Authors: Anna Campbell
Unfortunately for her, his plans were different. And his plans would prevail. He drew a deep breath and launched his attack.
“Leonidas Wentworth is your son.”
A
s Erith flung the uncompromising words at her, Olivia flinched and her face turned pale as moonlight. She snatched her hand from the strap to press it trembling against her breast. Her shock and fear were unmistakable.
In the charged silence that followed his statement, he wondered if she meant to lie and deny what he'd said.
He should have known better.
He heard her draw in a shuddering breath. She raised her chin and spoke defiantly. “Yes.”
Her expression was cold and closed. Her full lips took on a tense line and the gloved hand she held to her chest formed a fist. She bristled with hostility so powerful, it was almost tangible in the close confines of the carriage.
He sharply regretted that when he pried into her secrets, he hurt her. But while he waited in the village, he'd had time to ponder today's revelations. If he was to help her, he needed to know what had happened in her past and what he could do to gain long-delayed justice.
Ever since that jagged moment when he'd realized Leo was her son, a roiling mess of conflicting emotions had churned in Erith's gut. Amazement. Appalled outrage. Protectiveness. Sorrow. A voracious hunger for vengeance.
Curiosity that burned like acid.
“You must have been little more than a child when you bore him.” His tone remained austere although he could hardly bear to imagine what she'd endured. He was afraid that if he loosened the ruthlessly tight rein on his rage and grief, he'd lash out and terrify her indeed. Even though none of his anger was directed at her. Good God, how could it be? “How old are you now? Thirty?”
“Thirty-one,” she snapped.
Older than he'd thought. But in any just world, far too young to have a son of nearly adult age.
“And he's what? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
The boy's lanky height had originally fooled Erith into thinking him a few years older. Not surprising first impressions led him astray. Erith had observed the youth from yards away and through the distorting mirror of a virulent jealousy he still cringed to admit.
Leo didn't resemble his mother in much except for a slight lordliness to his manner. And that intense pride. The same pride he saw in Olivia now as she sat opposite him, spine ruler straight, eyes blazing, chin up.
“This is none of your concern, my lord.” Her voice was as icy and cutting as sleet on a windy winter moor.
The frail intimacy they'd established in the last few days might never have existed. She built a high wall around herself, invisible but real as the leather-covered seat beneath him. Unluckily for her, he intended to lay siege to her defenses. Batter them down if need be.
“I make it my concern.” Sighing, he ran one hand through his hair. He desperately hoped his motives weren't entirely selfish. He didn't think so. His voice softened. “I know
you're stubborn, Olivia. After what I've learned today, I suspect you've had to be. But humor me in this.”
Her lips thinned with resentment and her hands clenched hard on the green velvet reticule in her lap. “You've learned nothing.”
Leaning his head back, he studied the rich interlaced pattern of red, blue, and gold on the carriage's brocade-covered roof. “Haven't I?”
He let the pause lengthen into awkwardness.
“Why should you care?” she snarled over the carriage's endless creaking. “I'm nothing to you. Just another woman to fill your bed. There were women before me and there will be women after me. Your questions are only prurient curiosity, and you have no license to ask them.”
Undoubtedly there would be other women. But none would be like her.
He didn't understand his violent need to know the real Olivia under the spectacular facade. But in some obscure way, the challenge she presented seemed to him the last chance to save his soul. And he suspected, illogically, foolishly, obstinately, that in the process he might just save her soul too.
How had the stakes become so crucial? Why was this woman so important when others had just been warm bodies to fill the hollow coldness inside him?
It was a mystery. Perhaps one he'd only solve when he solved the mystery of Olivia herself. Olivia who clearly meant to fight him every step of the way.
He couldn't blame her. Already he guessed her history held harrowing secrets. Secrets it would pain her to revisit.
Why then did he push her? Did he do this for her or for himself? Were his instincts wrong when they decreed that only after she came to terms with her past would she break free of the cage of ice that trapped her?
