Arrested, Julian paused, staring at one long curl that spiraled down to her shoulder. It amazed him that his mind's eye never seemed to capture her true beauty. "You look
. . .
lovely," he remarked, well aware that the words hardly did her justice.
One delicate hand came up and fidgeted with a teardrop earring. "Thank you. Did you just return? I thought you would remain at Kettering Hall for a time," she said quietly.
"I thought it best that I leave at once."
Her hand stilled and she looked at him. "You are very good at doing what you think is best, aren't you?"
The rash flared in his stomach; all at once he felt a fool. What exactly had he thought would happen? That Claudia would rush into his open arms, as anxious to see him as he was her? The hell she would. The woman despised him; it hardly mattered to her that he had just endured one of the worst days of his life, and he felt the pain of raw anger rumble through him. "You have already made your opinion known to me. I see no reason to go over it again," he said tightly.
She cocked her head to one side as if to assess just how beastly he was, and folded her arms defensively across her middle. "Yes, well, you have made it quite clear that my opinion is so meaningless to you that you will not even do me the courtesy of listening."
God in heaven, not this, not now! He had only wanted to look at her, just hold her, not argue! Not speak. "Your opinion," he drawled, sauntering to the table, "is inconsequential. I have made my decision, and that is the end of it."
"No," she said simply.
"No?" he echoed, incredulously.
"I will not be dismissed, Julian—"
"And I will not be pushed into discussing this further—"
"I shan't leave this room until I have said what I must, whether you want to hear it or not! It is cruel of you to treat Sophie so abominably! She loves Sir William, yet you would apparently rather see her miserable before you would allow her to follow her heart!"
God grant him patience. "Claudia," he began, "Stanwood is—"
"A baronet!" she exclaimed hotly. "But that's not good enough for you, not with your ridiculous ideas of who is proper for whom! Can't you see that you are playing God with people's lives? This is exactly the same as what you did to me, do you even understand that?"
What he had done to her? Confusion clouded Julian's brain for a moment—he knew very well what he had done to her, he had ruined her for chrissakes, but for the life of him, he could not understand how that related to Sophie. "Pardon?" he asked stupidly.
Claudia made a sound of exasperation. "You tried to banish me, too, in a way. You never thought I was good enough for Phillip, which is why you strove to keep him from me. When that didn't work, you took it upon yourself to try to convince me that I was not good enough for him, hoping that I might slip away! As if. . ." she choked on a strangled cry and tightened her arms about her. "As if it was any consequence to you at all! But he was your friend, and apparently you would rather he had courted Madame Farantino than me! You never thought I was good enough for him, you don't think Stanwood is good enough for Sophie, and you don't care who you hurt! But Sophie loves Stanwood, just as I loved Phillip!"
Her words stabbed clean through his heart like a knife, and he suddenly could not seem to catch his breath. It was impossible . . . impossible that she could have misinterpreted his warning so badly! He opened his mouth, but he was too stunned to think, much less speak. She had loved Phillip . ..
"No! No, no. Let us be completely honest," she continued, almost hysterically, and behind her, the two footmen exchanged uneasy glances. "You never thought I was good enough for you! From the time I was a little girl, you made that very clear, but I was just a girl, Julian, barely old enough to know what I was doing! Yet you let me know then that I was somehow inferior, not quite up to your standards, and you still do! You think it perfectly all right to have your paramours, but you've no idea how painful it is," she said, her voice breaking, "so painful that when Sophie told me you objected to Stanwood because of his rank, I urged her, unequivocally, to follow her heart at all costs and defy your blasted convention—"
Fury exploded hot inside of him. "You did what?" he roared, unnoticing of the footmen slipping out of the room.
The sound of his voice shook Claudia from her tirade; her eyes widened. "I_. . ._ I told her to follow her heart, not some silly rule about who is good enough for whom," she said with much less confidence.
