive, for the first time in her twenty-one years.
And then she’d learned the truth. The bitter truth. That none of it had been real. That it had all just been a game. That she had just been another victim of the Lothario of London.
She sobbed helplessly into the grass, thankful for the veil of twilight which hid her from view, and so kept her mother from sending Bennington out to inform her that earls’ daughters ought not to recline weeping in the grass, even in their own gardens.
She was a fool. She knew it. A fool for falling in love with Braden Granville.
But his performance had seemed so convincing! She really had thought he loved her. Only how, she asked herself, for the millionth time, could a man who’d professed his love for her so tenderly still be capable of entertaining feelings for another woman? For he’d have to feel
something,
at least, for Jacquelyn, in order to work up enough rage to shoot her secret lover.
It was exactly as Emmy had always said: Men were rats.
And then, just as she thought her heart might quite literally be breaking, and that maybe she would, in fact, require a surgeon, or at the very least a little hartshorn after all, a familiar voice sounded from the vicinity of the small summerhouse by the garden’s back wall.
“Oh, God. What’s this then? Did Ma finally sell off all those horses of yours?”
Caroline lifted her head and squinted in the direction of the summerhouse, suspicion momentarily halting the flow of her tears. “Tommy?” she whispered.
She saw a dark shadow disattach itself from the others by the wall, and then her brother ambled across the lawn, and dropped down beside her, putting a finger to his lips.
“Quiet now,” he said. “No one’s supposed to know I’m here.”
Under different circumstances, Caroline might have hugged him. Now, however, she only looked at him, saw that he appeared to be in one piece, and sighed. “Where have you been?” she asked. “Ma’s worried sick.”
Thomas said, with a wry grimace, “Try to curtail some of your joy at seeing me again, Caro. It’s embarrassing.”
“Well, you had jolly well better go inside and let her know you’re all right,” Caroline informed him, “or you’ll have seen the last of anything resembling an allowance from her, let me assure you.”
Thomas, sitting cross-legged beside her in the grass, said, “I can’t let her know I’m all right. And you’re not to tell anyone you’ve seen me. I’ve got to stay disappeared for a while more. But I had to see you, Caro.”
Though the light was dim, Caroline thought she saw a look of genuine concern on her brother’s face. Since he was so rarely serious with her, she forgot her own problems for the moment, and peered at him through the twilit air.
“Tommy,” she said, softly. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
“A good deal of it,” her brother replied. “And all of my own making. Which is why I had to come see you, even though I promised I wouldn’t. You see, Caro—” He leaned forward and did something he’d only done three or four times in his life: he laid his hand over hers. “It’s about Hurst.”
“Hurst?” Caroline sniffled. Her tears had not yet completely vanished. In fact, at the mention of that particular name, she felt them returning, pricking the corners of her eyes. “Oh, God, Tommy.” She had a sickening sensation that her brother had somehow got wind of the Lady Jacquelyn situation. “Please, don’t. I already know.”
Tommy dropped her hand in astonishment. “You do?”
“Yes, of course. I broke it off with him this afternoon. I ought to have done it long ago, the moment I found out, in fact. Emmy told me to—”
The earl’s jaw dropped. “Emmy knows?”
“Yes, of course.” Caroline eyed him curiously. “You know I tell her everything. Only Ma wouldn’t let me. Break it off with him, I mean.”
“Ma?”
Her brother’s face contorted with horror. “You told
Ma?”
Caroline blinked at him. “Well, of course I told Ma. Only she said the invitations had already gone out, and that my reputation would be ruined if I broke it off, and that I could win him back if I just used my womanly wiles, and . . . oh, Tommy, I was such an idiot, I believed her. And I did the worst thing. . . . You wouldn’t believe how stupid I was. I went to Braden Granville, and I—”
He interrupted her. “Caroline,” he said, carefully. “What are you talking about?”
“What do you mean, what am I talking about?” Caroline asked. “I’m talking about Hurst.” She looked at him curiously through the gloaming. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Hurst, as well.”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “I thought so. Well, thank you for your concern, but I already know all about it. I walked in on them, you see.”
Tommy shook his head. “Walked in on
who?”
“Hurst, of course,” Caroline replied with impatience. “And Lady Jacquelyn Seldon. I saw them making love on a divan in one of Lady Ashforth’s sitting rooms.”
For a moment, her brother only stared at her. Then he opened his mouth and let out a word that caused Caroline’s ears to burn. And she had heard a good many such words from his lips in the past.
“Tommy,”
she said, scoldingly.
“Bugger
that,”
her brother said. “Are you telling me that Slater and Jackie Seldon were . . . were . . .
trysting
behind your back?” Only the word he used wasn’t
trysting.
“If you must be vulgar about it,” Caroline said, primly, “then I suppose the answer to that question is yes.” Then she looked at him curiously. “Isn’t that what—”
“God, no!” Tommy burst out. “I was trying to tell you why Slater got shot! That’s why you were crying, wasn’t it?”
Caroline said, “Well, yes, I suppose, in a way. But, Tommy, that
was
why he got shot.” She swallowed, then went resolutely on. “Braden Granville shot Hurst.”
