Page 17 of Her Beautiful Bastard
She shook her head, fighting the sensation his words caused deep in her chest, battling the hope, the desperation. “Don’t.”
“I think about it often,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Constantly, in fact.”
“Mr. Clayton.”
“I think aboutyouso often, it is laughable,” he rushed on. “What sort of besotted fool can’t stop pining after a woman he metoncefour years ago?’
“Mr. Clayton!” she bellowed, shrugging out of his hold and moving far away enough that she could no longer smell him, or feel the impact of his proximity. “Enough! Your words mean nothing. We both know that you withheld the truth from me. You tricked me into … I would have never … I will not lie with another woman’s husband!”
“I am not asking you to,” he stated, his voice quavering a bit on the last words. “Lydia, please—”
“For the last time, it is Miss Darling!” she snapped. “And there is nothing for you to say to me, unless I have somehow missed my guess. Were you, or were you not, wed to Lady Clayton on the night we met?”
He clenched his jaw, tearing his gaze from her and setting it on one of the stalls and the nickering horse inside. For a moment, she thought he would not answer, a muscle in his jaw flexing and loosening in spasms, as if he ground his teeth.
“Yes,” he managed after a moment of tense silence.
She had known, but hearing him admit it struck her like a fist to the gut. She placed a hand over her belly, taking a deep breath as she absorbed the pain.
“Then there is nothing left for you to say,” she declared, doing her best to pretend as if this revelation meant nothing to her. “I believe I have made myself clear, Mr. Clayton. I am here to act as Henry’s governess. Nothing more.”
“Of course,” he ground out, each syllable strained, as if he held himself in check.
“Unless it pertains to my pupil, you are not to speak to me or attempt to engage me in private again,” she added.
She was pushing her luck, speaking to her employer this way, but it felt so good after the shock she’d suffered today—her due after so many years of missing him, longing for him, only to find he was a charlatan.
“As you wish,” he said with a little nod.
She gave a curt nod of her own, then spun on her heel and left the stable as fast as her legs would carry her. Lydia felt his gaze on her, following her all the way to the house. It took every ounce of her will to keep from looking back.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sinclair left the bathtub, his water having long grown cold while he sat brooding, gaze fixated on the setting sun through his bedroom window. The day’s events after his long journey from Essex had drained him, and he wanted nothing more than to dry off and climb into his bed. There, he might yank the bedclothes over his head and burrow deep, shutting out the world as exhaustion pulled him into oblivion.
However, such actions would not stop the constant drifting of his mind back to the woman who had lingered on the edges of his thoughts for four long years. Even hours after their tumultuous conversation in the stable, he was hard-pressed to forget the way those large, blue eyes had stared so accusingly at him, or the way her mouth had curved in derision at the sight of him. The weight of her words, and the pain he’d heard in each one, had stayed with him, pressing down with crushing force.
Were you, or were you not, wed to Lady Clayton on the night we met?
The question had damned him, as all he could do when it was hurled at him was tell the truth. Yes, he had been married to Drucilla on the night he’d met Lydia. Yes, he had left Buckton for London shortly after Henry’s birth, where he’d buried himself in the revelry of the Season in order to avoid coming home to confront things he’d rather not face.
However, he had been unable to put into words how finding Lydia in that darkened corner of a London garden had been like a soft breeze cutting through stale, stifling humidity. He couldn’t have explained how kissing her, touching her, holding her for so short a time had so profoundly affected him.
Even if he had been able to say those things with Lydia looking at him, tears and disappointment brimming in her eyes, he doubted she would have believed him. And why should she? Examining their night together from her perspective, he measured it against the moment she had turned to find him standing before her in the schoolroom—in a home where he lived with his wife and son.
Pausing in the middle of drying off, he closed his eyes and heaved a pained sigh. God, what she must think of him.
He had thought leaving her in that garden without a look back, without telling her his name, was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. But he had done it knowing that he could never give her what she needed, what she deserved. He had walked away, hoping that she would remember him as fondly as he would her.
Sinclair had never given any thought to how it might feel to see her again and have her learn the secret he had kept from her, the reason he hadn’t told her his name or any of the other facts she might have thought to be pertinent. And, perhaps they were important now, but then, they hadn’t seemed to matter. He had not wanted to be Drucilla’s husband, or Mr. Clayton, wealthy bastard son of a viscount. He had only wanted to be the man Lydia looked at with wonder and desire in her eyes. He had wanted to be the man who banished the sadness he’d seen all over her face—the rejection she carried after months of being made to feel like an outcast by the Londonton.With her, for less than an hour, he had felt as if he belonged somewhere. It hadn’t mattered that that ‘somewhere’ had been in a tree bough with a beautiful stranger. It had felt right to him, and even after all this time, it still did.
He thought of it often; mostly at night when his son or the business of the day did not occupy his foremost thoughts. Sinclair would often lie in his cold bed alone and fantasize about being able to meet her as a bachelor, free and unattached. The possibilities were endless then, the numerous ways he could court, woo, and win her playing out in his mind so many times in so many different ways.
As he pulled on his dressing gown, belting it at the waist while crossing to the door separating his chamber from Drucilla’s, he attempted to bring his thoughts back to the present. There was nothing to be done about it. He could not travel back in time and do things differently with Lydia—perhaps telling her he had a wife, neglecting to kiss her or take any of the other liberties with her that he had. And, truthfully, if he could go back and do it all again, he was not certain that he would change anything. It had been one of the brightest spots of the last ten years of his life, second only to becoming a father.
Because he could not change the past, he could only look forward and hope that some way to make amends would present itself. He had done a poor job of explaining himself in the stable, still reeling from the impact of her sudden presence in his life. With more time to clear his head, he would think of some way to tell her the truth. He could only hope she would listen, and even if she did not forgive him for hurting her, perhaps she might understand.
It would be difficult, occupying the same home as her, going about life at Buckton knowing she was under the same roof as his shrew of a wife. However, letting her go was out of the question. If a woman with Lydia’s prospects had fallen to life as a governess, there must be some reason. He did not think she would have applied for work as a governess without cause, and he would not be the reason she went hungry or without a place to live.
