A Proposal to Protect His Lady, page 20
That silly headlong version of her hadn’t even seen his young love for her when it was so tender and unprotected she must have hurt him so very badly. It felt as if she had hurt that boy so much, how could the man he was now ever truly forget her insensitivity and love her as he might have done back then?
Now she knew she had to dig the words out of herself and give him everything she had refused to give him in the past. She could only start from here somehow, where all that denial and stupidity had begun when they were eighteen and still living on their family estates. It was all she could offer him and hope to convince him he had been right all along—they were born to love each other and she had been such a fool not to see it, too.
She was as tense as a bow string now and even that felt wrong after the lovely relaxation she had revelled in just a few hours ago in Max’s arms as they made love by daylight and it was even more powerful and deliciously wonderful than it had been last night. He had made her feel so much, got her to see herself as he saw her for a magical few hours. She had felt truly beautiful and he had given her such a heady sense of freedom that she marvelled that marriage to him had seemed like a trap when they began it.
She had wasted six whole weeks in ignorance of what truly loving her husband felt like, but now she knew she had to do this to let him know she really did love him. It felt as if she wouldn’t be able to find the right words to say how she felt about him unless she made things clear to both her parents at long last. She just hoped Max would still want her afterwards.
* * *
‘Oh, what a lovely surprise,’ her mother cried as her daughter entered the room with Max looming behind her. No doubt he was wondering as much as her mother and father why he hadn’t even been given time to go upstairs and change out of his riding clothes.
‘Good afternoon, Mama,’ Georgia said with a quick kiss on the cheek for her still very handsome mother while her stern glance dared Mrs Welland to comment on the aroma of horse as she shook hands with her son-in-law with such pursed lips they said it for her.
‘I have sent for Papa,’ Georgia added concisely. Then she stood silently waiting for him because this wasn’t a social call and she was too tense to sit opposite her mother like a meek little daughter and take tea. ‘And before you say or even imply anything about his manners, I asked Max not to take the time to go to Flaxonby so he can bathe and change after riding here so hastily at my request.’
‘I can’t imagine why you didn’t travel in the carriage with my daughter, Maxwell,’ her mother said anyway and Georgia sighed impatiently.
‘I don’t suppose you can, Mrs Welland,’ Max said blandly.
Despite her growing tension Georgia almost laughed as she imagined what he was thinking and why he chose to ride rather than scandalise the coachman and groom and where on earth would they have put Huggins?
‘Ah, Perkins didn’t imagine you, then, my love,’ her father said as he entered the room.
He kissed his daughter on both cheeks and gave her his usual bear hug before greeting Max easily and Georgia felt a little more sure that this had been the right thing to do. Not only did she need to free herself and tell Max how she felt about him, but she thought her father deserved better than her mother had been willing to allow him until now.
‘There is something I should have told you both a long time ago,’ she said and in the tense silence as she searched for the right words she could almost feel her father and husband silently arguing with her, but her mother needed to know and Georgia needed to say it. ‘You always wanted me to marry a nobleman, Mama. You trained me up to do so, taught me to flatter or condescend depending on the rank of those above and below the lofty place in society you expected me to fill one day.’
‘I taught you manners, taste and refinement. A lady needs the esteem of those around her and there’s nothing wrong with respecting rank as it deserves.’
‘Not as it deserves maybe, but in my experience that’s not very much. Rank is just a reward for a deed done by a man’s ancestors, good or bad. It says nothing about him as a person.’
‘Nonsense, proper respect for rank is the bedrock of society.’
‘Then I pity us all, Mama, because Edgar hit me for the first time the morning after our wedding and he went on doing it whenever I wasn’t with child until the day he died. His father’s rank and generations of privilege made sure he had sturdy enough doors to hide it behind and enough influence to keep the rumours he was a beast and a bully at bay. The sad truth is Lord Edgar Jascombe was no better than the tavern bully who gives his wife a black eye when he gets home drunk simply because she exists and he likes doing it.’
‘No! No, I won’t believe it. He was the son of a duke; he could not have been so cruel to his own wife.’
‘Oh, but he was, Mama. I hid the truth from you because I thought it would break your heart to know your precious son-in-law had feet of clay. I hid the bruises and the yanked muscles and all the humiliations he liked heaping on me from everyone except Max. Even after Edgar died and I was so ashamed he had made a victim of me for so long I went on protecting you from what I had been subjected to by one of your precious lords.’
There was a long silence and she remembered the pretty room her mother had decorated for her with so much love when she was a girl and knew her mother loved her despite her ridiculous ambitions for her only child. This must be hurting her, but protecting her from the truth wasn’t doing any good either.
Learning to hide her feelings, to be silent and hold back the truth, had to be the reason why her tongue tied itself in knots whenever she tried to tell Max she loved him. The words stuck in her throat even now and she knew she had to unlock them somehow, but what if it was too late and Max didn’t believe her?