“Right. As a warning,” Tommy said, “to leave me alone.”
Caroline gave a quick, negative shake of her head. “No, Tommy. Why would Braden Granville want Hurst to leave you alone? He shot him because he’d found out, you see, about Hurst and Lady Jacquelyn.”
“He didn’t,” Tommy said, with some indignation. “And I think I should know. I’m the one who started it all. Granville shot Hurst because of me. Hurst was trying to kill me, because the fellow who shot me last winter found out I wasn’t dead after all, and could not only identify him, but ruin his business, too. So he told your fiancé he had to finish the job.”
Caroline, sitting in the grass under the evening’s first smattering of stars, looked at her brother. Looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. Noticed for the first time the circles under his eyes, and the curious dusting of some kind of soot or grime all along one side of his face. He still had on the clothes he’d gone out in the night he’d disappeared, and though someone had obviously tried to clean and press them, there was a rip in the lining of his coat, and the knees of his trousers were still darker than the rest of his pants.
But that wasn’t what caused her to reach out and grasp his hand between her own. She did that because her brother was wearing the most serious expression she’d ever seen on his face.
“Tell me,” she said, urgently.
He frowned nervously. “You’ll be angry with me.”
“I won’t,” Caroline assured him. “Oh, I’m sure I won’t.”
And so he told her.
37
B
raden Granville sat at his desk, adding up a column of numbers. He finished, then eyed the sum he’d come up with. Wrong. It had to be wrong.
What was happening to him? He’d used to be able to add much longer columns of numbers in his head. Multiply and divide them, too. Why couldn’t he seem to do it anymore? Why couldn’t he concentrate?
He knew why, of course.
But he refused to think about it. What was there to think about?
It was better this way. He was better off without her. Look at what she’d done to him: he could no longer add the simplest column of numbers. If he’d stayed with her any longer, she might have sapped from him every ounce of intelligence he possessed. That, apparently, was what happened when one fell in love. One’s brains were sucked away, or turned gelatinous. At least, that’s what the inside of his head felt like at the moment.
Was this love, then? Was this what so many poets had wasted page after page describing? What Shakespeare had extolled? If it was—and he had every reason to believe it, based on his complete inability to think of anything, anything at all, but her—he wanted nothing more to do with it. Not if it meant he had to live the rest of his life with this knot in his stomach, this soreness in the vicinity of his chest.
There was a tap on the door.
How, he wondered, had it come to this? That the Lothario of London should be sitting at his desk, pining for the one woman in England he couldn’t have? How many women out there, he wondered, had sat feeling the way he did now, over him? He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known what it was like. Now he understood the long letters, pleading with him to change his mind. Now he understood the threats, the tears.
Love
hurt.
What hurt most of all was that he knew that, however many times he told himself he was better off—that if she couldn’t trust him now, she never would—it wasn’t true. He wasn’t better off. He needed her. Needed her goodness, her frankness, her humor, her humanity. Needed
her,
dammit. Needed to feel her close to him, her warmth, her scent, her—
Another tap at the door.
And it was his own fault she didn’t trust him. How long had he known of his moniker—Lothario of London—and done nothing to change it? He was notorious for his many love affairs, his charm, his power over women. And he had done nothing to change that, to insist that it wasn’t that he’d
wanted
to hurt these women—far from it. Only that none of them—none of them—had turned out to be what he was looking for, what had been right for him.
Until now.
When it was too late.
“Dead.” Crutch appeared in the doorway, looking impatient. “I’ve been knockin’ and knockin’. Were you ever going to say come in?”
Braden glanced at his butler. “Why should I bother? I knew you’d come in anyway.”
Crutch peered at him through the semidarkness. “It’s dark in here, Dead. You want I should light the lamps?”
“No,” Braden said, realizing, even as he said it, that Crutch was right. The light filtering through the glass panes in the French doors leading to the garden had shifted from the gold of sunset to the lavender of twilight. No wonder he’d added those numbers wrong. He could barely distinguish his own hand in front of his face.
But as usual, his butler didn’t listen to him. Slowly, the rosy glow from the sconces along the wall brightened the room. Crutch even turned on the small gaslights that lit the display cases which held various incarnations of the Granville pistol throughout the years.
“That’s better,” the butler said, with satisfaction. Then he added, “Someone to see you, Dead.’S why I knocked.”
Braden sighed. “I told you. I’m out. And if it’s Jacquelyn—”
“It ain’t,” Crutch said. “It’s the Lady Caroline—”
Braden felt as if his entire world, which seemed to have been crumbling beneath him, bit by bit, had suddenly shifted back onto solid ground. He stood up hastily—too hastily. He knocked over his inkwell.
“Send her in,” he said, as he bent to clean up the mess. “No, never mind this, I’ll take care of it. Send her in at once. Don’t make her wait any longer—”
Crutch, looking faintly surprised, went away. Braden used his handkerchief to soak up the spill, telling himself the entire time,
She is undoubtedly only here to ask about her brother. It hasn’t anything at all to do with you. She hates you. And she has every reason to, for only a criminally blind idiot like yourself would have failed to guess that Slater was the man she was protecting all along. . . .
