Page 89 of The Study of Seduction
Pivoting to face her, he stared blindly past her with a haunted expression. “The bastard clamped his hand over her mouth and told me they were playing a grown-up game, and I should go back to my nurse. But I saw the stark terror in her eyes, the tears running down her cheeks. So I launched myself at him, determined to get him off her.”
His hand shook as he lifted his glass to his lips and drank deeply. “He had to abandon his assault of her to fight me, and then he had to fight both of us, and we made such a ruckus that our old butler came running. That ended it.” Ice glittered in his eyes. “Or rather, that ended thephysicalassault. The assault on her character lasted the rest of my parents’ marriage.”
Her heart sank. “What do you mean? The man tried to rape her!”
“But he told our butler that Mother had encouraged his advances, and then had grown embarrassed when I came in upon them. That I’d misunderstood what was going on. And our damned butler, who’d never really approved of Mother, believed him and agreed to keep quiet about it. Then Father’s friend took me and Mother aside and said that if we told anyone else about it, he would paint her to be a whore.”
With an ugly oath, Edwin threw the wineglass into the fireplace, startling her with his anger. She watched with her heart in her throat as he paced before her, his jaw tight. “Mother, however, wasn’t standing for that. As soon as the bastard left and Father returned home, she tearfully related what had happened. So Father went off to confront his friend, who apparently elaborated on his Banbury tale by claiming that Mother had tried several times previously to seduce him.”
“That scoundrel!” The thought of poor Lady Blakeborough being falsely maligned made her stomach roil. “But . . . but surely your father didn’t believe that awful man.”
“I wish I could say he didn’t.” Edwin scrubbed his hands over his face. “But they’d been friends all their lives, and the man was clever enough to play on Father’s jealousy, and the fact that Mother had always drawn men’s gazes. So Father marched back home and questioned the butler, me, and Samuel.”
He snorted. “Samuel was useless—he kept saying the two had been playing a game. I told Father that it hadn’t been a game, but an assault. That didn’t matter much when our butler said he’d come in upon my mother standing there in disordered clothing, looking flushed and agitated, while I screamed at Father’s friend. All of it was true. But all of it could also corroborate her attacker’s account.”
“If one was predisposed to believe the wretch—which your father certainly should not have been.”
“Unfortunatelyhedid not agree with you.” Edwin’s voice went cold. “He believed the butler. Father said we were children and didn’t understand that our mother had been playing the whore. Why else had she invited the man into the drawing room alone, after all?”
“Because she was being a courteous hostess?” Clarissa said, irate on his mother’s behalf. “Because the man was supposedly your father’s friend?”
“Father didn’t see it that way. He saw it as her fault, and their marriage was never the same. Though he cut off his friend because the man had ‘accepted his wife’s advances,’ he also withdrew from Mother and claimed that they’d both betrayed him. If she hadn’t already been in the beginning stages of pregnancy with Yvette when it happened, I suspect my sister would never have been born.”
“That’s appalling! How dared he believe those wretches over your mother?” At least Niall had realized the truth about what had happened toher, had never doubted her word for one moment.
When he didn’t say anything more, she eyed him warily. “You . . . you didn’t come to agree with your father when you were older, did you? Blame your mother for . . . for . . .”
“Of course not,” he bit out. “I might have been a child, but I could tell that she didn’t want what that bastard was trying to do, even if Father was too stupid to realize it. My father broke her heart. I could see the pain in her eyes whenever he was cold to her, hear her crying at night when she thought no one knew. And as the years went by, I could see her grow hardened by it.”
His expression was troubled. “She died without him at her side, because the man who’d claimed to marry her for love blamed her for that bastard’s attack. It’s why Father was never around, why his jaunts to London got longer and longer.”
“Oh, Edwin, I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing to have to hold inside you. Is that why you’ve always been so strict with Yvette about what women should and shouldn’t do—”
“Yes. Because I know that some men will use any excuse to justify hurting a woman.” He locked his gaze with hers. “Better that women curtail their freedoms than end up broken and battered and betrayed.”
“Better that men just stop hurting women,” she countered fiercely. “Better that people stop allowing it, condoning it, excusing it.”
That brought him up short. “Yes. You’re right. Thatwouldbe the best alternative. Sadly, we don’t live in such a world.” He approached her with a serious expression. “But I think you know that already.”
Oh, Lord, the time had come. She had to tell him. Glancing away, she murmured, “Yes.”
A shuddering breath escaped him. “Some man hurt you, scared you so badly that you’ve had trouble being touched intimately ever since.”
He spoke the words so gently that it made tears clog her throat. “Yes.”
Coming up next to her, he cupped her cheek. “He tried to do to you what that son-of-a-bitch tried to do to my mother.”
Unable to bear his sympathy, which she didn’t quite trust, she pulled away and turned her back to him. “He didn’ttry.” Lord, but it was hard to say. Especially to Edwin. “He succeeded.”
The long silence behind her made her wince. Then he let out his breath in a whoosh. “Are you saying that some man—”
“I’m saying I’m a ruined woman. That years ago, a suitor of mine got me off alone and . . . took my innocence.” Now that the words were spilling out of her, she couldn’t seem to stop them. “That’s why I—as you put it—shy from you. It’s why my nightmares, which I fought so hard to extinguish, erupted again recently.”
She could feel his stare boring into her back. “That’s why I . . . didn’t want to marry you or anyone else.” Bitterness crept into her voice despite her attempts to quash it. “Because I didn’t want to spend my life like your mother—wed to a man who despised me because I ‘let’ some scoundrel assault me.”
Twenty
“Let? No woman chooses that,” Edwin said softly, determined to banish the bitterness from her voice. “And I do not despise you. I could never despise you.”