He brought his eyes down to meet her turbulent topaz gaze. “What harm to tell me?”
“What harm if you don't know?”
“I can guess most of it.”
“Or threaten to expose Leo's existence.” Bitterness oozed from her words.
He knew he should swear that her secret was safe and that any battle between them was a private matter. He wished her and those she loved no ill. The opposite in fact.
But he said nothing. Add deception to his list of sins against her.
He kept his voice neutral. “How old is your son, Olivia?”
She avoided his eyes. Her hands in their tan kid gloves mangled the reticule completely out of shape. “Leo is seventeen in August.”
“He doesn't know you're his mother.”
“He must never know.” Beneath the anger, he read lacerating sorrow. And something else he'd never thought to see in her.
Corrosive shame
.
The realization plowed bloody furrows in his heart. Especially as if what he surmised was true, she had nothing to be ashamed of. He tightened the lid on his seething rage. He needed to find out more before he pursued recourse from those who had injured her.
He didn't bother asking himself why her causes were his. They just were.
He desperately longed to hold her, to offer her the comfort of human warmth, but he restrained himself. That was the last thing she wanted from him. And recognizing that grim fact cut him to the bone.
“He loves you.”
“Yes.” With an irritated gesture, she smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from her green skirts. “But in any real sense, his parents are Mary and Charles Wentworth.”
Erith doubted that. The unspoken affinity between mother and son had struck him forcibly. He'd mistaken it for a sexual
connection. But then with his mistress, his mind dwelled overlong on sex.
His belly tightened with the urge to hit something. Hard and repeatedly, smashing it to a pulp. He folded his arms across his chest to hide how his hands trembled with rage. “You were fifteen years old when he was born.”
She'd already told him that in so many words, but he needed to say it. Needed to hear the vile truth spoken aloud.
The mongrel had fucked her when she was little more than a child. Disgust rose to choke him. Good God, how old was Olivia when she first learned the cruel truth of what men did?
“Yes.” Still she refused to meet his probing stare.
Damn it, Olivia, you're not at fault here.
He paused to beat back the shrill demons of anger and violence battling for release. Even so, his voice was harsh. “Yet you feel affection for his contemptible father.”
She frowned and at last looked at him. “His father?”
Her beautiful eyes were dark and cloudy as burned syrup with distress. Another pang of remorse stung him but he ignored it. He needed to know the truth, and, damn it, she needed to tell him.
“Lord Peregrine.” He bit out the hated words like a curse.
He couldn't interpret the expression that crossed her face. Bleak amusement, perhaps. “You think Perry is Leo's father?” she asked.
“The resemblance is unmistakable.”
“You told me Perry prefers the company of his own sex.”
Why was she fencing with him? The boy's parentage was indelibly written in his handsome face. “Clearly I was wrong.”
To his astonishment, she gave a scornful spurt of laughter. She sent him a derisive glance under her long eyelashes then stared out the window at an afternoon that rapidly clouded over.
“I'm sure you've never admitted that before.”
“You'd be surprised.”
“This inquisition stops now, Lord Erith.” Her lips firmed and she spoke as though she loathed him. “I've told you all I intend to.”
“Do you want me to ask Montjoy?”
And then kill him slowly and painfully.
“You bastard,” she whispered, obviously reading the unspoken threat. Her eyes flared temper as she glanced at him then away again. “Leave Perry alone.”
He was so outraged and incredulous that she still protected the despicable miscreant, his words emerged like bullets shot from a gun. “How the hell can you bear the man who raped you when you were only a girl?”
“Perry didn't rape me.” She pushed back the curtain so she could better see the view.
The gray light that flooded the window illuminated her remarkable face. She looked like a girl, too young to have a child Leonidas's age. She looked old enough to know the secrets of the millennia.
“Don't lie, Olivia,” he growled. “The boy's the spitting image of his father.”
“Yes, he is.” This time when she leveled that perceptive, clear gaze on him, she seemed almost dispassionate. “But Perry isn't Leo's father. Perry is Leo's brother. Lord Farnsworth fathered my son.”
