It's Always Been You (21 page)

Read It's Always Been You Online

Authors: Victoria Dahl

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General

“Kate,” she heard Aidan’s voice say. She didn’t look toward him as she finally reached the first step and started her escape. “Kate, what’s wr—”
“Pardon me.” Kate was amazed that she could speak so clearly. In some distant, still-functioning part of her mind she felt proud of her quiet voice, proud of the way her legs carried her up as if she weren’t dying inside.
Her legs carried her all the way to the second floor and down the hall to her room. But once she was inside, with the door safely shut behind her, Kate fell to her hands and knees, and put her forehead to the floor, weak with something she couldn’t understand and didn’t dare examine. How could she have imagined that Aidan York was lonely? His whole being defied the idea.
He was young and handsome and charming. He was rich, strong, and vibrant. Women loved him.
She
had loved him.
“Oh, God,” she said. She’d thought he needed her. An image filled her mind—of Aidan bent over Mrs. Renier, his exquisite body flexing, entering, filling her up while the woman cried out. Just as Kate had.
“No,” she moaned, closing her eyes, struggling to blind herself. Again the scene played itself out, a different woman this time. An icy blonde, screaming her pleasure.
Oh, all those beautiful, primal things they’d done, she and Aidan, all of them part of some traveling show he trotted out for anyone who asked. Hundreds of them. She dug her nails deep into the wool of the carpet.
Insatiable
.
Laying her cheek very carefully against the wool, she cursed the softness, wishing it the cold of hard stone.
Insatiable
. Kate had likely been just like the other women to him, except perhaps in that respect. He’d never been insatiable with her. He’d gotten more than enough of her, easily, quickly, had often found nothing better to do with her than fall asleep.
I’ve never slept with another woman
. My God, she’d been unsophisticated enough to take that as a compliment.
This newfound understanding of him was painful in so many ways, but humiliation struck her hardest.
Opening her eyes, she stared across the blurred colors of the rug, stared at the pale fall of drapes over the window. What had he even wanted with her?
It was true she was not his type—she could see that easily enough with that glimpse of only one of his women. Cool, effortlessly elegant, completely at ease among his peers. Mrs. Renier was beautiful, if a little older than Kate would have suspected. Older. More experienced. Less naïve.
The thought of her own inexpert responses to him brought tears to her eyes. Eagerness did not make up for lack of skill.
What was the appeal? The only explanation she could conjure was simple: sheer nostalgia. She was a reminder of his youth. It was possible he’d even meant to marry her. People married for less compelling reasons than nostalgia, certainly.
But she’d actually thought she was saving him, rescuing him from a bleak existence. My Lord, she’d been about to save a man from a harem. They would have married, she’d have left everything behind to be his wife, then watched, helplessly, as he began to drift away, back to those women.
This revelation of his true nature was a blessing, she told herself with desperate practicality. A gift to keep her from shackling herself to another endless, fathomless misery. This excruciating pain was better than the dull, eternal ache of yet another life spent with a man who didn’t love her and spent his nights elsewhere.
This was a rescue. She still had what she’d owned a few months ago. She’d come so close to throwing everything away for him, but she hadn’t stepped over that cliff. Nothing had changed.
Something wild scrambled inside her, screaming that she lied. She smothered it mercilessly and pushed herself to her feet. It was time to leave this place.
 
