This Side of Heaven (25 page)

But in the end there had been no escape.

“No!” she shrieked even as Matt’s hand slid over her ribcage, aiming, she knew, for her breast. “No, no, no!”

Like an animal gone berserk she began to fight, beating at him with her fists, kicking and scratching without regard for any damage she might do him. He had ceased to be Matt for her, ceased to be the one man whose touch she had thought might be able to heal her. Instead she experienced again the horror of Simon Denker.…

“Whoa, there! Caroline! Caroline, stop it!”

He was no longer kissing her, no longer holding her as a lover might but rather holding her off as she attacked him with sobbing, spitting fury. Her eyes opened even as her nails raked down his unscarred cheek. The sight of blood beading in the scratches she had inflicted shocked her back into some semblance of sense.

“What the deuce is the matter with you?” It was a roar. His hands were tight on her upper arms, pinning her once again to the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. She shut her eyes to block out the mixed bewilderment and fury in the dear face she had just done an injury to.

“Sorry!” For a moment his fingers tightened. Then his grip eased. “Caroline, look at me.”

Briefly she resisted. Then, most unwillingly, she opened her eyes.

He was frowning, his brows twitched together over those breathtakingly blue eyes as he searched her face. There were three parallel scratches on his cheek, she saw, blood-spotted and angry-looking against his skin. Scratches he had not deserved.

“I’m so sorry,” she said again, helplessly. In response, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth twitched down at one corner.

“ ’Tis I who should apologize. I should not have allowed this thing between us to get out of hand.”

“ ’Twasn’t you—” ’Her voice broke off, strangled by guilt. That he would beg pardon of her after that! The enormity of it made her throat ache.

“Wasn’t it?” His voice gentled. “What was it, then, Caroline? Or should I ask, rather, who? The man you told me about, the one who wanted you in payment for your rent?”

26

S
he flushed a deep, painful scarlet. There was no need to answer after that. Realization was plain in his eyes.

“He forced you, didn’t he? Forced you to bed him. That’s what this is all about.”

Caroline closed her eyes, shuddering. The memories came flooding back, disgusting, horrible memories—and she could no more stem them than she could hold back her tears.

“I’m so—ashamed,” she whispered, turning her face away as she felt her eyes brim over, The wet saltiness seeped beneath her lashes to trickle down her cheeks unchecked. Above her—she could not, would not, look—she thought she heard him draw in a harsh breath.

“You’ve no need to be ashamed.” His arms came around her again, tenderly this time. She curled into the hard warmth of them as he eased over onto his back, pulling her with him to cradle her against his chest. “Don’t cry, my poppet. ’Tis no blame attached to you.”

“You—I—I can’t bear to be touched.” Her face was burrowed against his chest, her hands clutching him as if he was her lifeline in a raging river. She was not
sobbing, but weeping silently, her eyes tightly shut, her face awash in tears. “By men, that is. But you—you can touch me and I don’t get sick.…”

“Just hysterical,” he muttered dryly, and her eyes flew open at that.

“ ’Tisn’t funny!” she cried, shoving against his chest as she thrust herself into a sitting position. With a grab he caught her hand, barely in time to stop her from scrambling off the bed and fleeing. He held it just tightly enough to keep her beside him.

“Believe me, I am not laughing,” he said, and from the grim set to his mouth she knew that he spoke the truth. With one more halfhearted effort she tried to free herself. When he would not let her go, she didn’t struggle but continued to sit beside him, legs curled beneath her, her hand in his. In truth, she scarcely knew whether or not she wanted to leave him. She ached for his comfort but feared discovering that her revelation had given him a disgust of her. But even if he did not despise her, she despised herself enough for the both of them. She felt despoiled.

A despairing heaviness settled in her chest as she realized that not even with Matt could she escape the nightmare Simon Denker had thrust upon her.

“I had best go—there’s supper to prepare, and …”

“Supper can go hang.” His hand tightened around hers. “Can you tell me what happened? ’Twould do us both good, I think.”

“Oh, no! I—I can’t talk about it!” Her stomach churned at the thought.