‘I... I don’t know what to say,’ her mother said as love for her daughter fought with her long-held belief that peers of the realm were the human equivalent of Greek gods come down from Olympus to walk the earth with mere mortals.
‘I had to get you to see what you are throwing away, Mama. I didn’t mean to make you cry, only to finally get you to understand how lucky you are to have married a good man. Papa is a good and faithful husband and he’s kind, but you have set him lower than any so-called gently born male simply because his father made a fortune in trade. No, don’t stop me from telling Mama the truth she should already know about you, Papa. You are a good man and I know to my cost how hard they are to find.’
She paused as the most crucial words of all threatened to seize in her throat again, but she had to force them out this time.
‘Max is one, but I turned my back on him because I wanted a title and to live in a stately pile when I was eighteen, because you brought me up to think that would be so wonderful how could I not want it, Mama. Max loved me when we were both eighteen, but I ignored his love, made light of it and hurt him so badly that I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for what I did to him back then.
‘He was the only person I could turn to when Edgar died and I had to tell someone how awful my life with him had been. Max married me to save me from having to live at Mynham again with the girls, in the same miserable rooms where I was beaten and humiliated for three long years by my first and supposed-to-be noble husband.’
‘Max is...’ She paused again as she searched for the right words and he went to speak, but she put a finger on his lips to ask him not to. This wasn’t the time or place to be so aware of his mouth under her touch and want to caress it, then stare into his dark eyes with all she felt for him in her own. ‘Max is going to let me speak,’ she said with a severe look, ‘because he loves me.’
‘Ah, very well,’ he said with a nod to say that was why and he was glad she knew it.
‘Max has been my best friend since we were old enough to get into mischief together, but I still broke his heart when we were young. I hate the thought of the ruthless little title hunter I was back then. I had a second son with a better title than his and a suite of grand rooms in a grand house in my sights and I wasn’t going to be diverted by a silly little thing like love.’
‘If Lord Chert did not marry or produce a son, you could have been a duchess one day,’ her mother said as if she was still clinging on to that foolish old dream.
‘A duchess chained to a monster. Why can’t you see love is far more important than rank and privilege even now, Mama? I have more real love and joy in my life than the Duke of Ness and his stuffy peers have between them now because I love Max and I think he still loves me. I love my husband and you can’t imagine how sweet it is for me to be able to say how much I love Max when I hated my first husband so bitterly I was glad he died and set me free even if I did feel guilty about it.’
At last she could say it and now she had started she couldn’t seem to stop.
‘You love me?’ Max said so quietly Georgia had to step closer to hear him and almost forgot they had an audience.
‘I do,’ she said on a long sigh as the ache in her throat finally melted away.
‘And about bloody time, too,’ he said and she put her hand over his mouth in shock at his language and in a lady’s drawing room, too! Suddenly she could laugh as well as tell him she loved him and it felt absolutely wonderful.
He was her darling Max, her everyday sort of husband as well as the man who put the stars in the sky for her and made that everyday world seem so much brighter. Her life was real with him, this extraordinary man who had loved her even when she didn’t deserve it. She loved him so much it made silly young Georgia look more of a fool than ever.
She smiled up at him like a besotted fool, grabbed his hand and turned so they could face her parents together. ‘I had to try to make you see what you are throwing away, Mama. The character of a man is all that matters, you see? Not what his ancestors did to be made into lords or dukes—and that’s usually best not enquired into too deeply.’
Chapter Seventeen
‘Do you think knowing the truth about your splendid first marriage will change your mother in any way?’ Max asked Georgia as if he didn’t think it could.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can only hope my father will finally be forgiven by his own wife for not being born into the purple.’
‘Why did you feel you needed to say all that to me in front of them? Why not just tell me, Georgia?’ Max asked a bit too seriously for comfort.
‘We would never have got half a mile along the road here if I said it to you first, now, would we?’
‘And why would that have been so wrong?’
‘If you must know, I didn’t have either the courage or the words to say it to you until we got here, where it all began when we were children and then suddenly we weren’t. I was such a fool to turn my back on the idea of you when I thought I was a woman at eighteen and I was just taller and more of an idiot.
‘How could I have been so stupid, Max? Why did I not see you when you had obviously seen me? Because you didn’t have a title and my mother said it was a basic requirement for the man I would marry, I suppose,’ she said, answering her own question. ‘Papa would have given his permission for us to wed if only I had wanted to marry you back then and never mind what Mama said, so I can’t even blame it all on her. I have to hate my young self for causing you so much pain for such a very unworthy cause, Max.’
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ he said with a shrug to minimise her stupidity all those years ago and she knew she had to own up to it if they were going to have an honest marriage.
‘I know otherwise, I know how much you suffered,’ she said shortly. The carriage had stopped in front of grand neo-classical Flaxonby Hall, but she signalled the startled footmen to keep away.
