Rescued By a Lady's Love (Lords of Honor, #3) (29 page)

She winced and agony stabbed him. Did she believe he’d condemn her in this moment? Then why should she not? Everyone else before, including her own parents, who should have protected her, had instead turned her out. “I thought I loved him.”

“Did you?” That gravelly question ripped from somewhere deep inside his chest where jealousy dwelled for the brother who’d possessed her heart; that blinding emotion lived with a rage for the man who’d stolen her virtue.

“I was in love with the dream of a man who did not exist.” A bitter, broken laugh escaped her. “Isn’t that the greatest irony? I gave up all for him. A man I hardly knew. Outside, like the cheapest of whores.” Her speaking made what they’d shared real in a way that knifed at him. George had known her smile. The taste of her lips. Except...some of the agonizing pressure weighting his chest eased.

George had not known the depth of her soul. Not the way Derek did. Lily glanced down at her hands and spoke, drawing him back from his jumbled musings. “I built those moments into something they had never been.”

And something they could
never
have been. Not with George who’d taken his pleasure where he wished and then moved on to the next. Women had been no different. Derek thought of Lily, as she would have been; a girl of fifteen, meeting his older brother. With his ducal arrogance and charm, she would have been helpless against George’s seduction.

What if I had seen her first?
What if all those years earlier, he’d actually seen the world in front of him? Lily would have been a bright-eyed girl with a riot of midnight curls, unbroken by life.
She
would have been a reason to remain in England.

A vise-like pressure squeezed at his chest. Then, he’d been too blinded by his pursuit of greatness and fleeting moments with skilled courtesans, to notice the vicar’s daughter. And through that folly of his youth, George had been there all the while, noticing her...and then, ultimately robbing Lily of her innocence. A heavy curtain of rage descended over his vision, momentarily and completely blinding him to his earlier jealousy and shock. He’d always known there was blackness to his soul; standing here with his mother and brother dead, wishing them to the devil, was now proof of that.

A black curse escaped his lips.

Lily recoiled. “F-forgive me.” She made to rush around him.

“Stop,” he barked. She immediately complied, her shoulders proudly straightened, even as she avoided his gaze. He studied her through hooded lids. Did she truly know him so little that he’d condemn her for her crimes the way others had? This woman who’d seen beyond the beast and scars to the man? Did she believe him incapable of that same gift she’d given him? “What happened after my family turned you out?”

She wetted her lips and skittered her gaze about. “What happened?” Her wide-eyed stare put him in mind of a fragile deer trapped in the hunter’s snare.

“Tell me.” Coward that he was, he didn’t
want
to hear the truth. Yet he needed it, anyway.

Lily threw her arms up. “What would you have me say?” she spoke in pleading tones and stalked forward in a soft swish of her night-rail, emotion burning deep inside her expressive eyes. “Would you have me tell you all the vilest, most horrible details?” Her lower lip trembled. “Would you have me tell you that I was found outside this very townhouse on the street by a powerful gentleman who offered me employment as a maid?”

The muscles of his stomach spasmed. She hugged her arms to her chest and he ached to take her in his arms. The clock ticked loudly in the corner as Lily stood there, her body so tightly held, a strong wind would likely shatter her. And he knew before she even uttered the words...

She drew in a shuddery breath. “Would you have me tell you how after two years, the old, kindly
gentleman
required altogether different services of me?” Her words emerged as a faint, broken whisper.

Oh, God. Even expecting it as he’d been, the words gutted him. “Lily,” he rasped.

“How he threatened to turn me out without references and, instead, offered me a place in his bed or nothing at all.” She panted.

Agony tightened in his belly and he wanted to clamp his hands over his ears to blot out the flood of those gut-wrenching words.

She was relentless as she advanced, coming toward him, ravaging him with every word she uttered. “Do you want to know the woman you hired to care for your sister’s child has been nothing but a whore for the past six years?” Her words caught on a sob.

