Rescued By a Lady's Love (Lords of Honor, #3) (33 page)

“But it is true,” she whispered. “It is what I am.”

Agony knifed at his gut. Those words uttered once more, in a decisive way where she’d played judge and executioner to herself for those acts. The same as he’d done to himself.

How long had he spent hiding himself away from the world and living in these very walls perpetuating Society’s worst expectations of him? He looked a beast, therefore, he must be one. It had taken Lily and Flora to show him there were some who could see past the marks he wore upon his person and into the man he’d been and, more, the man he wanted to be.

Derek continued rubbing small circles over her silken skin. “What you did to survive can never be undone,” he said at last. “Just as I cannot change what I did to—” His gut tightened. He’d not allowed himself to think of Christian, the Marquess of St. Cyr and Lord Maxwell in those lights any more since he’d been carried off the battlefield.

Lily angled her head and looked up at him. “Your what?” she prodded with a gentleness that clogged his throat with pained emotion.

“My friend,” the words came out gruff and harsh. Words he’d not uttered. His friend... Christian had been his friend, and hating so much what he’d been transformed into from that one unwitting accident, Derek had been unable to stomach the sight of either of the men he’d called friends.

She cast a glance over at his desk. “The gentleman who wrote those letters.”

He gave a curt nod. Before Lily, he’d have roared the townhouse down had anyone read those intimate missives. This, her knowing, had a sense of rightness. She belonged in his world and he ached to belong to hers.

“Tell me,” she urged and just as though he’d known when she needed to weep, she knew he needed to share his life with someone.

And God, he wanted it to be her. Derek drew in a shaky breath and searched his mind for a place to start. “We were young and foolish,” he began. Then, weren’t the two inextricably the same? In a man’s youth, he believed himself undefeatable and capable of nothing but greatness. One didn’t see their own mortality at the young age they’d been. Nay, man tempted fate with his recklessness, until fate ultimately proved the lie.

She slipped her hand into his and gave an encouraging squeeze.

Taking that silent support, he continued. “Christian and Tristan and I were closer than brothers.” Even his own brother, George, now dead and gone, had been more of an aloof stranger since he’d stepped from the nursery into his father’s fold, to learn his responsibilities as a future duke. “We were sought after and full of our own self-worth.” How many years had he spent carousing and womanizing? He’d been no different than the nobleman who’d seen a beautiful woman, a desperate woman, and thought of nothing but his own desires. He’d brought those women to heights of great pleasure, but beyond that, he’d never spared them a thought. He’d never considered what had brought them to a place where they’d forsake marriage and a respectable future
for
his enjoyments.

“What is it?” she prodded.

He cleared his throat. “We were bored noblemen.” Just like that bastard who’d identified a girl alone—a younger, equally beautiful version of this woman before him. “All second sons at the time.” A wry grin turned his lips. “And, of course, all ladies desire a strappingly attired soldier, don’t they?” He gave his head a shake, disgusted at the initial thoughts that had first held a tantalizing appeal to his pair of friends.

Lily forced him to unclench a fist he didn’t recall making. She brushed her fingers over his palm and that butterfly soft caress filled his chest with warmth. “You were young.”

“Yes.” He dropped a kiss atop her black curls. “And idiotic.”

“We all are at that age.” Her and her first love. Derek tightened his grip reflexively about her. God how he despised the man who’d robbed her of her innocence and right to a joyous future.
But then, I’d never know her...
And he was just that selfish of a bastard that he could not imagine never knowing her. Unnerved by that staggering truth, he continued with what were suddenly safer talks of his past. “We went off to fight Boney’s forces.” Cannon fire echoed through his mind and the piercing screams of men as they died alone on a field of chaos.

Lily unfolded herself on his lap and he made to gather her back but she only wrapped her arms about his waist. With strength radiating from her delicate frame, she hung on tight, and he took that unspoken offering. It eased the tension in his shoulders and the battlefield cries faded to a distant hum. “Christian was...an unskilled soldier.” Where he and Maxwell took to battle as though that had been the purpose they’d been born to, Christian had been too
human
to be what Derek had too easily transformed himself into—a ruthless warrior. “Maxwell and I made a pledge to keep him alive.” In the end, Christian had returned unscathed and Derek had been carried off in shame.