 
He knew who was waiting in the drawing room. The butler had whispered the name “Mrs. Renier,” in his ear with a tone that managed both alarm and censure.
So he expected to see Beatrice Renier when he stepped into the drawing room, but the sight of her still sunk knives of fear into his chest. “What the hell are you doing in my home?” he ground out, as if there were some mystery as to why Kate had floated up the stairs like a ghost.
“How dare you?” she spat, her lovely features twisting into ugly fury.
“How dare I what?” He glanced over his shoulder, his mind already straying to Kate.
Beatrice grabbed his chin and pulled his face back toward her.
He shrugged and jerked free of her grasp. “What did you tell her?” he demanded.
She crossed her arms and smirked. “I waited for you, idiot that I am. I dressed with such care, imagining what you might like. I had Chef prepare your favorite dishes. And then I waited for hours, like some doxy who’d lost your favor!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he snarled.
Her sneer wavered. “You don’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
Beatrice’s shoulders slumped and she became smaller. “You sent a note that you’d come to me, and you don’t even remember it.”
Damnation. He remembered now. Just before he’d left to retrieve Kate’s watch, he’d promised Mrs. Renier he’d come for dinner. And more. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “But you’ve overreacted. What did you say?”
“Overreacted?” She laughed, tossing her head back.
“I reacted exactly as you treated me. Like a whore beneath your consideration. Exactly the same thing that other woman is to you, I assume, as you treat none of us any better than the next.”
“Get out of my home,” Aidan snarled. “Go back to your husband.”
“Ha!” she barked, brushing past him as she tugged the veil over her face. “I love how you say that as if you’re better than I. You were no better than I when we were rutting on the good china under his roof. The only difference is that I have someone to go home to, and you don’t.” She stopped at the threshold of the door and turned back. “Not even her, Aidan.”
His blood went cold. “What did you tell her?” he asked again.
“I told her the truth.”
He stood before her door for an endless moment. Fifty heartbeats. A hundred.
He was waiting for this to get easier, to convince himself that it wasn’t that bad. Beatrice was only one woman, after all. Kate must know he hadn’t lived like a monk. But the look on her face when she’d passed him . . .
No. It wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t be. He knocked on the door and waited. When she didn’t answer, he knocked again, then pushed it open, his heart skipping as the door stirred the scent of her soap in the room.
“Kate?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed the door open farther. “Kate?”
“Yes. I’m here.” She rose up from where she’d been kneeling next to the bed.
“I’m sorry about . . . that.”
She stared at him oddly, saying nothing, looking as beautiful as ever, but very pale, very stiff. He stepped into the room, and when he drew nearer, he could see why she’d been kneeling. Next to the bed lay her satchel. It gaped open, and he could see the blue dress inside.
“What are you doing?” he asked past a tight throat.
She clasped her hands together and did not look at him. “I’d like to go home early. Today, in fact. As soon as possible.”
That tightness choked him, closing off his throat in a painful grip. The tension grew, sinking impossibly deep in his chest. Fighting against it, fighting the terror, he opened his mouth, drew in a breath. “No.”
Her eyes locked on his in a shock of dark fury before sliding deliberately away from him. “It seems the best thing.”
“I’m sorry that she came here. But I haven’t seen her in months. I swear to you.” His voice sounded distant, shushed by the loud rush of blood in his ears.
“That’s not it.”
“What did she tell you?” he snapped. There was only one thing Kate could have heard about him, but perhaps it wasn’t that, he told himself ridiculously. Perhaps she’d heard something else, something entirely untrue.
She didn’t want to speak, he could see it in her twisting hands, the muscles working in her throat. He wanted her silence as well, wanted her to shake her head and smile and tell him it was nothing, nothing, just a misunderstanding. When her lips finally parted, when she finally spoke, she stared hard at his shoes, as if she couldn’t bear to see his face.
“She told me that you are well known for your impressive displays of indiscriminate sex. That you’ve been with seemingly vast numbers of women. That you may, in fact, have already run through the whole of the ton.” She deigned to glance at him then, a terrible blank look that bore straight through his heart. “I did not receive any estimates as to the number of the lesser classes you’ve offered your services to. I’d rather not know.”
Services
. She’d captured it exactly, though she could not know that. Rage rose up—unreasonable, illogical—as if to make an effort at shielding him from his shame. “It’s not what you think.”
“I’ll be very pleased if that’s true.”
“You make it sound like I’ve been with legions of women. I haven’t. Not that many.” Jesus, he couldn’t stop himself babbling. “Only ever widows, or married women who made it well known that they . . .” He snapped his jaw shut, refusing to explain further. It was the past, surely he could make her see that.
“Married women? Like me?”
“No! They never meant anything to me, Kate. Not one of them.”
She drew back from him as if he’d reached for her, though he wouldn’t have dared. “How can you say that? How could you s-s-s—” He winced at the sharp edge of hysteria in her voice and watched her stiffen and stamp it down in response. “—Sleep with all those women if they meant nothing to you?”
“I never slept with any of them,” he spat, wanting to make her see.
A gasping, coughing sound jumped from her throat, startling him and her as well, it seemed. She slapped a hand hard over her mouth with a clap that made him cringe.
“I know,” she gasped, giggling behind her palm. “You already told me.”
“What?” Frightened by her laughter, he lurched forward to clasp her elbows, to shake her. “Stop it.” Her eyes caught him with their flat, unnatural gaze. “Don’t look at me that way. Please.”
She only closed her eyes against him.
Mad fury swept through him—fury at Kate, fury at Beatrice, but mostly, truly, fury at himself for the depths he’d sunk to in the past few years. “Goddamn you,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “If I’d known you were alive, I would never have done any of it.”
He expected anger, outrage in response. The calm that came over her body frightened him.
Pale as the white silk wallpaper that glowed behind her, she nodded and dropped the hand from her mouth. “That is something between us then. If I had known I was still alive, I’d have done things differently too.”
The veil fell away from her eyes, just for a moment. Aidan dropped his hands from her in shock. That brief clarity in her eyes had allowed him a glimpse into her heart, and he’d seen nothing but bleakness. She had no hope for him. And what could that mean for his soul?
“I’m sorry. I’d take it all back if I could. All of it. But you had a life these past years too, Kate. You lived your life with another man, you loved him once. You shared your bed with him and I’m sure you enjoyed it. But I didn’t even—”
“Is that what you think?”
She knocked his hand roughly from her arm, and he felt it fall away, weightless as mist.
He watched her watching him. She looked wary and disgusted and ready to attack or flee or both. “What?” he asked, confused.
“You think that I loved him?”
“You said you were happy,” he murmured stupidly, wanting it to be true for the first time. “I may not like it, but I understand.”
“My God. You don’t understand. I don’t
want
you to understand.” She backed away from him, her feet drawing her too close to the fire.
“Stop.”

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