He would strangle her. In the morning, the authorities would find the body of his wife with those words strangled from her lips. Julian leaned over, grasped the edge of the table tightly as he fought to keep his rage in check. The ignorant chit had no idea what she had done, no concept of the peril she had put Sophie in! "William Stanwood," he said, struggling to keep his voice even, "does not love Sophie. He is a profligate. He wants nothing more than her goddam fortune. His debts are staggering and it is a bloody miracle he has not as yet landed in debtors' prison. His solicitor has inquired into every one of my accounts in an effort to ascertain the exact sum of Sophie's dowry and the annuity our father left her." He lifted his gaze and glared at her. "And furthermore, wife, it is widely known among the men of the ton that Stanwood delights in beating the whores he lies with, apparently deriving some sort of sick satisfaction from it!"
Color rapidly drained from Claudia's face. She moved awkwardly forward, catching herself on the back of a dining chair. "W-what?" she whispered hoarsely. "Sophie said—-"
"Oh, for God's sake, Claudia! Sophie would have said anything! She is terribly unsure of herself and quite certain she is in love with that degenerate!"
With a blink of her eyes, Julian could see the truth sink in. "Oh no. Oh no—"
"Lord God, what a tremendous mistake I made in trusting you and Sophie!" he continued hotly. "I had no idea that she was sneaking around behind my back, much less that my wife knew of it and condoned it! Had you told me, I surely would have given you every vile reason to be alarmed! But as it was, I found no reason to repeat such obscene things to the women I would protect!" he fairly shouted.
"My God," she whispered, her eyes roaming wildly about the room. "Oh my God! I am so sorry, Julian. I didn't know—"
"That's rather the problem, isn't it, Claudia?" he spat contemptuously. "You are so caught up in your dema-goguery that you are blind to the truth—blind to everything! The walls you have erected prevent us from speaking about anything of import! I confess I am quite at a loss as to how to bring them down, and I daresay I am sick to death of trying!"
She said nothing; just bit her lip and lowered her gaze.
It was the same as always; she closed herself off to him, the doors between them slamming shut and locking. His discomfort was suddenly suffocating. He jerked around, wanting her gone from his sight. "Leave me," he said curtly, and stalked to the sideboard, prepared to drink every drop of liquor he could find.
"Julian, I—"
"Go!" he bellowed, and heard the rustle of her satin skirts, her ragged breathing as she moved to the door.
"Claudia!" he said sharply. He glanced over his shoulder, watched her head bow as if she prayed for strength before she turned to face him.
"One more thing." God, Kettering, don't do this. He was a fool, a goddamned fool, he thought as he glared at her stricken face, on the verge of laying his heart bare to her. "You have misjudged me from the beginning. That night I called on you before Phillip died . .."—he saw the hurt flash in her eyes—"I did not mean to imply that you were not good enough for Phillip. I meant to convey that he was not good enough for you."
She gasped in disbelief, her hand fluttering to her throat.
"When the rumors began to circulate that he meant to offer for you, I could not bear to think that you, of all people, the one bright light in the whole bloody ton, would innocently marry a drunkard facing ruin. I could not bear to ever see you unhappy, and frankly, I could not bear to see another man have you. If you intend to crucify me all our days, at least do it for the right reason." He paused, summoning every ounce of his courage. "I_. . ._ I loved you. I loved you from the moment I saw you at the Wilmington Ball and every moment of these last two years. There never were any paramours, Claudia. There never was anyone but you."
Her other hand covered the one at her throat, and Julian wondered if she meant to be ill. Whatever she thought, he stopped there, acutely aware that she stared at him as if he had lost his bloody mind. Perhaps he had, at long last. His little confession now seemed absurdly insipid, and embarrassed, he turned back to the sideboard. "There is nothing more, no more startling revelations," he said sarcastically. "You've nothing to fear from me. I am quite recovered from it now."
"Julian. . ."
The soft whisper of his name sounded exactly as he had heard it in so many dreams. But it was too late. "Leave me!" he said roughly, and closed his eyes. After what seemed like minutes, he heard the door shut softly. He picked up the bottle of wine and walked unsteadily to the table, falling heavily into a chair. And there he remained for several hours, attempting to drown the image of her that bobbed about in his mind's eye.