Yes, he’d known the words were coming. The self-hatred she wore that could only rival the same he cloaked himself in, stood as testament to her belief she was the whore she spoke of. Even expecting them, however, could not dull the blade of shock that ripped through him. Unable to face her in light of what his brother had visited upon her, Derek slid his gaze away. An ugly slithering of green envy snaked about him. Equal parts jealousy at the man who’d laid claim to her body and burning hatred for the same bastard who’d taken advantage of a young girl sent out alone in the streets, melded into a vicious blend of madness.

Then she stumbled back. Her eyes formed round moons as she slapped a hand over her gaping mouth. “I w-will leave,” she said quickly, jerking his attention back. She staggered further away from him, all but sprinting to the door.

He’d wager his other eye she’d been running since she was fifteen and, yet, trapped all at the same time. “What will you do?” His quietly spoken words halted her once more.

Lily lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. “I will survive,” she said in a flat, emotionless tone that sent a chill running through him.

She would survive. Just as she’d done for years. When surviving meant sacrificing her body and laying herself open before a base lord who’d take his pleasures with her, for the fleeting security. The maddening bloodlust pounding through his ears was the powerful beat that had pulsed through him in the thick of battle with enemies bearing down on him.

He stood stiffly, willing her with his silence to continue. When it became apparent there was nothing more she intended to say on the matter, he took a step toward her, craving the stinging fury and indignation she’d displayed when she’d stormed his household. “Why did you not tell me before?”

A sad laugh escaped her. “You would have had me come to you, asking for a position on your staff, after such a confession?”

“Yes,” he said plainly and she flinched. “I would have you tell me the truth.”

“Come, Derek.” She gently chided. “You’d have never granted me a position.”

Would he have? He looked over the top of her head. Would the man he’d been a week ago, the same man who’d sought to destroy his former friend’s happiness, have done anything but mock Lily and call her a schemer and a grasper? Shame tightened his belly. He didn’t much like the man he’d been. He liked even less the haunting truth of her words. “Very well, then.” He fixed a probing stare on her, searching? For what? Answers he did not want? Questions he did not know? “Why did you come to me?”

“I had no choice.” She spoke in such emotionless tones, that ice skidded along his spine.

So tired of serving a base lord’s pleasures, she’d come here, to the household no person cared to be—trusting he’d grant her a position. “What of your family?”

He was grateful when she broke across the tense guilt gripping him. “My father was...” she grimaced, “is the vicar at your family’s estate in Carlisle.” A wry, mirthless smile formed on her lips. “One can hardly maintain a level of dignity within the parish if the daughter who was discovered by the village gossip remains on as an indelible memory of that day.”

Oh, God. His gut clenched. Even now, the man who’d turned her out had been, and was in fact, still the vicar on his properties? Her father had turned her away and she’d come to his family. He scrubbed a hand over his face, thinking about the reception she’d received from his mother who’d protected that coveted title of duke for her son like she guarded the gates of a kingdom. Lily would never have received his family’s support. And in the end, she’d little recourse but to open herself to some lecherous nobleman who’d taken advantage of a desperate girl. With all the wrongs his family had committed, she’d still shown Derek more kindness than any other person since Toulouse.

“That bastard,” he said quietly.

Lily gave him a sad smile. “No,” she said softly. “It was not his fault, Derek.” She’d defend the coward who’d sired her, even so? “There was my sister and my brothers, and what livelihood exists for a vicar whose daughter gave herself to his employer’s son, in that public way?”

He winced, hating that she should defend the man even now. Who’d defended her? Pain threatened to cleave his heart in two.

With the truth echoing between them, Derek slid his eye closed. By God, if his brother was not dead, he’d kill him all over again. He’d use his scarred and marred hands to take his limbs apart and then choke him for what he’d done. “How you must despise me,” he whispered.

Lily moved toward him. His body, attuned to her every nuance felt her beyond his shoulder and he faced her. She stood before him pale and uncertain when she’d only been bold and proud. Another spasm racked his heart. What had the Winters’ done to her? “I did,” she said at last. “I hated anyone and everyone who shared his blood.”