Then, was anyone really unscathed by life? The tortured marquess he’d visited some months ago had given no evidence of being unscathed.

“You are both blessed to have one another as friends.”

He didn’t have friends. By hell, he didn’t even have family. Derek pressed his eye closed. No. That was not altogether true. There was still Flora, his sister’s daughter. “We are no longer friends.” He’d severed any possibility of that former relationship when he’d sought to destroy St. Cyr’s reputation and marriage.

“Of course you are,” Lily said with a matter-of-factness that brought his eye open.

“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice thick. “I blamed Christian.”

She shifted in his lap and he wrapped his arms about her. “Don’t you see? We always blame someone. Some blame themselves and some blame others.” Who was Lily Benedict? Was she one of those latter individuals? Did her hatred belong to the cad who’d ruined her and thrust her into an uncertain future, reliant on the whims of bored nobles? Or did she take on guilt she should not feel for the circumstances presented women in an uncertain world? Her gaze fell to his chest and when she spoke, her words were so faint he strained to hear. “It is easier to take the hatred we carry for ourselves and turn that sentiment on someone else.” Then, she gave her head a hard shake and looked up once again, with a firmed jaw. “Your friend, the marquess, he understands.”

“I tried to destroy his marriage,” he said bluntly, hating the way she stiffened. Remorse twisted inside, having nothing to do with this humbling moment and everything to do with the shameful actions in the cold of winter. “My friend found love and I was,” am, “alone.” With no one and nothing. Or so he’d believed. Except... He skimmed his gaze over the room, to where the pile of St. Cyr and Maxwell’s notes littered the floor. He’d not truly been alone. Not in the ways he believed, but in other, deeper, more isolating ones for the self-imposition of that solitary state. What of Lily, however? Who had she had? He continued in quiet tones. “I read the papers of his and Maxwell’s triumphs. They returned the conquering heroes, sought after by all...” A dull flush burned his neck.

“And you were shunned by all,” Lily correctly finished for him. She trailed the tip of her index finger over the puckered flesh of his chest.

Derek flinched. He’d never grow accustomed to any person looking upon him and touching him as she was. Even in knowing she did not so revile him, he made to pull away, but she persisted.

“I had Harris,” his too-loyal butler, “find out about Christian’s circumstances. He was in need of a fortune and a wife, but he found something more than that.” And how Derek had sat cloaked in the shadows of this very room hating him for that happiness. Why should his friend know light when he knew dark? Why should Christian know love when Derek knew loneliness?

Lily looked questioningly up at him. “What did he find?”

“Not what.” The shame grew and continued its cancer-like spread through his being. “A woman. He found a lady with a fat dowry and that lady was...is,”
despite my best efforts
, “madly in love with him.” Memories flitted in of Derek’s first foray into the living. And where had he gone? To taunt and goad the newly wedded Marquess and Marchioness of St. Cyr. He spoke, his voice made hollow. “I crafted lies that made Christian out as a ruthless fortune-hunter.” And though the newly minted marquess had, indeed, been a fortune hunter, he’d possessed the same honor marrying where his heart willed it. And out of his own jealousy and self-hatred, Derek had tried to rob the other man of that gift. “I shared secrets of St. Cyr’s past with his wife.” He winced. Moments in his past that St. Cyr, no doubt, flagellated himself for.

Lily threaded her fingers through his hair and tenderly played with those tresses. “Oh, Derek.”

Bitterness ate at his tongue like acid. “That is the man I am. The monster.” A beast for not the marks he wore upon his person, but the crimes against his friends...and sister.

Lily pulled him back from the abyss of guilt threatening to swallow him. She clasped his face between her hands and looked him in the eye. He wanted to turn away but she tightened her hold upon him, not allowing him to pull free. “Oftentimes it is easier to feed that hatred and anger. Because the alternative is allowing life to destroy you, and for the struggles that go with living, there is something very grand and beautiful in life, anyway.” The dark glint in her eyes sucked at him so that he wanted to delve deeper into the story of Lily Benedict. That regretful glimmer in her aquamarine gaze spoke of someone who knew and this connection between them grew all the more, terrifying him with the intensity in this needing her.