And then she was there, standing in front of him, chewing her bottom lip nervously and looking every bit as heartbreakingly lovely as when he’d last seen her.
“Hullo, Braden,” she said gravely, in that low-pitched voice he’d come to adore.
He found himself quite at a loss for words, and was astounded by the fact. Very seldom had he ever suffered from being tongue-tied.
Fearful she would think he was being purposefully rude, he hurried out from behind his desk and indicated one of the comfortably stuffed leather chairs in front of it.
“Won’t you have a seat?” he asked, and was chagrined when his voice came out sounding oddly uneven.
If Caroline noticed, however, she gave no sign. She sat down, still in her gloves and bonnet. A reticule dangled from one wrist. In the gaslight, he could see her face clearly. Anxiety was swimming in those deep brown eyes.
How often, he asked himself, had he entertained women a thousand times more sophisticated than Caroline, and done it smoothly and with dazzling aplomb? Why was it that this one time, when it really mattered, he found himself gawky as a schoolboy, and floundering to think what to do.
A drink, he thought. Offer her a drink.
It seemed inconceivable to him that a little over twelve hours ago, he’d held this woman in his arms, and poured into her what had felt like a lifetime of need.
“Would you care for a sherry?” he asked her.
“Sherry?” she echoed, in a strangled voice.
“Sherry?
No, I don’t want any
sherry.
Oh, Braden, why didn’t you
tell
me?”
He stared down at her confusedly. He should, he supposed, have sat in the chair opposite hers, but he was not sure that, at such close proximity, he’d be able to resist reaching out for her. . . .
“Tell you what?” he asked, having only half heard her. His traitorous concentration had fled once more, leaving him only with an ability to gaze at her throat, and remember how smooth it had felt beneath his lips and tongue, soft as silk.
“About Tommy.”
That brought him up short. He blinked at her.
“Tommy?”
“Yes, Tommy,” Caroline said. “He told me everything. Oh, Braden, if you’d only said that
that
was why you’d shot Hurst. How could you have stood there, and let me think it was because of Jacquelyn?”
He was too surprised to dissemble. “You’ve spoken with the earl?”
“Yes.” Suddenly, Caroline reached up and, as if they were bothering her, untied the ribbons that held her bonnet in place. Then she wrenched the hat off, tossing it carelessly onto the floor. “He told me everything. I couldn’t tell him about . . . well, about you and me, of course. So I couldn’t ask him the one question that vexes me the most. Braden, why didn’t
you
tell me?”
He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Your brother made me swear I wouldn’t.”
“He made you—” Caroline looked up at him curiously. “That’s
all?
Tommy made you swear not to tell?”
He opened his lips, but again, no sound came out from between them. What was wrong with him?
He knew. He knew what was wrong. The impulse to take her into his arms, to smother that small mouth with kisses, was so strong, his arms were shaking with it.
But he could not allow himself to touch her. All of his resolve to let her go would vanish, he knew, the moment they touched.
And he had to let her go. He knew that now.
They were from different worlds. To prove it to her, he said, pacing toward the French doors, his head down so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye, “I know that in the circles in which you travel, Caroline, it is common to give one’s word, and then break it when keeping it no longer becomes convenient.” He paced back toward his desk. “But in the Dials, when someone makes an oath, they keep it.” He headed back toward the French doors. “Even at the risk of death.”
She stood up and met him as he was making his way back toward his desk. “Even,” she asked, in the softest voice imaginable, as she lifted her chin in order to look him in the eye, “at the risk of losing me?”
She was close enough now that if he reached out, he’d have been able to touch her, to stroke the light brown curls that had escaped from her hairpins.
“Yes,” he said, and though each word tore at his gut, he forced them out, anyway. “Don’t you see? That’s why perhaps it’s better that you and I—”
Hurt instantly flooded her eyes.
“That you and I what?” she asked, her voice unsteady. “What are you trying to say? That because you keep your word, you’re better than me? Is that it? Braden, I know I never should have left, but—”
“Caroline,” he said, knowing it was for her own good, but feeling that with each syllable, he was hammering a nail into his own coffin. “You know that’s not it. It’s just that . . . I don’t belong here. Here in Mayfair. Don’t you see? I’m an imposter. All of this, the house, the business, these clothes I have on . . . they aren’t me. I’m not who you think I am. I’m no gentleman. I’m no businessman. I’m from the Dials, Caroline. I don’t know the difference between a fish knife and a butter knife. I don’t belong in this world, your world, and I never will. What you thought, when you learned that I had shot Hurst . . . it was wrong, but it wasn’t far wrong. Not really. Do you understand?”
He saw her eyes widen, and realized that at last, she was beginning to understand. She would never, he knew, understand how much he loved her—so much that he had to let her go, rather than let her be pulled down to his level.
But then he noticed that she wasn’t looking at him. She was peering at something around his shoulder. Something that caused her to fling a hand to her mouth in horror.
Braden turned around.
Just in time to see the Marquis of Winchilsea open the French doors and limp into the library, a pistol pointed quite steadily in the vicinity of their hearts.