Clayton heard her, as she intended that he should, but he did not bother to gallantly reassure her that he wasn’t bored, nor did he turn to pay her the flattering attention that Janet was seeking with her remark. Raising his glass, he took a long swallow of his drink, watching the low-hanging mist swirling and advancing in the night. He yearned to have it close over him and blot out his thoughts, his memory, as it did everything else in its path.
He saw Janet Cambridge’s reflection in the window glass and heard her low, throaty laugh behind him. Until a few months ago, he had enjoyed her sensuous beauty and seductive voice. But now she lacked something. Her eyes weren’t the green of India jade; she didn’t look at him with that teasing, appraising, impudent sidewise glance; she didn’t tremble in his arms with shy, awakening emotions that she couldn’t identify. She was too available, too eager to please him, but then other women always were. They didn’t spar with him or stubbornly defy him. They weren’t fresh and alive and witty and wonderful. They weren’t . . .
Whitney.
He took another long swallow of his drink to dull the ache that came with just her name. He wondered what she was doing. Was she planning to marry Sevarin? Or was she with DuVille instead? DuVille was in London; he would be able to comfort her and tease her, to help her forget. DuVille would suit her better, Clayton decided with a wrenching pain. Sevarin was dull and weak, but DuVille was sophisticated and urbane. Clayton hoped with all his heart that she would choose the Frenchman. Well, with half his heart; the other half twisted in agony at the image of Whitney as another man’s wife.
He tortured himself by thinking of the way she had said, “I was going to tell you that I would marry you.” And bastard that he was, he had mocked her! Callously, deliberately, coldly stolen her innocence! And when he had finished, she had put her arms around him and cried. Oh Christ! he had all but raped her and she had cried in his arms.
Clayton dragged his thoughts from that night. He preferred the more refined torture of thinking about the joy of her: the jaunty way she had looked at him at the starting line of their race, just before the pistol fired. “If you would care to follow me, I shall be happy to show you the way.”
He could still visualize her exactly as she was that night in the garden at the Armands’ masquerade, her beautiful face aglow with irreverent merriment because he had told her he was a duke. “You are no duke,” she had laughed. “You have no quizzing glass, you don’t wheeze and snort, and I doubt you have even a mild case of gout. I’m afraid you’ll have to aspire to some other title, my lord.”
He thought of the way she had melted against him and kissed him with sweet passion that day beside the pavilion. God, what a warm, fiery, loving creature she could be—when she wasn’t being stubborn and rebellious . . . and wonderful.
Clayton closed his eyes, cursing himself for letting Whitney leave Claymore at all. He should have demanded that she marry him as soon as he could summon a cleric to the house. And when she put up a fight, he could have bluntly pointed out that since he had already taken her virginity, she had no choice in the matter. Then, in the months that followed, he could have found some way to make up for what happened.
Clayton slammed his glass down and strode past the guests and out of the room. There was nothing he could ever do to atone for the profane act he had committed against her. Nothing!
The guests departed early the following morning and the brothers celebrated their last evening together by getting purposely, thoroughly, blindly drunk. They reminisced about their boyhood misdemeanors and when they ran out of those, they began telling each other bawdy stories, laughing uproariously at the tavern jokes, and drinking all the while.
Clayton reached for the decanter of brandy and spilled the last drop of it into his empty glass. “Migawd!” Stephen rasped admiringly, watching him, “You drinked . . . drunked . . . finished the the whole damned bottle.” He grabbed another crystal decanter and pushed it across the table toward Clayton. “Here, see what you can do to the whiskey.”
Clayton shrugged indifferently and pulled the top from the decanter.
Through slightly bleary eyes, Stephen watched him fill the glass to the brim. “What the hell are you trying to do, drown yerself?”
“I am trying,” Clayton informed him in a proud, drunken tone, “to beat you to the finish line of oblivion.”
“Probably you will, too.” Stephen nodded jerkily. “But I was always the better man. It was unkind in you to be born, Big Brudder.”
“You’re right. Never should’ve done it. Wisht I hadn’t, but she’s . . . she’s paid me back for it tenfold.”
Although the words were slurred, they were filled with such bleak pain and despair that Stephen snapped his head up and stared, as alert as his sodden wits would permit. “Who paid you back for being born?”
“She did.”
Stephen shook his head, desperately trying to clear the alcohol euphoria from his hazy senses and concentrate. “Which . . . she?”
“The one with the green eyes,” Clayton whispered in an agonized voice. “She’s making me pay.”
“Pay for what? Whad you do?”
“Offered for her,” Clayton announced thickly. “Gave her stupid father £100,000. Whitney wouldn’t have me though.” He grimaced, taking a long swallow of whiskey. “Betrothed herself to somebody else. Errybody’s talking about it. No,” he corrected himself, “she din’t get betrothed. But I thought she had and I . . . and I . . .”
“And you . . . ?” Stephen rasped softly.
Clayton’s features twisted into a mask of anguish. He lifted his palm to Stephen as if asking him to understand, then let it fall onto the table. “I didn’t believe she was still a virgin,” he grated. “Didn’t know . . . till I took her . . . and . . .”
The tense silence that followed was suddenly shattered by a terrible sound that ripped from Clayton’s chest. “Oh, God, I hurt her,” he groaned agonizingly. “I hurt her so damned much!” He covered his face with his hands, his voice a hoarse, ravaged whisper. “I hurt her and then she put her arms around me. Stephen,” he choked brokenly, “she wanted me to hold her while she cried!”
He crossed his arms on the table and buried his face in them, finally sinking into the oblivion he’d been seeking all night. His raw voice was so low Stephen could hardly hear it. “I can still hear her crying,” he whispered.
In dumbfounded amazement, Stephen stared at Clayton’s bent head, trying to piece together the disjointed st
ory. Apparently his self-confident, invulnerable older brother had lost his head over some girl with green eyes named Whitney.
There had been a wild rumor sweeping London this past week that Clayton was betrothed—or on the verge of it—to some female, but that was nothing out of the ordinary and Stephen had shrugged it off as being the usual idle speculation. But it must have been true, and this Whitney must have been the girl.
Stupefied, Stephen continued to gaze at his sleeping brother. It was unbelievable that Clayton, who had always treated women with a combination of amused tolerance and relaxed indulgence, could have been driven to physically hurt one of them. And why? Because the girl refused to marry him? Because he was jealous? Impossible! And yet the evidence was across from him; Clayton was tearing himself apart with remorse.
Stephen sighed. Clayton had always been surrounded by dazzling women; Whitney must have been very special to have meant so much to him, for it was perfectly obvious that he loved her desperately—and still did.
In fact, Stephen thought tiredly, if the girl had turned to Clayton for comfort after he had just roughly deprived her of her virginity, she must have loved Clayton a little too. More than a little.
The following morning, the brothers shook hands on the front steps, neither able to look at the bright, sunlit day without flinching in pain. The duchess waved a cheerful good-bye to Clayton, then rounded on Stephen. “He looks awful!”
“He feels awful,” Stephen assured her, gingerly rubbing his temples.
“Stephen,” she said firmly, “there is something I wish to discuss with you.” She swept into the salon, closed the door behind them, and sat down in the nearest chair. Then she took an extraordinarily long time arranging her skirts to her satisfaction. In a halting but determined voice, she said, “Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs, thinking I’d spend a little more time with the two of you. When I reached the library, I realized that both of you were shockingly in your cups, and I was about to say how stunned I was to discover that I had raised two drunken louts, when I . . . when I . . .”