Wedded in Scandal

Whenever and whatever your heart desires.”

He meant it as a joke. He was teasing her as he sat there, all golden skinned and beautiful. But he used the words “my lady.” As a joke. But she was a lady in truth. Lady Helaine. And she had just shamed her heritage terribly. The thought had her burying her face in her arms, her shoulders stiffening as she imagined what her grandmother would say of a woman like her.

“Oh, no,” she heard Robert say. “Helaine, what happened? What are you thinking?”

He put his hand on her bare shoulder, large and warm where neither blanket nor pillows touched. She wanted to sink into his heat. Instead, she lifted her head and looked him in the eye.

“What would you think of Gwen if she were to do this?”

His hand remained on her shoulder, but the rest of him recoiled in horror. “Pray do not make me think of my sister in these terms.”

“Because it is wrong?”

“Because she is my sister.”

Her lips quirked a bit at his tone, but she quickly sobered. “Don’t misunderstand,” she said as much to herself as to him. “I would not choose differently, Robert. Tonight has been wonderful.”

“It is not done yet.”

She couldn’t help smiling a bit at that, but still her conscience pricked her. It was silly, of course. She had made her choice and did not regret it. Plus, no matter what title she’d been born with, her situation was vastly different from Gwen’s. And yet, it still bothered her. She had fallen. “We are both daughters of earls. And by all accounts, our fathers are similarly…er, flawed.”

Robert snorted. “Yes, though my father tends to make his mistakes a little more privately than yours.”

“He could hardly be more public.”

He nodded, and his hand squeezed her shoulder. “Helaine, it is merely a word. Mistress. Lover. Woman.”

“Tart.”

He winced. “No one will damn you for what we’ve done.”

She knew that. Her mother had all but thrown her into his arms. Her best friend, Wendy, would clap her hands and demand details. And as for her grandmother and even her father, they were all long gone. Their opinions mattered nothing. And yet…

“I feel as if I have cheapened myself somehow. And shamed my family name.”

He sighed and his hand went to her face to stroke a finger across her cheek. “Do you want me to take you home?”

She bit her lip, taking less than a second to decide. “No,” she said firmly. “I don’t regret what we’ve done, Robert. I really don’t. It’s just so hard to understand. It was wonderful, and now I’m…”

“As beautiful and wonderful as you were an hour ago.”

She snorted. “I doubt my priest would say that.”

He flashed her a rueful look. “If we are to look to the priests for our judgment, then I, for one, was damned a long time ago.”

She had no answer to that. They both knew as a titled lord, no priest would say a word against him. But she, on the other hand, could be cursed as a whore from many a pulpit. Not that it would happen. The priests had no interest in her at all. But it stung a little that as a titled man, he was given grace, whereas she would have to beg for forgiveness.

He searched her face, but she had no answers for him. So he shifted on the bed, putting his back to the wall before gathering her into his arms. She went easily. There was no place in the world that felt better to her than right here. She pressed her face to his chest and rubbed her cheek against his flesh while he held her tight.

And she did her best to hide her tears.

Chapter 20

Robert felt her tears wet his skin. He knew she was trying to hide it, and so he didn’t comment. But that didn’t stop his mind from spinning. What would you think of Gwen if she were to do this? Those were her words, and he was hard put not to shudder as his mind replayed the question over and over.

The two women were completely different, of course. Their situations, their stations in life, were in vastly different places. He did mark some obvious similarities in strength of character, but that made them both formidable women. He liked that about them both.

I don’t regret what we’ve done. Neither did he. And yet, he couldn’t stop the moral squirm that he had just debauched an innocent. In fact, he was still painfully hard with the hunger to complete what they had started.

Which brought him to the obvious question: What did she regret? What was she crying for? He guessed it was her lost childhood and the titled woman she should have become. She wasn’t mourning what they’d done, only the things she’d lost the minute her father had proved himself an ass.

“I know about lost possibilities,” he said to her hair. “Nothing like what you lost, but in my mind it was everything. At least for a while.”

She straightened off his chest. At his urging, she realigned herself against him. She was still settled in his arms, but could now watch his face while he talked. And he in turn could be tortured by the full length of her glorious legs along his.

“It must have been a woman,” she guessed.

“It was,” he confirmed. “My mother. I remember a time when she laughed. There was a day when I was just a boy when we had a picnic outdoors. I went swimming and Gwen sat on the blanket and smeared jam all over herself. Jack hadn’t been born yet. Mother looked at Gwen and laughed. She’d pressed her hands to her mouth but we could hear it.” He closed his eyes, pretending he could remember the sound of it. He couldn’t, but he imagined it. “She’s beautiful when she’s happy. Really, really beautiful.”

“Of course she is. Do you know what happened? Why she changed?”

He shook his head. He dropped his cheek on the top of her head, needing the support as he spoke. “I didn’t even notice at first. She’s never been a loud woman and if she spent most of her time indoors, I didn’t care. I was a boy. I wanted to run around without my mother, not have her trail around behind me.”

Helaine shifted against him, twisting slightly while his body thrilled to the sweet torture. When she looked him in the eye, he stole a kiss from her lips. It was sweet and stirring. And she ended it much too soon.

“Your mother seems sad to me. Just…well, desperately sad.”

“I know,” he said as he dropped his back against the wall. “As I said, I didn’t realize it at first. I was a boy and then I was at school. But one summer I spent a month at my friend’s home. His mother was never still, always busy, always expressing herself.”

“Expressing herself?”

“Well, she had five children plus guests. It was like a house party but for children. Jamie’s mother would be laughing at one of us while chiding another child to stay out of the tarts. Meanwhile, she ordered the household and helped teach the younger kids while the tutor worked with the older ones. Every day we went outside for hours, probably just to save the furniture, but it was never ending. And it was the best month of my life.”

“Until you went home and compared that woman to your mother,” she said, proving that she understood exactly what had happened.

“I tried to help her. I did everything I could to please her, to make her smile. I tried to get her to go on walks, to sing, anything that might work. Over the years, I’ve begged, teased, coaxed, even yelled.”

“And none of it worked?”

“Oh, it all worked for a short while. As it is working now with Gwen’s future in-laws. She’ll make the effort for a bit, pretend that she is feeling better, but eventually it stops. In time, she returns to her bed worse than before.”

She pressed a kiss to his neck and stroked her fingers idly across his chest. “How awful. What a terrible