Page 57 of Her Beautiful Bastard
The man nodded, going to one of Drucilla’s bedside tables to begin collecting his belongings. “I will return in a few days to look in on her, if you do not mind. Lady Clayton has been one of my favorite patients over the years … a more resilient woman than any I’ve ever treated.”
Typically, some sarcastic remark would dance on the tip of his tongue when someone said something complimentary about his wife. But, this time, Sinclair had to agree with the man. Drucilla had proved many wrong by living as long as she had, and he supposed that was to be respected and admired. It was all he could conjure beyond this sick feeling in his gut, this conflicting mixture of reactions roiling in his middle.
The doctor quickly took his leave, so Sinclair approached the bed, finding that Drucilla’s breathing had quieted a bit, changing, becoming more shallow. She still lay with her back to him, her hair hanging in a single braid across the pillow. It made him think of Lydia, whose unbound hair had been darker, richer against the sheets he’d laid her on, her face a warm peaches and cream in contrast to Drucilla’s porcelain.
This was the bed he’d first made love to Drucilla in, the bed she’d borne Henry in, and now, he supposed it was where she would die. He pressed a hand against his middle, trying to tame this toxic mingling of feelings making him feel as if he would be sick. Lowering himself into the chair Tunstall had just occupied, he leaned forward, resting his elbows upon his knees, his chin atop his folded hands.
“I know you are awake, Dru,” he said. “I heard it the moment your breathing changed.”
Drucilla released a heavy sigh, then slowly rolled over onto her back. After she’d turned her head to look at him, her eyes narrowed with the usual malevolence and spite. He winced at the sight of the bloodstained handkerchief held in one hand, as well as a few droplets staining her pillow.
“Why are you here?” she spat, her voice tortured from constant coughing.
“You are my wife, and you happen to be dying.”
She snorted, but the sound turned into a wheeze before a coughing fit seized her. Sinclair got to his feet, helping her to sit up and reaching for a fresh handkerchief from the stack of them resting on the bedside table. He propped her up while she coughed, pity lancing through him as he felt the way it tore through her, shaking her willowy frame. The handkerchief came away stained with more blood, and he took it away as well as the one she’d been holding in her sleep, dropping them into a basket on the floor filled with other stained squares of linen.
“Do not come to me still smelling of the governess and pretend as if you aren’t relieved,” she muttered, falling back onto her pillows with a sigh.
He inclined his head and pursed his lips, wondering how he’d gone so long being fooled by her outward appearance. Now, when he gazed upon her, the petulance that was such a part of her personality overshadowed all the beauty that had once captivated him.
“You misjudge me,” he replied. “Of course I am not relieved. No matter what has happened between us, I would never have wished for you to die.”
She folded her arms over her chest and rolled her eyes, shaking her head as if she did not believe him. “You will not even deny that you have been with her.”
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Why would I, Dru? One thing I have never done is lie to you.”
“Have you no respect for me at all?” she spat. “That you would crawl into her bed while I lay here languishing—”
“And where has your respect for me been all these years?” he snapped, his patience badly frayed by fatigue.
His knuckles still ached from pummeling Wortham, and his sleepless night with Lydia, while blissful, had left him unprepared to deal with Drucilla.
“Where was your consideration for me when you invited your lover into our home, flaunting him before me knowing I could do nothing lest I risk making us the laughingstocks of Hertfordshire?”
He paused and chuckled, the irony of it all too damn good to ignore.
“Yet, we are probably on the tips of everyone’s tongues this morning,” he grumbled. “Or rather, we will be once our guests leave and word of last night’s events spread. If you did not care what it would do to me, did you not at least consider what the gossip might mean for Henry? How it would feel for the other families to decide their pedigreed children should not play with the son of the bastard and his whore of a wife who flaunts her lover with no care for discretion?”
“No one told you to act like some sort of ill-bred commoner,” she groused, turning her head to avoid looking at him. “Though, I am hardly—”
“Surprised that a bastard like me would behave in such a way?” he finished for her, raising his eyebrows. “That is what you were going to say, wasn’t it? You are, as always, so predictable, Dru. What did you think would happen when you invited him here, as if to rub my nose in your little affair? Did you expect me to stand back and do nothing as I have all these years, protecting your reputation and claiming Henry, going about life as if you did not stab me in the heart? Then, you think to bring him here and force me to host him under my own roof, eat with him at my table,lookat the face that shows me what my son will look like when he is grown?”
Drucilla moved as if to leave the bed, but Sinclair rose from his chair, towering over her and preventing it.
“No,” he ground out from between clenched teeth, hands balled into fists at his sides. “You will not leave this room. You will lie there and listen to what I have to say.”
Seemingly shocked by his sudden forcefulness, she shrank back against the pillows and stared up at him with wide eyes.
“I’ve spent years allowing you to treat me as if I am a dog not good enough to eat the scraps from your table,” he went on, unable to stop the words he’d held in for so long. “I have held my tongue, and done my best to keep the peace for Henry’s sake. I have ignored your many affairs—yes, I know Wortham was not the only one, simply the only one whose seed took root. And even then, I provided for you, I denied you nothing … I kept my breeches buttoned, because a part of me would not let go of the girl I loved, the one I built my entire life around, the one I would have moved mountains for. And you may as well have spat in my face for all the love and respect you denied me. Why? I want to know what I ever did to deserve to be lied to, cuckolded, and altogether trampled on for the past ten years!”
For a long moment, she simply stared at him, lips pinched into a thin line, face white as a sheet. Sinclair began to think she would not answer him, and had almost made up his mind to quit the room, when she finally opened her mouth.
“You were never what I wanted for myself, Sin,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper as tears filled her eyes. “Not for my future, anyway. Oh, you were handsome and charming, and I’ll admit the fact that you were a bastard thrilled me. You were forbidden, the sort of man I should never wed. But then, my father could not seem to get enough of your company, always speaking of Sinclair, the brilliant young man with a head for investments. He wanted you for me, and I … I had always wanted so desperately to please him, to gain his notice.”
Sinclair frowned, thinking back to their past and the first years he’d spent visiting Buckton. Yes, he’d come with Drucilla’s brother, mostly to escape the tension in his own household. But over time, his trips to Hertfordshire had become more about the girl with the secretive smile and white blonde hair than about her father. He remembered how the earl had doted upon him, as well as his own son … then recalled the aloofness with which he’d treated his daughter. A sickly thing, who could not make a good match for marriage because no man wanted an ailing wife he had to worry would die before birthing him an heir.
None of that had mattered to Sinclair, of course, him being a bastard and in need of no heir. He’d only wanted Drucilla and Buckton. Was that why the earl had so readily handed his only daughter over to him? Had he decided it made no difference if she died before giving Sinclair a son?
