A Secret Affair

He sat facing her, a short distance away, a biscuit in one hand, his cup in the other. He slouched back in his chair and crossed one ankle over the other knee.

A pretense of relaxation.

“Tell me, then, Duchess,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

And suddenly a huge, dark, empty hole seemed to open up deep inside him. An enormous vulnerability.

But it was the only way he could atone.

***

HANNAH WAS IMPRESSED. Most men would surely have avoided the issue for as long as they could. And she had been fast asleep when he got out of bed. She would probably have slept all night. But he had chosen to remind her that she had the right to ask him questions about himself and to expect answers.

He was a man full of secrets, she suspected, and she doubted he ever gave up any of them willingly, even to those nearest and dearest to him. He was a private man.

And who were his nearest and dearest? His cousins? The ones who had usurped what should surely have been rightfully his?

Was he a lonely man? Suddenly she suspected that he was.

He was also, it seemed, a man of honor. He had behaved badly with poor Barbara, and he knew it and was remorseful. Now he would atone in the only way he knew how. He would answer any and all of her questions.

It would be cruel under the circumstances to ask them, to force him to give up the secrets of the life he guarded so carefully.

He was not looking his dark, elegant, dangerous self at the moment. He was sitting quite inelegantly, in fact—as was she. He looked gorgeous.

Something touched her heart—and was denied entrance.

She finished eating her biscuit.

“I might have known,” he said, “that you would respond with unpredictable cleverness to my offer to tell all.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“With silence,” he said.

And she realized that when she had chosen Constantine Huxtable to be her first lover she had done so not just on the basis of his physical attractions, considerable though they were. She had also been drawn to the closed look of him, hinting at depths of character and meaning that might contain nothing but darkness but might just as well hide universes of light. She had been attracted by the mystery of him, though she had had no evidence that there was any mystery at all.

She had known all this from the start, of course. She had told him before they became lovers that she would insist upon knowing everything there was to know about him. But she had not really understood what she was saying. She had still thought that primarily her interest in him was physical.

Was it not, then?

She had no one with whom to compare him as a lover. But surely there could be no one else who could so thoroughly satisfy her—a thought that did not bode well for the coming years. She had started with the best, and what did that leave her?

And was not the physical enough?

This craving to know him—ought she to have paid it more attention before it was too late?

Too late for what?

“Ainsley Park,” he said abruptly, setting down his empty cup in its saucer beside him. “It is the name of my property in Gloucestershire. The house and park are not quite on the scale of Warren Hall, but they are impressive enough. Even the dower house is quite sizable. And the home farm is large. I have enlarged it further by not leasing out two of the tenant farms when they went vacant. It is all very prosperous—a hive of industry.”

“Was it your father’s?” she asked.

“No.” He shook his head. “All my father’s properties were entailed. They are Merton’s.”

“How could you afford to purchase it?” she asked.

He smiled slowly.

“It is the question all my closest acquaintance have wanted answered since it became mine,” he said. “Especially Moreland, who knows—or thinks he does.”

“So?” she asked, setting her own cup down and sliding her hands into the opposite sleeves of the dressing gown she was wearing.

“I did not purchase it,” he said. “I won it.”

“Won?”

“I gambled as much as most idle young men do when I first left home,” he said. “I always ended up losing everything except the shirt on my back, though I was always wise enough to wager only what I had, which was not a great deal. I had a monthly allowance, but my father kept me on a tight enough rein. But this was after his death, when Jon was earl, and this time I deliberately sought out a game where I knew the stakes were high and no prisoners were taken, so to speak. And I wagered with money that was not strictly mine but was what I had received for the sale of a certain jewel—we have both been up to that game, Duchess. The money was not mine to lose, and I do not believe I have ever felt a terror to match what I felt when I sat down to play and made a bet of the type of magnitude my fellow players expected.”

Hannah closed her eyes.

“Within ten minutes,” he said, “I had won Ainsley Park. It was not the principal seat of the man who lost it, and he did not seem unduly disturbed at losing it with one turn of the card. He and his fellows did seem annoyed, however, when I took my winnings and left. They threatened never to allow me into their hallowed midst again. I do not know if they would have carried through on the threat. I believe they probably would have. I have never gambled since—except in a very small way at balls and private parties, I suppose.”

“And the money from the sale of the jewel?” she said.

“That went where it was intended to go,” he told her.

“And no one knows how you acquired Ainsley Park?” she asked.

“Let them guess,” he said.

“And what is the usual guess?” she asked.

“That I bought it with ill-gotten gains, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “They are not far wrong.”

“You live there alone?” she asked. How sad that he should have cut himself off in such a way from his relatives and friends.

He laughed softly.

“Not quite,” he said. “In fact, the house—the mansion—is so crowded with people that there is no room left for me. I live in the dower house. And even that haven of peace is being slowly but very surely invaded.”

Hannah moved her legs until her feet were flat on the chair. She hugged her updrawn knees and rested her chin on them.

“You are going to have to tell me now, Constantine,” she said, “or I will not sleep for a week wondering. And you do owe me. Who are all these people?”

“I started with women,” he said. “Women whose character and reputation were in tatters because their employers or social superiors had assumed their God-given rights extended to the very persons of the females they fancied. Women and their bastard children. They were given a home at Ainsley and honest work to do in the house and on the farm. And training as seamstresses or milliners or cooks or whatever else took their interest, if I could find someone willing to teach them in exchange for a home and food and a modest salary. And eventually they were found work with people who were willing to take them, reputation and bastard children and all.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why them in particular?”

He looked darkly brooding.

“Let us just say,” he said, “that I knew some of those women and the man who took everything from them except life itself. I knew what they lost—employment, family, the respect of all who knew them. I knew what they