For the second time that day Erith felt as though someone had knocked the air out of him with a single blow.
Her lover hadn't been the beautiful and kind Lord Peregrine, but his foul and notorious sire. Uncontrollable nausea made his belly cramp.
Oh, Oliviaâ¦
Frederick Montjoy, Lord Farnsworth, had been a noxious roué with a taste for the exotic in his lovers. Women. Men. Even, near his death, a whisper about animals. Pain. Bondage. But if he'd liked children, he kept that fact hidden.
When Erith was a young man about town courting Joanna, he'd met Lord Farnsworth briefly. But his attention had been elsewhere and he'd found the raddled old man of no interest. He'd noted enough, though, to know he wouldn't entrust a stray dog to the villain, let alone a defenseless girl.
“You've found out enough, my lord. It's more than I've ever told anyone else.” Her voice broke and he noticed that the hands she returned to torturing her reticule shook uncontrollably. “I never speak of those days to anyone. For pity's sake, please drop the subject.”
Painful compassion paralyzed him. How could he put her through this? Her suffering was clear. And she'd already suffered too much.
Then he remembered the fear that shone in her beautiful eyes when she forgot to keep her barriers up. Perhaps this difficult confession would help her conquer the phantoms that pursued her.
“Tell me what happened,” he said in a hard voice.
A flash of anger made her tawny eyes blaze, even in the dim light. “Will you give me no peace?”
“Tell me, Olivia.”
She spat the answer at him as though she hated him. “My brother bartered me to Lord Farnsworth to pay his gambling debts when I was fourteen. Are you satisfied now?”
Dear God, her damned brother had sold her into prostitution. No wonder she had such contempt for men.
“I'm sorry.” The words were hellishly inadequate.
She shrugged and turned to look out the window again. She tried to adopt the courtesan's impassive facade but he'd sheered too close to her essential vulnerability. Under the mask of composure, her face was pale and drawn, and her lush mouth tense with unhappiness. Guilt stabbed him in the gut.
They approached the outskirts of London. He'd been so intensely involved in what little she'd told him of her past that he hadn't noticed the passing miles.
“Where is your brother now?” His hands formed fists against the seat as he imagined squeezing the life out of the slimy blackguard's throat.
Her voice was flat. “He shot himself ten years ago when he couldn't pay his debts.”
“And of course he didn't have another sister to sell.”
She turned back to him and frowned. “Erith, I'm not some princess who needs rescuing.”
He wasn't so sure. But how could he explain to her what was barely clear to him? He drew a deep breath to control his bile. But nothing could cleanse his mind of the foul images rocketing through it.
The thought of his daughter forced into Olivia's situation made him clench his hands around his elbows so tightly that they ached. Roma had a family, a father, a brother to protect her. Clearly the young Olivia had had nobody.
“I've got a daughter.” It was the first time he'd mentioned his family to her. To any of his mistresses.
“Ah.” The clear gaze she settled on him filled with understanding.
He waited for her to question him, but she merely looked out the window once more. The traffic thickened as they approached Town and the carriage wasn't moving forward with its former speed.
An uncomfortable silence descended. The only sounds were the vehicle's rhythmic creaking and the clatter of traffic on the street. As the miles passed, Erith's heart thundered a furious chant of vengeance.
Against a dead man. Two dead men.
Both her brother and Farnsworth were forever beyond his reach, God damn it.
Erith could never win justice for Olivia.
He looked blindly out the window at the passing London streets and tried to douse the futile anger that made every muscle clench. Frustration was a physical pain in his belly.
And now a more immediate problem than her past woes,
terrible as they'd been, raised its head. Devil take it, he had to work out how to hold onto her.
After a long time, he spoke. “Our arrangement isn't at an end.”
Her head whipped around and she scowled at him. The brief cessation of hostilities when he mentioned his daughter was obviously over. “Of course it is. I laid out my rules and you've broken them.”