He would not see his fate befall such a creature. And that,
that
was why she was here. Certainly not for love, nor lust, though he certainly felt the latter. He would not let her turn into an empty shell of a human.
“You’re doing it again.”
He blinked, focusing on her pale face. “Pardon?”
That pale face was now flushed, her cinnamon brows drawn together in consternation. “You are looking most peculiarly.”
He couldn’t let her venture into his soul. He was all too afraid that if he gave her purchase there, she would find a crack, pry it open and let out all the pain that he had managed to shore up. Best to keep her far away and focused on the externals of his being. “Perhaps I am thinking how best to consume you.”
Her lips parted for a stunned second, before she snipped, “That is an alarming word choice.”
He cocked his head, letting his hunger for her heat his gaze. “Is it?”
“To be consumed, my lord? By you?” She lifted her chin, contemplating him. Her breasts lifted up and down with a sharp breath. “Yes. Alarming is the word. For once consumed, would I not be lost?”
“Could you ever be lost, my lady?” he countered, the devil in him unable to resist playing with her. Just a little. “Are you so weak?”
She flinched. “My mettle has yet to be tested in the forge of trial.”
Astonished, he pulled back. Did she doubt herself so entirely? The Ophelia he’d come upon at the river had been so sure, so determined, even in her sorrow. “That is not true.”
Her rigidness softened for a moment. “I wish I could be so sure.”
God, she had walked a troubled road. Could she not see that she was the strongest woman he’d ever known? Certainly, she was stronger than he. For she had withstood grief while he had laid down before it. “You have already withstood your father’s passing and all that accompanied it.”
She focused on her glass, her spirit dimming, and she took another drink. Apparently, to fortify herself. For she met his gaze and said flatly, “You know the sordid tale, I’m sure.”
He did know. He’d had reports delivered to him the moment he’d returned to London. It had been all he could do not to call out the Earl of Darlington for the craven blackguard that he was. For no reason but his own jealousy over the love his father had felt for his step-mother, the earl had cast his half-family out.
It sickened Andrew.
But that bastard didn’t deserve another moment of his interest. No, his interest was for Ophelia.
She shivered under his attention.
He reached out and touched her cheek, skimming his fingers so lightly he might not have touched her all. “You must be freezing.”
She tensed. “I am not.”
Though he would have liked to slide his hand into her hair, cup her nape and draw her lips to his, he pulled his hand back. “You look as white as the proverbial snow.”
“We were talking of my family scandal. What does my complexion have to do with that?”
“Nothing,” he admitted. She wouldn’t bend easily to his care, yet he would try. “Only that I wish you to draw closer to the fire so that you might ease your aching limbs and chase the chill from your skin.”
Skin. Limbs. He shouldn’t say such things to her. He knew that. She was innocent. Oh, not to the ways of the hardness of the world. But innocent to men like him who could twist a maiden’s words and untouched desire like a potter spun his wheel to sculpt his clay.
“I am tired,” she confessed.
There. How simple. A nudge here. A word there. And she would do as he wished. Above all things, he wished her to open to him, to spill words she meant to keep guarded. He gestured toward the hunter-green settee before the fire. “Sit.”
Her small steps sent her badly made gown swaying deliciously about her curved hips. Would she let him buy her gowns? Not likely. But it would not stop him from clothing her in the silks she deserved.
As her patron, was it not his place to ensure her luxury? How easy it was to convince himself of the rightness of his actions. The innocence. He knew better, deep in his loveless heart.
She eased herself down onto the furnishing, keeping her back straight, not allowing herself the casualness of easing back.
Andrew smiled to himself. She didn’t trust him. It didn’t matter that her mother did or that he intrigued her. He would have to lead her carefully every step of the way in this strange relationship of theirs.
So, quietly and without warning, he crossed the room and sat beside her, allowing his calf to rest slightly against her gown. She froze, and her gaze snapped to the place where their bodies met.
He slid his leg back and gave her an innocent look. “Do forgive me.”
“Perhaps you should consider sitting over there.” She jerked her strong chin in the direction of the wing-backed chair adjacent to the fire and several feet away from her.
“I prefer this.”
She arched a brow. “You are not making me comfortable.”
He leaned back, allowing his body to drape along the lounge in a display of languor. He was on the verge of being an ass, but he couldn’t help himself. Largely, it was his nature. “How
comfortable
should you like to be?” An innocent question, laced with invitation.
She started to stand, too shocked or angry at his tactics. “Lord Stark, it is indeed your intent that I should be your plaything.”
He clasped her wrist in his hand, hating himself for a moment. Hating that his unpleasant nature, a nature that didn’t know how to be kind or affectionate, had won out over the intentions he had set in that small cottage in Sussex. The rake in him had come to rule so much of his life, it had taken over this meeting without him even truly realizing it. Without giving thought to how deeply he might offend her. Christ, he was a cad.
Andrew swallowed back bitter self-disgust. Had he really become so callous that that meeting in the country had been foreign? And yet, he’d liked himself there. Now? Suddenly tired, he swiped a hand over his face, perhaps to hide his shame.
“Forgive me,” he begged, eyes shut.
“I—”
“You must, you know,” he said, each word an ache. He opened his eyes and lifted them to her pale face.
She met his gaze, her eyes flashing with anger. “I beg your pardon?”
He studied her delicate face, his heart doing the strangest beat in his chest. “Forgive me?”
She blew out an exasperated breath. “Why?”
