Page 35 of A Kiss Gone Wylde
“Gordon,” Payne acknowledged.
“Davenport,” the other man replied in kind. “Brandy?”
“No. I’m not here for libations,” Payne declined. “You promised answers and I would have them.”
Gordon sighed. “You always were direct to the point of bluntness… I was in love with Anne Bardwell and she was in love with me.”
“And the bet?”
Gordon leaned back in his chair, eyes closed for a moment. “I’m not proud of it. I pursued her, initially for that bet… and then I withdrew it from the book. I paid the wagers everyone had placed on it and burned that damning page.”
“I see. And did you seduce her as Wainwright stated?”
“No. Did I make love to her? I did. But it wasn’t seduction. It was not some scheme. I had every intention of marrying her. I had asked for her hand and she’d agreed long before—well before.”
“So why not just marry her then and be done with it? She and I had not been formally betrothed. It was an understanding but not something binding!”
Gordon laughed bitterly. “I wanted to. I begged her to run away me, to elope to Gretna Greene. But she insisted that we had to wait until your return from your grand tour. She wanted to speak to you in person rather than send something so significant in a letter that would possibly take months to reach you… if it reached you, at all.”
Payne waited for some responding emotion to manifest. But there was no anger or jealousy. There wasn’t even any wounded pride. He’d left Anne and gone off to do what he wanted. It had been grossly unfair of him to expect that she would sit at home waiting for him.
He was an unlikely source of wisdom, but Payne was without other options. “How did you know you were in love with her?”
Gordon shrugged as he took a sip of his brandy. “Easily enough. She occupied my every thought—waking or sleeping. When we were not together, I wondered what she was doing… what she was thinking. I would see some trinket in a shop and think it would make her smile. I’d read a passage in a book and it would remind me of her. Hell, I’d wax poetic to myself about the color of the sky matching the color of her eyes.In short, I became the very thing I had always jeered at—some calf-eyed fool.”
“I’m glad,” Payne said.
“Glad that I made an ass of myself?”
“No. I’m glad that she knew love. I didn’t love her. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was everything a man should want… and I would have married her and we would have lived the entirety of our lives feeling vaguely discontent without any notion as to why.”
Gordon nodded. “I see. And your baroness? Do you feel vaguely discontent with her?”
Payne laughed aloud at that. “No. There is nothing vague about Benny. We are either at one another’s throats or— ”
“I get the point. You have always been unflappable, Davenport. Calm to the point that it was infuriating for the rest of us. No one could ever get a rise out of you. In school, we all hated you for that.”
Payne eyed the man dubiously. “Is there some point to telling me how much every one at school detested me?”
“There is, oddly enough… I needed Anne because she was the calm in the storm for me. In her presence, my temper was soothed, the anger that had always seemed to bubble beneath the surface for me… that was abated. Perhaps your lovely bride is your storm. The one person who can shake your unfailing calm and bring you to life.”
“I’m not that much of a bore,” Payne protested. But he was. He was and he knew it. Even when he’d had his adventures, his grand tour, he’d been cautious and circumspect in all things. His entire life, he’d spent it avoiding trouble and confrontation, not out of cowardice but out of an intense desire to preserve his peace. And in slightly less than a week of Benny being in his life, he’d been embroiled in a scandal, married by special license, evicted his mother from his home, killed a man and foiled an abduction… and somehow achieved an uneasy truce with his childhood nemesis. “But she does certainly liven everything up a bit.”
“She does,” Gordon agreed. “For the record, you were right about Wainwright. He did attack Anne. She could never tell me whether or not the child she carried was his. I told her it didn’t matter. But she—she wouldn’t even let me touch her after that. Even if she had not died from child birth, I’m not certain the girl either of us knew would have borne any similarity to the woman those events had forced her to become… For years, I’ve been searching for proof. He confirmed it to me himself in conversation before his attack on your wife.”
“Why did he do it?”
“Because he could. He was a foul and miserable excuse for a man who only wanted to inflict pain. I think anything or anyone that crossed his path and was intrinsically good became an obsession with him—something he felt compelled to destroy. It was likely happenstance that it should have been her. But the world is a better place today without him in it. I only wish I’d managed to kill him instead of you.”
“Oddly enough so do I,” Payne stated.
“Go home. Go home to your wife.”
“It will not be a warm welcome. She is angry with me.”
“Then apologize.”
“I’m not entirely certain what I’m apologizing for. It’s all so impossibly complicated.”