“Maybe talking about it is what you need to do, to take the hurt away.”

Caroline stared at him. He was watching her steadily, his fingers entwined with hers. He was bare to the waist, blatantly male with his bristled jaw and heavy muscles and black hair, but neither the sight of him nor the touch of his hand on hers repelled her. On the contrary, she wanted to curl up in his arms and take shelter there, where she knew as well as she knew that the sun would rise in the morning she would be safe forever.

“I have a stake in this too, you know,” he said softly, and as the sense of that sank in, her eyes widened. Her heart began a queer, almost painful hammering in her chest.

“You do?”

He gave her a small, ruefully crooked smile. “You don’t think I go around kissing every female who throws herself in my path, do you? Tell me, Caroline.”

So she told him, though it nigh tore her apart to do so. Told him about her father lying on the pallet before the tiny fire that was all that they could afford although he shivered constantly with the chill, told him about the meager food with which she had tried to rebuild her father’s strength, eating as little as possible herself as she had saved the lion’s share for him, told him about watching her father die by degrees right before her eyes while knowing herself helpless to save him—and told him, finally, about Simon Denker. Her voice emptied of all emotion as she spoke of that.

After weeks of putting him off she had thought herself finally free when her father died. Despite her grief
at his passing, she had been fiercely relieved to know that she need no longer suffer Simon Denker’s maulings, which had been growing more and more intimate. She needed only to retrieve Millicent and her own and her father’s belongings from the flat and then she would be on her own. The prospect had frightened her, but not nearly as much as Simon Denker did.

He had been waiting for her in the flat, and when he saw that she meant to leave, he threw her down on the floor and forced himself on her. She fought, but her struggles availed her nothing. Quickly, brutally, he had his way with her. Then, smirking, he got up to go, leaving her lying there, exposed and bleeding. To her horror she heard the key turn in the lock. When she banged on the door, screaming at him to let her out, he said that it would take more than that one lifting of her skirts to repay him for weeks of lost rent. He would keep her till he tired of her, and only then would she be free to go.

The flat was a tiny one on the third floor, the one window too small to allow escape. Had she screamed for help until her lungs ached, no one would have come to her aid. Such screams were all too common in that slum neighborhood.

So she had waited behind the door and knocked him unconscious with a chamber pot when he thought to come to her next. Then she grabbed Millicent and her belongings, locked him in the flat, pocketed the key, and fled. A hansom cab had taken her to dockside, where the
Dove
was ready to sail with the morning tide.

When she finished the telling, she was lying beside
him in the position into which he silently had coaxed her, her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. As she glanced up at him, sore afraid of what she would read in his face, she saw that his jaw was set, his eyes hard. But that grim look was not, she thought, for her.

“So you see why I had to use the brooch,” she ended miserably. “I had no money, and he would have come looking for me.”

“You did exactly the right thing. Had I known all this, I would have applauded your courage rather than scolding you as I did upon your arrival.”

“Courage?” She peeped up at him, surprised out of her grief.

“Aye, courage. Anyone can be overcome by an enemy’s superior strength. Look at me, felled by a deuced tree! But instead of allowing yourself to be beaten, you fought back with the best weapons you could muster, and you prevailed. To knock the dastard over the head with a chamber pot was but a small recompense for what he did to you, my poppet, but I can promise you it made him smart for days.”

“I hope so!” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Then, conscious suddenly of how cozily she lay against him, she sat up and gave him a wavering smile as she struggled to get herself under control again. Her voice was a shade too bright when she next spoke. “I must put some salve on those scratches. And then I really should get started on supper. There are the pies your lady friends brought, but I must give the boys more than that.…”

His hand kept its hold on hers, though she tugged discreetly to be free. “Caroline.”

She cast a quick glance at him.

“You must not do this to yourself any longer. By allowing that—lame excuse for a man to affect you so, you give him power over you out of all proportion to his importance to your life. What happened to you was a terrible, brutal assault—but it is over. You have to let go of it, so that you can heal.”