Though it took him every last vestige of soul he had, he allowed that small crack in his heart, the one he’d been so determined never to let her see, open. “Because I understand you.”
Those emerald eyes of her narrowed. “I don’t believe that.”
“You are here not as my guest,” he pointed out, unsure how to explain that he had seen deep into her beautiful soul at that river and could see it already withering like the burnish of fool’s gold. He couldn’t allow that. He would do whatever was necessary to fan it back to life.
She began to tug away, but he held fast. “You are not here as my plaything but as something entirely different. I am your patron, because I see something in you which needs tending, an awe of this world which is dying daily. I saw a desire in you to embrace a life so much larger than the little one you were leading.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped, but didn’t pull away. In fact, she lingered, swaying slightly at his words.
“Is that not true?” he prompted gently, afraid of hurting her with his blatant honesty. ”Do you not die daily?”
She winced.
He should have stopped there, but he needed her to see how much he understood her pain. “Your foot is sliding ever nearer your coffin as your mother drifts away. Oh, I know you are not dying. Not physically. You’re too robust for that. You are no foolish maiden waiting to be saved, my lady Ophelia.”
He pulled slightly at her hand, urging her to sit beside him again, and she did, her skirts flowing over his legs as she yielded to his gentle pressure.
He leaned in toward her, undaunted in his need to reach her. “You have seen those you love taken from you, and you know your mother is fast approaching a threshold she must cross. A threshold she can never retrace her steps over. And you are killing off your heart in slow, steady degrees so that you will not have to feel it.”
Her throat worked, and her eyes glassed over. “How dare you?” she said, her voice taut with a hint of anger. “How dare you be so cruel?”
His own heart, usually a shallow, dull ache in his chest, throbbed at her pain. “To make you cry?” He hesitated. “To say that which you have no wish to hear?”
Her shoulders shook, then she nodded. Tears slid down her cream-colored cheeks, cutting pathways across the porcelain.
“Tears are proof that you are alive, Ophelia. That you love your mother.” He took her hand and out of sheer impulse placed it upon his heart. She curled her fingers into a fist, resisting his comfort.
“The day you stop crying, my lady,” he soothed, refusing to give up, “is the day you become what I have become.”
Her fist trembled over the linen as if at any moment she might pound it against him in protest. “And what is that?”
“Someone whose heart still beats but who feels so very dead.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fear is the true weakness of the heart,
not love.
-Ophelia’s Notebook
Ophelia yanked her hand from him and tore from the room, brandy sloshing over her fingers as she made her escape. She raced down the hall to her mother’s room, then forced herself to draw in a calming breath. She would not enter her mother’s chamber so distressed.
She stood in the long, dark hall, shaking hands clasping the half-spilled glass of brandy. Fiercely, she gripped it with both hands and drank, drank until she reached the dregs, determined to feel anything but the temptation she’d left in that room.
How could anyone so beautiful be so terrifying?
She eased one hand to her corseted middle.
Why had he been terrifying? There’d been the rakish moments, the moments when her flesh had longed for him to embrace her, to fulfill her expectations that he wished her here only to make use of her body, to teach her pleasure in a way she’d never known, but had read much of.
But no. That was not why she was here.
With full certainty, she understood her presence was for something entirely different.
Tonight, she’d looked at him, and in that last moment, he’d been her mirror, a hideously beautiful mirror of foreboding, threatening her with the future of dark, empty eyes and a heart that wept blood, even though it swore it felt nothing.
Andrew Stark did not feel nothing. The misery in his eyes convinced her of that, no matter what he might believe.
She wouldn’t follow such a fate, would she?
Ophelia shoved such fears to the recesses of her thoughts, lifted her chin, then opened her mother’s door and silently slipped in.
A fire bathed the large room in a rosy glow, but the candles had been snuffed. One might have thought the room, full of delicate furnishings and a broad bed decked with silk hangings, was entirely empty.
A piano stood near the windows, a new addition since their arrival, and its presence drew her eye, clearly the queen of all the furnishings. When had that arrived?
She turned her eye to the bed and for a moment wondered if her mother had disappeared. At first glance, she might have mistakenly believed it was uninhabited, but for the small rise in the covers proclaiming her mama’s occupation.
Ophelia took careful steps, her slippers muffled by the soft, woven, ice-blue rug. She longed to speak with her mother, but she wouldn’t wake her. Not when her mother so needed rest. It seemed now she was sleeping away what little life she had left.
But at least she was not in discomfort when she slept. Large doses of laudanum ensured that.
Ophelia’s skirts brushed the coverlet of the bed, and she placed the empty brandy glass on the carved, pale confection-like bedside table. Her mother’s face was so small, small and strangely wrinkled, as it had not been just a few months ago. Her cheeks were deep hollows, giving the once-beautiful lady with skin to be envied by the angels, a mask-like look.
The mask was not a pleasant one. There was no beauty to it. Only a sort of delicate, whispery, gallows’ pallor.
A tear slipped down Ophelia’s cheek.
How ever was she to bear it?
Everyone she had ever loved had left or betrayed her. Now, her mother, the one person who remained who loved her no matter what she did or said, was fading.
Would she become like Viscount Stark? Strange and cold? Poetic one moment, calculating the next? There was a desperate yet confident desire in his determination to have his way. Would she become so void? She prayed not. She prayed she could fill her life with something besides the hollow pursuits that seemed to have left him more empty than his losses.
Her mother’s eyes fluttered, then opened. As she spotted her daughter, a smile eased the harshness of her features, and she seemed to coil with delight. “Can you not sleep?”