“Eliza, are you all right?” Darius called to her from a few steps away.
No response at all. Kneeling beside her, he took her wrists and forced her to turn in the chair until she faced him. “Eliza? Talk to me.”
Finally her blue eyes, once sparking with anger but now flat with a strange sense of nothingness in them, lifted to meet his gaze. “I don’t know what happened.”
“What do you mean? You were attacked.”
“My father… He never meant for any of this to happen. I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he placated. “None of this is your fault.”
“Yet it is my responsibility to fix it.”
Darius shook his head and placed a finger beneath her chin when she made to drop her gaze. “Not anymore. Please let me protect you.”
She shook free of his hold and turned back to the fire. “You can’t protect me. You have no sway. No standing in the village or in town. When they find out…”
“When they find out what? What haven’t you told me, Eliza?”
She squeezed her eyes shut but her back shook as a sob took hold. Raising her bandaged hands to her face, Eliza began to cry. She cried until she couldn’t draw breath, until Darius was forced to pick her up and sit with her on his lap, his arms tight around her slight frame as she sobbed against his shoulder. Where was the spitfire who’d told him she would bow to no man? Where had her sass gone?
“This doesn’t have to be the end of anything,” Darius said as she relaxed against him, as her tears dried but her grip on his shirt didn’t ease.
“I’ll lose my freedom and my family all in one moment of time,” she said with an indelicate sniff and half a hiccup.
“You’ll lose nothing at all and if you’d listened to me yesterday, I would have said the same thing. I have a proposal for you that I think could work out for all of us.”
She pushed away from his chest to look him in the eye. “What proposal?”
“I have a special licence in my pocket, the names have been left blank but your father and the archbishop both signed their names to it. We can be married in the morning and holding your dowry in the afternoon.”
“What then? You’ll sail away free as a bird but I’ll be left behind with another scandal and in no better position than I was a week ago.”
“Would you like to know what the alternative is? I promise you my idea will look like a rainbow compared to what you have now, which by the way resembles horse shit.”
A small smile bent her lips but then a shudder racked her body and she hugged her arms to herself. It was then that she seemed to recall she sat on his lap. He liked it. He liked her inconsiderable weight perched on his thighs. It felt familiar and yet not all at the same time. He wanted to pull her back down so she rested against his chest but then she rose. The cold and detachment were instant. He wondered if she felt it too.
“Give me the alternative and then we shall compare rainbows with…with…”
“Faeces,” he supplied with a grin. He needed to lighten the moment before sealing both of their fates. “First tell me why you didn’t accept Harold’s offer after you were compromised.”
Her head drooped and she sat on the settee, or rather fell, her eyes back on the dancing flames in the hearth. “You know about that?”
Darius nodded. “I asked around the village. The tale was a little too eagerly relayed to a stranger. Did it happen recently?”
*
Eliza supposed he had to find out sooner or later. He’d obviously done his research on the men who owed him money and the families who supported them. Was it concern in his eyes or did he wait to hear her version of events before he pulled the rug from under her and sent her back to the house with no roof and now no windows?
“It happened two years ago. Harold didn’t even know about my dowry then. He was full of charm and courted me even though I knew my father wasn’t completely taken with the notion.”
“Why didn’t the duke put a stop to it? Forbid him to call?”
For a bastard who had moved away from England more than a decade before, he had a good grasp on the proprieties observed by the ton. “I guess he owed Wickham money even then, or perhaps I should say Meddington as he’d been at the time. The two, father and son, came to call anytime they were visiting with the old earl. They’d invite my father to this game or that fight. He would never say no. I assumed they were friends, all of them.”
“Maybe they were?”
“He certainly put his esteem of them above his own daughter,” she muttered but then went on. “One night, my father invited the men to stay after dinner. I put the children to bed and told them to keep the doors of the nursery locked. We had no nanny or governess to see over them. We had no servants to play music or to pour the drinks. That was my task, he told me.”
“I am beginning to see where this is going,” Darius interrupted. “Did he force himself on you?”
Eliza shook her head. “He didn’t. He was actually quite polite and ordinary when he propositioned me. When I turned him down, he took me in his arms. Persuasion, he called it.” She lifted her gaze and looked Darius right in the eye. She had to make him see she told the truth even though no one had so far believed her. “I pushed at him to leave me alone but it was in that moment that my father and his entered the library. I knew instantly that Wickham had set up the whole thing. I