‘How?’
‘Becky told me that, too.’
‘I’ll strangle her, slowly.’
‘You will have to get past me first. She was right to tell me how much you hurt and how hard you fought to forget me once I was married to Edgar. I thought you had forgotten me in those studies at Cambridge that everyone seemed to think you were enjoying so much.
‘I used to wish I was a man so I could join you during that first year while I waited for Millie to be born and hated every part of my splendid new life as a breeding mare for the ducal succession and chattel to my supposedly noble husband. After she was born I loved my baby too much to wish myself anything other than her mother, but I envied you so bitterly until then and all the time you were miserable and trying so hard to forget me.’
‘I did try very hard to do so, Georgia,’ he said with the bitterness of it in his eyes as he recalled the passionate, hurt boy who wrote out his resolutions to forget her over and over again. ‘You were my best friend as well as the girl I thought would be the love of my life, so I was lonely as well as furious and so frustrated without you.’
‘I doubt you were frustrated for very long,’ she said and thought of the eager mistress she had invented for him at the beginning of the summer and felt jealous all over again.
‘Oh, you are flattering me, my love. I was a spotty and not very rich youth at the time.’
‘I’m so sorry you were lonely,’ she lied and didn’t want to think of the boy he was then sleeping in the arms of an eager lover, or the man he became later doing it either. If that made her a bad woman then so be it. ‘I want you and you’re not in the least bit spotty now.’
This was meant to be her grand gesture, a semi-public declaration of all he meant to her, since she couldn’t find the words or courage to say it to him in private. It looked the very opposite of grand as they sat in a motionless carriage outside his brother’s fine but empty house.
‘I might be a weedy man of nearly seven and twenty at this very moment if you had realised what a fine man I was back then, my love. It was missing you so hopelessly that made me study hard for my degree to distract myself from loving you and I am rather proud of it. You are the real reason I took on Holdfast when my brother and Martha offered it to me as well, because I needed to work hard to forget you and it really did need me.
‘I certainly would not have become the splendid specimen of manhood before you if it wasn’t for you. I would probably have sat back and been Zach’s idle little brother for the rest of my life, not fitted for army, navy or the church and not much use to anyone. You are the one who put steel in my backbone and made me the man I am today.’
She could see he really believed it, but she thought he would have become more than he was born to be anyway, because he had such energy and verve that something else would have touched his heart enough to make him fight for it if she wasn’t such an idiot at eighteen. There was no point in her telling him so, though. If he wanted to think she was responsible for the fine man he had made himself into, she was quite happy for him to carry on with that particular delusion.
‘I do good work, even by accident,’ she told him with a besotted smile and an appreciative feel of his nearest wide shoulder to admire it more closely.
‘You are the lodestone of my life, Georgia, plain and simple. I simply love you and I think I always have, even when I was trying to convince myself otherwise. I know I always will now you are my wife and finally have the good sense to love me back.’
‘Thank you,’ she breathed between rather wobbly lips and saw a protest in his dark eyes. ‘I mean, thank you for keeping on doing it, despite all the reasons I gave you not to.’
‘Like being married to somebody else, then being a hurt and damaged widow even I wasn’t brash enough to try to woo for five long years?’
‘I certainly wasn’t ready to love you when Edgar died.’
‘You weren’t ready to do that even last night.’
‘No, last night I was very ready to. In fact, I did so rather beautifully in my opinion,’ she told him provocatively.
‘But it took you until today to say it.’
‘Ah, but today I know I love you; yesterday I only thought I did.’
‘The power of a good...mmph,’ he almost managed to say before she put her hand over his mouth to stop him.
‘Don’t you dare say that, Maxwell Chilton,’ she told him and devilment looked back at her from the darkest, most intriguing male eyes she had ever lost herself in—the only ones she ever looked so deeply into she lost herself, in fact—and he never could resist a dare.
‘Max,’ he argued silkily through her splayed fingers, then licked the palm of her hand and she shivered with delight and anticipation and oh, so much love she actually ached with it. ‘And, as I told you last night, demonstration works so much better than explanation.’
‘Really?’ she said and even tried to put some mockery into it. She must have looked and sounded unconvincing since he kissed her passionately, in a stationary carriage in front of half the servants in his brother’s primary country seat, on Lord Elderwood’s finely raked carriage sweep where anyone could have come along and caught them at it.
‘Really,’ he said and raised his head long enough to murmur it before he kissed her again and she forgot where they were and who might be looking.
She was almost certain her legs wouldn’t hold her up so it was as well Max really was the magnificent specimen of mature manhood he had boasted just now, as that meant he had strength enough for both of them. He finally jumped down from the carriage, grabbed her in his arms and raced up the lordly staircase into the nearest bedchamber with her and slammed the door behind them, before anyone could question his presence in his brother’s primary country seat when Zachary wasn’t even here to be ignored in his own home.
