One Night for Love

'You were promised to someone else when you married me?' she asked him.

'No,' he said. 'Not really. I was rebelling against my lot in life. Even we privileged aristocrats do that, Lily. I had advised her not to wait for me.'

'Was I part of your rebellion, then?' she asked him, realizing that there could surely not be a more magnificent snub to his former life, to his parents, than marrying a sergeant's daughter.

'No, Lily.' He was frowning at her. 'No, you were not. I married you because there was a need to do so, because I had made a promise to your father. And because I wanted to.'

Yes. It was true. She must not start to believe that there had been any cynicism in his choice of her. He had married her because he was a kind and honorable man. And because he had wanted to. What did that mean?

'But all the time you remained fond of her,' she said.

'Yes, Lily.'

It had not escaped her notice that he had not really answered her original question. Did he love the woman called Lauren? Did he realize now what a dreadful mistake he had made in marrying her even though he had wanted to in a moment of impulse?

'And today you would have married her,' she said.

'Yes.' He had not looked away from her. 'I have known her all my life, Lily. She waited for me. My father died and I returned to my responsibilities here. One of my duties was to marry so that the abbey would have a countess. And to beget children, in particular an heir. My life of rebellion was over. And you were dead.'

'You told no one about me.' It was not a question. She turned and touched the silky brocade of the bed hangings. So heavy and so rich. So alien to anything she had ever known in her life. She wished she had remained in Portugal. She did not know what she would have done there, but she wished she had not come back. Perhaps she could have clung to part of the dream…

'Lily,' he said as if he was reading her thoughts, 'I mourned you deep in the privacy of my own heart. I am not sorry you survived. I am not, my dear. How could I be?'

No, he was a kind man. He had always treated her with gentleness and courtesy, even when she had been a girl and must sometimes have seemed an irrelevance at best, a nuisance at worst. Of course he would never wish her dead even though her survival had set an obstacle in the smooth path of his future.

'It was not because I did not care that I never mentioned you here,' he said. 'It was not because I did not care about you that I was to marry Lauren this morning, only a year and a half after your—your death. Please believe me.'

She did. Yes, he had cared. Enough to marry her. Enough to murmur those endearments to her on their wedding night. Enough to mourn her. But if he had died, she thought, she would have mourned him for the rest of her life. She would never, could never… But how could she know for sure? Who was she to judge? Meanwhile there was an obstacle even more insuperable than the fact that he was the Earl of Kilbourne while she was the former Lily Doyle.

'I—' She swallowed. 'You know what happened to me in Spain, do you not? You did understand this morning?'

She could feel him staring at her for a long time as her hands played with the braided fringe of the curtain. 'Was it one man, Lily?' he asked. 'Or many?'

'One.' Manuel, the leader. Small, wiry, darkly handsome Manuel, who ruled his band of partisans through daring and charisma and occasional intimidation. 'I have not been true to you.'

'It was rape,' he said harshly.

'I—I never fought,' she told him. 'I said no a number of times and was quite determined to—to die rather than submit, but when it came to the point I did not fight.' It was a burden on her conscience that she had not fought her captor more strenuously.

'Look at me, Lily,' he said in the quiet, authoritative voice of the major she had known. She looked unwillingly into his eyes. 'Why did you not fight?'

'There were the French prisoners,' she began. Her breath was coming in short gasps as she tried not to remember what had happened to them. 'Because I was afraid. So afraid. Because I was a coward.'

'Lily.' He was still using the same voice. His eyes were looking very directly into hers, making it impossible for her to look away. He was her commanding officer again suddenly, not her husband. 'It was rape. You were not a coward. It is a soldier's duty to survive any way he can in captivity—and you were a soldier's daughter and a soldier's wife. There is no question of cowardice. It was rape. It was not adultery. Adultery demands consent.'

Neville sounded so certain, so sure of what he was saying. Could it possibly be true? She was not a coward? Not an adulteress?

'Let me hold you,' he said softly. He was using a different voice now. 'You look so very lonely, Lily.'

A woman come home to a world that was alien to her and to a husband who had been about to marry someone else. How abject was it possible to feel? Would she never have herself back again, the serene, confident, happy self she remembered, the self who had somehow got lost after her one night of love?

She hunched her shoulders and looked down at her hands. When he came to stand in front of her and took her upper arms in his hands and drew her against him, she relaxed for a while, turning her head to rest against his shoulder, feeling the warmth and the strength of him all along her body. She allowed herself the luxury of feeling safe, of feeling cherished, of feeling that she had come home. He smelled good—of musk and soap and pure masculinity.

Yet she felt like someone who has arrived at the end of the rainbow only to find that there is nothing there after all—no pot of gold, not even the shreds of the rainbow itself. Just… nothing. And no more faith in rainbows. Only the core of herself with which to build a new identity, a new life.

She drew back from him before she could get lost in a dependency that would just not do.

'It would have been better for us both,' she said, 'if I had died.'