“It does not undo what I did.” There was no atonement. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. Especially not when one’s plan nearly resulted in that former friend’s death.

“It does not. I know that better than anyone. But he is still your friend,” she said. She touched her lips to his and she tasted of forgiveness and hope and new beginnings. He wanted those new beginnings—with her.

How could she not know that as she spoke, he’d lost his heart to her? There was no fear in that. Just an absolute rightness; a sense of being whole, when he’d been empty for so long.

“You were blessed to have those friendships.”

Yes. He had been. Derek winced. In the end, he’d gone and made a muck of everything with those men. Guilt sliced away at his conscience, even as something in her words gave him pause. “And what of you, what of your friends?”
Please say there was someone you had all these years. Please say you were not alone in the ways I have been.

She gave him a sad, pitying smile as though he spoke with a child’s naiveté. “Women who are mistresses to noblemen do not have friends.”

His chest tightened painfully as with that handful of words, she confirmed what he’d already known. His exile had been self-imposed. Yes, he’d been shut away and scorned by Society but had he given the words, St. Cyr and Maxwell would have taken down the Tower of London with their hands, for their strength of friendship. Even his sister had not been deterred by the ugliness of his soul and continued to come day after day, with her young daughter in tow. And how had he embraced those kindnesses? By shutting out the only people who cared. And in his sister’s case, he was too late.

Who were the people important to Lily? Surely there was a friend for her somewhere in this world? Someone who knew the strength of her courage and beauty of her spirit. A desperate need to know all he could about her filled him. “Who are your letters to?” he asked, wanting those notes to be from a friend who cared for her and not some man who’d mattered to her.

Lily paused and, for a moment, he thought she’d withhold that knowledge he craved. Then she pulled away from him and he mourned that loss as she took the distance she now clearly required. She climbed to her feet, leaving him cold for reasons that had more to do with the loss of her body’s heat. Except, unashamed of her nudity, she strode over to the forgotten box she carried about his house in the earliest morning hours. She ran her palm over the top. Her lower lip quivered and she caught the trembling flesh between her teeth. “They are to my family.”

To. Not from.

Silence echoed through the room as this revelation made her more real and her loss all the greater for that realness. It had been easier when they’d been notes to amorphous strangers and he’d been left to speculate as to the person’s identity. In this case, it was a number of persons.

“I have two brothers and a sister,” she murmured. The person who should have protected her above all others had turned her out. Lily sucked in a jagged breath. “They were but children when I left Carlisle,” she said, her tone stronger for that breath.

Derek sat and stared through his lashes at her. “And do you still write them?”

The muscles of her throat moved. “No.”

“Did they ever write back?”

He held his breath, but her silence served as her answer. A black curse slipped out on a hiss at the coldhearted man who’d sired her, who’d deny her family. A man who’d left his child at the mercy of a merciless world. Then...was his own mother’s defection any different? Blood did not kindness or love make.

“He did not have a choice, Derek,” Lily said quietly, correctly interpreting the path his thoughts had traveled. “Your mother threatened to have the bishop strip him of his vicarship.”

The air left him on a swift exhale. God, his mother and brother had been the same kind of ruthless to rival the Devil himself. Guilt twisted his insides into vicious knots. “I am so sorry,” he whispered. How empty. How very meaningless those words were. Words that could never right George’s and his mother’s wrongs.

“It is not your fault,” she said so simply it ravaged him all the more. “Just as it was not my father’s. He had his other children to consider.”

“You were a
child
.” And she’d been cast out on her own. Insidious thoughts slid in, of a young, scared Lily, forced into the role of mistress by an old, lecherous gentleman. Rage descended over his eye momentarily blinding him so that he wanted to choke the life from that bastard’s body.

“But so, too, were they,” she said pulling him to the moment.