Page 91 of Deceiving an Earl
“Please, Ellen. Please, stop this.”
She clutched her hands together as if in prayer, and he felt as if he might be sick. His stomach churned at what she had done to herself.
“I have to marry him,” she whispered. “I have to.”
“Whatever it is that is making you do this, I can help you. We can work through this together.”
She shook her head as tears formed in her eyes. “We can’t. Not this we can’t.”
He stood there helplessly, feeling as if his heart were being ripped from him. In two strides he was in front of her, tugging on her hands until she was standing. Not knowing what else to do, he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly to him. There was a deep fear inside him, a terror that he had never felt before, that was slowly strangling him.
“Tell me,” he kept saying over and over, and she kept shaking her head, her body trembling. But never once did she give in to the tears that he saw in her eyes.
“You have to promise,” she said. “Promise that you won’t pursue this. That you won’t let the press find out. That this will quietly go away.”
“I can’t, my love. I can’t. If it were in my power I would, but the arrests have already been made.”
“No,” she whispered brokenly. “Please, no.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ellen stood at the window and watched Oliver bound down the steps and into his carriage. She blinked the tears from her eyes because she wanted to memorize his form, his long stride, the way his shoulders moved when he walked with purpose. She wanted to imprint upon herself the wholly masculine scent of him and the strength and feel of his arms around her when he held her close.
She wanted to remember it all, because it would be the last time she would see him alone.
She knew she’d acted irrationally, but she was a mother trying to protect her son. She cared little for herself. As long as Philip was protected—as long as the secret of his paternity was kept guarded—she didn’t care what happened to her.
Except when Oliver was present. When he was next to her, talking to her, she tended to forget all reason. He was so persuasive. For a moment she’d believed that he could help her, that he could make this nightmare go away. But she was also saving Oliver from her secret, protecting him the best that she could.
Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she had gone to him when she realized that Philip was his child. It wouldn’t have changed anything. She certainly couldn’t have left Arthur and gone to Oliver. The scandal would have destroyed them all. But sometimes she liked to pretend that Oliver would have swept her and Philip away and they would have lived happily ever after in a small cottage in the country, drunk on love and happiness and little else.
That was a fairy tale, however. And reality was never like fairy tales.
Her lie by omission had grown and grown until its evil tentacles had wrapped around her and she’d become a prisoner to it.
But wasn’t that what all lies eventually became? A prison?
William wielded her secret like a sword, threatening her and everyone she loved.
For Philip she had to stay true to the course. For Oliver she had to stand firm.
The thought of what William had done, killing people to provide his lectures with bodies to cut up, sickened her. She’d not thought that she could be any more disgusted by the man, but this was a new low. What was she to do? William would never let her go. He would never allow her to walk away in light of these accusations. Even Oliver admitted that William would probably find a way out of this mess.
“Was that Lord Armbruster?”
Ellen spun away from the window and tried to surreptitiously wipe the tears from her eyes.
“Yes,” she said to Philip. “He just left.”
“And what did he have to say?” Philip stood in the doorway, tense, his gaze direct and burning.
Uncomfortable, Ellen turned away from her son. “Nothing important.”
A heavy silence fell between them, so many unspoken words. She felt his disapproval from across the room.
“Nothing important,” he repeated with little emotion. “I see.”
She fiddled with a silly piece of crystal that was nothing more than a dust-catching ornament and wondered where it had come from, how long it had been there. This was her home; shouldn’t she know these things? But she looked at it like she’d never seen it before.
