“I don’t want to tell you.” Alice gulped and accepted his handkerchief. “It’s awful.”
“It might be awful”—Ethan kissed her cheek—“but you are not awful. Tell me.”
Alice closed her eyes, tears leaking from the corners, while she tried to find words for something she hadn’t mentioned to anybody in twelve years.
“Hart Collins was engaged to my sister.” She tucked her face to Ethan’s neck and would have climbed inside him if she’d been able. “He put on the pretty for her. Then we began to hear rumors. I barely understood them, but Avis is a little older than me, and she was much more worldly, not buried in books. Hart was always getting sent down and into trouble. His papa was a baron, though, so the trouble was kept quiet. Still, Avis had second thoughts and decided to break the engagement. There was another fellow who caught her eye—a worthy fellow. The day before our papa was to call on the baron to explain Avis’s change of heart, Collins and his friends snatched her from her horse and made off with her. I was so foolish…”
“You were fourteen,” Ethan said gently. “Fourteen is still a child.”
“I should have gotten help right then,” Alice said miserably. “We were on our own property, and Papa never made us take a groom if we were riding on Blessings land. I trailed after them and rode right into a trap, with Hart’s cronies pulling me off my horse as easily as Hart had taken Avis. They’d been drinking, and when Hart dragged Avie, screaming, into a gamekeeper’s cottage, they cheered and tossed me in after.”
“Go on.”
“He cut her clothes right off her, laughing all the while,” Alice went on, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “When Avie screamed at me to get out, he noticed I was there and held the knife to her throat.”
“I’m listening.” Ethan’s hand went to her hair. “I’m right here.”
“She stopped struggling,” Alice said, voice catching. “She motioned me to leave, and I knew she was trading her virtue for mine. When he started rutting on her, I bolted. I jumped on the first horse at the hitching rail and took off at a gallop.”
“You did the right thing,” Ethan said swiftly, before she could say another word. “You tried to go for help and made your sister’s sacrifice worth something.”
“He hurt her,” Alice wailed softly. “He hurt her terribly, Ethan, and all I did was run, and even then, I couldn’t control the horse. I ended up coming off, getting dragged, and taking forever to get her help. When the neighbors found her, Collins was long gone, and Avie was a wreck. He assumed no other man would have her, and he’d get her and her dowry despite her change of heart.”
In the safety of Ethan’s arms, Alice realized something else: Collins had hurt Avis, abominably, terribly, unforgivably, but he’d hurt Alice too.
“Avis couldn’t contemplate marriage to anyone, and you could no longer walk,” Ethan concluded. “Alice, you did the best you could, and you have to forgive yourself for not being older, wiser, stronger, and meaner. You have to. You were just a girl, a child, just… Good God, you were just fourteen…”
Ethan fell silent, and Alice let him hold her in that silence for a small, fraught eternity. At that moment, she didn’t care why he was holding her; she only knew she needed his arms around her for as long as he would spare her an embrace. She needed that gentle caress of his hand in her hair, needed the scent and heat and strength of him.
And then his hand stilled, and the silence shifted.
“I was fourteen,” Ethan said, surprising her enough that she pulled back to see his face. His voice was calm, almost meditative. “Collins’s modus operandi was already established. He gathered his little mob, plied them with liquor, ambushed me, and had his pleasure violating me. Because Heathgate came upon the scene, we were able to do some damage to Collins and his thugs, but nothing permanent. He went on to rape others, including your sister, and for that, I will always, always be sorry.”
Alice wrapped her arms around him. “You were only a boy, and so far from home, and it was just wrong.”
“It was wrong.” Ethan repeated her words quietly. “What happened to you and your sister was wrong too, Alice. I let Collins’s brutality limit who I was and whom I allowed to love me for a long, long time. I am unwilling to give him that control any longer.”
She blinked up at him, but burrowed back into his embrace without saying a word. As her mind calmed and she absorbed the quality of his embrace—sure, uncompromising, and snug—she realized something else: Ethan wasn’t disappointed in her. His words assured her of it, but more fundamentally, so did the quality of his touch.
“Why did you stay away, Ethan? I waited for you to fetch me home, and you didn’t.” She’d been waiting years for somebody to fetch her home, in fact.
He brought her knuckles to his lips for a lingering kiss. “Why didn’t you come home? I waited for you to come to me, and you didn’t.”
Alice nodded, accepting the validity of his point.
“Heathgate asked me if I’d heard what Collins said,” she offered. “I did, but it hardly registered. You seem so… in charge of your own life, not knocking about from one obscure post to another just to hide from your past.”
“Sometimes, we need privacy to get our bearings. We each hid differently, but I was as determined to have my obscurity as you were.”
“Thank goodness for little boys and their games,” Alice said. “They consumed more chocolate in five minutes than I’ve had since leaving Sussex.”
Ethan brushed a kiss to her temple. “They play kidnapping a lot. I’ve decided, because they always vanquish their foes, not to forbid it.”
“They’ve gotten good at it,” Alice observed wryly. “I sit before you, thoroughly kidnapped.”
“And it must be a tiring experience,” Ethan countered, running a finger down her cheek. “Are you resting, Alice?”
“Not well. You?”
He shook his head, his expression grave.
Alice had already, with no dignity whatsoever, told him she missed him, and she didn’t want to leave. Her recent confessions notwithstanding, his recent confessions notwithstanding, she still didn’t know where she stood with him.
Ethan rose and went to the window. “I want to put a question to you.”
“Ask me anything.” She didn’t like that he’d moved away, but framed by the window light, she could see he’d dropped some weight too, and there hadn’t been any fat on him to lose.
“It’s uncomfortable to ask this,” Ethan said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “I’d rather put it off.”
“Ask, Ethan. You put Hart Collins where I needed him to be, and for that, I would grant you any request.”
He turned and frowned at her in earnest.
“That won’t do,” he murmured. “You see, I want to ask you to marry me, and I am not jesting, Alice. I cannot have you marrying me out of some misplaced gratitude, or you’d be better off accepting Argus’s hoof in marriage. He’s the one who sent Collins to his Maker.”
“You want me to marry your horse?” Alice sat on the couch, trying to understand what he was asking, but a buzzing had started up in her ears.
Ethan shook his head. “No, love. I want you to marry me. I want you to belong to me and to the boys and to Tydings. I want…” He sighed and offered her a crooked smile. “I want children with you, little girls who look like you and peer down their noses at all things male and silly. I want babies, and great strapping lads who tease their sisters and drive us to distraction with their noise and ruckus. I want to someday drag my family off to Belle Maison in a parade of carriages and take over every inn we stay at along the way. I want you in my bed every night for the rest of our lives. I want you…”
She still said nothing but watched his mouth as if she could see his words.
“But most of all, Alexandra, I want you to be happy.” Ethan paused and swallowed. “I stayed away because I thought that’s what would make you happy. But you’re here now, and I don’t… I can’t… Don’t go, Alice. I’ll never bother you again. Please, just… don’t go.”
He turned his back, leaving Alice bereft of the truths in his eyes. He’d no sooner braced his hands on the windowsill than a missile pounded into his back in the form of a silent, fierce Alice, intent on getting her arms