If Claudia had had a bottle of wine at her disposal, she, too, would have attempted to drown herself. As it was, she was pacing her rooms wildly, unable to believe— to accept—how very wrong she might have been. Was she truly such a fool? She pressed her fists against her temples, trying to stave off the piercing headache that descended on her the moment she left the dining room.
How could she possibly have been so bloody stupid? Disgust filled her—disgust with herself, for so boldly advising Sophie to defy him without fully knowing the facts, even after Julian had tried to tell her. She had let her indignation guide her and was as ashamed as she was mortified—oh, Lord, the note she had slipped into Sophie's valise, urging her to follow love! Claudia choked on a sob, sickened by her impetuosity.
But what truly made her heart ache was that she had, apparently, misinterpreted his call two long years ago.
So convinced she knew his character, she had twisted his words around, inventing her own story to fit what she believed of him. He had meant to help her. But no, she could not see that then, would not listen to a Rake who made her heart soar with longing. She had believed the worst of him for two years more, wanting to blame him for Phillip's death. It had been easier that way, easier to believe Julian had led Phillip to his demise than to believe the worst of Phillip.
But she had known.
She could no longer deny that she had known of Phillip's increasing debilitation, or that he was losing sight of himself and his position in society. She had known that behind the smiles he reserved for her, the gifts he gave her, the whispers of steadfast esteem, something wasn't quite right. And she had stubbornly insisted it was Julian's fault.
It was easy to blame Julian for everything. His reprimand for a girl's foolish kiss, his slight at the wedding ball seven years ago—what on earth had made her think a man of his stature would have been infatuated with a seventeen-year-old girl? But it was a fantasy she had built, one she had carried forward, allowing it to color everything around her. Her adolescent crush and subsequent hurt had influenced her long after it should have. How it mortified her now to know she had been so shallow as to judge him on the basis of those meaningless, innocent encounters! It was exactly the sort of thing she fought every day—the blind acceptance of who and what women are supposed to be, based on outdated, stereotypical, uninformed thinking.
She paused in her pacing to press the heel of her hands into her eyes. She had never been more contemptible than she was at this moment. . . and he had loved her! The little things Julian had done over the last weeks, things that had seemed meaningless, but spoke volumes, now assailed her. The way he touched her wrist, her temple, her waist. The way he possessively took his hand in hers when they attended Sunday services. His constant smile, his indulgence of her every wish. When the sun comes up I think of you, when it sets I think of you, and every moment in between, it seems.
With an anguished cry, Claudia squeezed her eyes tightly shut and felt the hot tears slide from the corners of her eyes. She had deigned him indifferent when he had shown tolerance of an impossible situation, of her thrashing about, of trying to find her own way in this marriage. He had given her the freedom to do it her way, deferring to her wishes.
Why was everything so bloody complicated?
She dropped her hands, stared blindly into space. Was it true? Had she really been so ridiculous? Had he never been unfaithful? She was not a wife to him, not really. Even on those increasingly rare occasions he would come to her bed, she turned her heart away from him, allowing him her body, but not her soul. Cringing, Claudia sank onto a chair feeling sick with regret. She had done everything she could to push him away, to shove him into some corner. How could she blame him for seeking his satisfaction elsewhere? The most absurd thing of all was that she wanted to share his bed! Mother of God, how she wanted to share his bed
. . .
but pride, her foolish, useless pride, had gotten in her way.
A bitter laugh lodged in Claudia's throat—the irony of it was that she thought she was being so strong, so independent, striking a victory for women everywhere when all she had done was shove a marriage already teetering to the brink of collapse.
How exactly did she repair the awful rift between them now?
She wasn't confident at all that it could be repaired.
She slept fitfully as doubts about everything she had ever known grew to monstrous proportions. It was almost noon before she descended to the breakfast room. Tinley informed her that Julian had left very early, shortly after dawn. "Did he say where he was going?" she asked.
Tinley pondered that. "Don't believe so, ma'am," he said, and a footman carefully shook his head behind Tinley to confirm it.