Page 67 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
‘To beauty and to memory, Eleanor. And to Lucy, our daughter.’
She drank to that, her lips leaving a mark on the glass that he then covered with his own.
* * *
He was a thousand times more dangerous than the man she used to know, the light playfulness gone and in its place a scorching sensual certainty. He was also promising her nothing save for this one night.
Her worry increased. What if his memory was suddenly jogged back and he recalled how he had pulled away last time? A lover who thought she had not quite been enough? A man who had sampled all that she’d offered and decided it wasn’t for him?
A hundred thoughts whirled around in her mind, a vulnerability that had been so complete six years ago she had barely survived and one that she was only just now beginning to recover from. Could she chance it all again or should she leave?
Her heart sank at such a thought.
Tonight he had allowed her the space to come to terms with what he wanted, but he would not be denied. She knew that to the very core of her soul.
The wine was an interlude to be enjoyed, but that was all. The stories that she had heard of him through the gossip mills of thetonhad been running around for years, but the living and breathing reality was so much more overwhelming.
She ought to call a halt to what he was proposing, cry enough and leave before she lost any will to say no. On his terms. Again.
‘I think perhaps I should eat. The wine is strong.’ She sounded like her grandmother, the rigid tones of sense discordant after the softer ones of lust.
His smile sent her heart into further spasm. Sensing her fear, he rang the bell on the small table beside him and instructed the man who came to serve the dinner immediately.
‘Can I show you to your seat?’
When his hand came up under her arm she felt the spark of connection like a shock.
It was a small table and they sat close. As the creamy chicken soup was served she saw the footman did not tarry, but rather closed the door behind himself and left them alone. When Nicholas locked it she was glad. Without interruption she could speak to him properly.
‘It was not my intention to deceive you about Lucy for I thought you were dead.’
‘To an extent I was. Deception is an emotion I have had lots of practice in, for when you do not know who you are you can be anything at all and make others believe it, too.’
She smiled at that because she understood the concept entirely. ‘And who were you? Then?’
‘A traveller. A businessman. A tramp. A card player. An outsider. It depended on the time of year and the places I was in. Summer usually found me in the back country far away from anyone. In winter I had to return to civilisation and shelter.’
‘A hard life for a lord?’
‘At first it seemed worse because, I suppose, I was softer.’
She could imagine him as a twenty-three-year-old without memory thrown into the chaos of a new country, without money, without a name.
‘Who were you there? How did you call yourself?’
The brown of his eyes was full of harsh memory.
‘A variety of different names all cobbled together by expediency. I was Peter Kingston when the man who did this found me in the town of Richmond tending a bar.’ His good hand gestured to his bad one and at his face.
‘It had been a while since I had moved so I was feeling safer and it was a shock when he tried to kill me as I was gathering wood for the fire from a shed by the river.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No. But I did not know the others, either.’
This truth nearly broke her heart because in those few words she could imagine exactly just what his life there had been like.
As if he thought he had said too much he raised his wine glass, struggling for a lost ease.