And yet she’d come here anyway. She’d come for employment to be free of her post as mistress, when she’d deserved far more repayment, of which no amount could ever right the injustices done.

Lily took his hands in hers. “But then I realized something as I was here. There is Flora.” His niece. The sole person of any goodness who shared his blood. “And there is you. And there is only good in the both of you.”

His chest moved hard with the force of his rapidly drawn breaths. For there wasn’t good in him. He’d been the same indulgent lord George had been. Though careful to not litter London with his bastards, Derek had been driven by his own pleasures. If he’d returned and found Lily Benedict on his doorstep, pleading, would he have been the callous bastard his mother and brother had been? Or would he have been the person she deserved? Part of him didn’t know the answer to that and it made him hate the whole of himself for it. His throat constricted painfully, making it difficult to swallow.

He took a step toward her, wanting to be the one person who’d been there when others had not. How many years had she spent hating herself? As one who’d spent the past seven despising himself so, he recognized that self-loathing in another. “It was not your fault,” he said quietly. “You survived.”

She stilled like a doe tracked by hunters. “But it was my fault,” she shot back, her eyes stricken. “I threw away my virtue. That was
my
decision. I gave myself to Sir...” She bit her lip hard and looked away.

“Because you were young and scared,” he said quietly. How could she not see that a vicar’s daughter in the ruthless streets of London could not be condemned for the feelings she’d carried?

Grief contorted her face. Derek closed the distance between them. He took Lily in his arms and drew her against his chest.

She stiffened. “What—?”

“Shh,” he whispered against the top of her head. He rubbed his unscarred cheek over the crown of black curls.

“I did not want to like you,” she said, her voice wary with the years of hardship she spoke of. “I hated you,” she said into the fabric of his shirt, the words muffled, but no less powerful. “I hated you without even knowing you not because of who you were but because of who
he
was.” A sob ripped from her throat and then she collapsed against him, weeping. Her body shook like a slender willow in a mighty storm. She cried until her tears soaked the front of his shirt and seeped through the fabric, hot and agonizing. Drops of her despair, guilt, loneliness, and fear.

Derek rubbed small circles over the small of her back, allowing her the cathartic healing of her tears. It was a healing she greatly deserved, after the ways in which she’d healed him. When her body stilled and nothing more than a shuddery hiccough escaped her, he reluctantly set her away. Her eyes swollen red to match her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, met his. Derek reached inside his jacket and withdrew his handkerchief. Wordlessly, he turned it over to her.

Lily hesitated and then took it. She blew her nose noisily and there was an innocence to that action that filled his heart with lightness, when everything in this walled in garden had previously been dark. “So that is the truth.” She stared down at the fabric. “That is who I am.”

Derek stared at her with her head bent like a repentant sinner. That certainly was how the lady saw herself. “You define yourself by the actions of a girl who was but fifteen.”
And yet, didn’t I define Christian by his actions as a boy of eighteen?
He started as that staggering realization slammed into him, momentarily sucking the breath from his lungs. Why should Lily have confided in him when he’d proven unbending where his former friends were concerned?

Lily spoke and her soft, husky contralto righted his unsteady world. “That was who I was, though, Derek. I was impulsive and rash. And desperate.” She fiddled with the edges of the soiled fabric in her hands. “I’m still that person. There is nothing noble in such a figure.”

He imagined her more girl than woman alone in London with nothing but her shame and fear, and was stunned by the hungering to drive back the sadness from her eyes. Why should he care about her, this stranger he’d known for a handful of days? Why should he care when the world had ceased caring for him? Because she was different than all the others. She saw him as a man and that shattered the safe walls he’d resurrected about his heart. “You expect I’d judge you?”

She turned her palms up. “You are a duke.” What a low opinion she carried of the nobility. Given her treatment at those unnamed gentlemen’s hands, however, entirely warranted. And she saw him as belonging to their ranks.

Only, he’d been cast out of that cold fold long ago and did not want back in. Derek strolled over to his sideboard and fetched a bottle of brandy. “I am a beast,” he corrected. He held up a glass and she waved a hand dismissively.