“But I feel so—unclean.” She whispered the confession, ducking her head in shame that refused to be dismissed, eyes closing even as her hand unconsciously tightened around his.

“So you feel unclean, do you?” There was an undertone of harshness to his words that made her open her eyes and look at him in surprise. “Because of something that was done to you, by force, that you had absolutely no way of preventing,
you
feel unclean.”

He made a sound that was midway between a laugh and a snort. “If you want to hear about unclean, my poppet, let me tell you about unclean.”

27

S
he looked lovely, sitting there on the edge of his bed, her delicately boned fingers curled with unconscious trust around his. Her raven hair had escaped its pins yet again, to tumble in artless disarray over her shoulders and down her back. The remnant of tears trembled on her lashes and left damp patches on her pale cheeks. Her mouth was soft, vulnerable, her eyes haunted with memories and the shame they provoked. They glittered a luminous gold through the wash of moisture that still lingered in them, Unfallen. Her tongue—the tongue that did not taste of raspberries after all but something infinitely darker and sweeter—was just visible between her lips, which had parted in surprise at his words.

Matt had his fury for the man who had dared to harm her under tight rein. Had the dastard been within his reach, he, God-fearing Puritan though he might be, would have strangled the life from him without a second’s pause. But the man was not within his reach and probably never would be. All he could do was try to repair the damage he had done to Caroline.

Caroline. Beautiful, dauntless Caroline. The image of her felling her attacker with a chamber pot made him want to shake with laughter and, at the same
time, howl with tears. That was so typically Caroline, courageous, spirited, yet vulnerable beneath the flinty skin she assumed for the benefit of the world. Her eyes were defenseless now as she waited for him to speak. Her head was slightly bent on her slender neck, drooping like a flower weighted down after a heavy rain.

He could not change time and undo what had been done to her. He would give nearly all he possessed were that possible, but it was not. He could help her only by laying himself as open to her as she had laid herself to him. He would reach out to her in the only way he could, by sharing the bitter secrets that he had thought never to speak of to a living soul.

“Just what do you remember of Elizabeth?” he asked, after a moment’s careful consideration of how to proceed. He did not want to hurt her further by needless revelations about her sister. Yet he thought that it would help her to know.

She blinked at him. “Very little. Although Mary has told me quite a lot.”

That surprised him. His eyes narrowed. “Gossiping, was she? I would not have thought it of Mary.”

Caroline shook her head. “It was more in the nature of telling me something that I needed to know.”

“She told you that Elizabeth was—not perfectly well in her mind?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you that one of the symptoms of her illness was a—an appetite for men?” This was more awkward than even he had expected. How did one phrase, for gentle feminine ears, a description of how Elizabeth had been?

“Yes.”

Where first he had been nettled to think of James’s wife gossiping about his private affairs, Matt now had occasion to be grateful. It would make the telling so much easier.

“All right then. I had no inkling that she was not the innocent young girl she seemed to be when I met her. She lived with an aunt in a cottage on land that was—used to be—ours, and if the Civil War had not thrown our family into poverty, Elizabeth would most likely have never crossed my path. So you may blame all that subsequently happened on your good King Charles.”

He tossed in the jibe to tease her and was rewarded by a faint smile. But she did not rise further to the bait, and so he continued: “But of necessity we had taken up farming, and one of our fields lay near her dwelling. Nearly every day that we were there, she would come out to watch us work. It never occurred to me, then, that she did so because she had an—unhealthy interest in men. She was older, but I didn’t know it then. Besides, I was old for my years myself. She was a pretty thing, very playful and kittenish, and very interested in me. Like a fool, I let her attentions go to my head and—” He paused, searching for the right phrase, and eventually bypassed a description of what he had done in favor of the results. “Eventually she told me she was with child. Again like a fool, I wed her.” He smiled faintly, as an errant fragment of memory momentarily alleviated his self-disgust. “I even went to ask your father for her hand, which was how I became acquainted with Marcellus Wetherby.
Where you were, I do not know, but I don’t recall ever setting eyes on you.”