Verity bestowed a worldly smile upon him that was a brief reminder that she’d once had all London at her feet. “Kylemore, you more than anyone know men don’t take care of women without asking something in return.”
He wished he could deny it. He wished he could claim he was different, but they would both recognize the lie. It was too late for him to become Verity’s white knight even if a vile miscreant like him could play that role with any conviction.
With piercing sadness, he mourned all the lost innocence, his own as much as hers. Unlucky circumstances and human evil had forced them both into adulthood long before they’d been ready.
When he didn’t speak, she shrugged and went on. The gesture was so much the notorious Soraya’s that the breath caught in his throat. “At least Eldreth kept his side of the arrangement faithfully. With exceptional generosity, in fact. He took me to Paris, he hired tutors, he created the famous courtesan. Believe me, a grand personage such as the Duke of Kylemore wouldn’t have spared the Yorkshire farm lass a moment’s notice.”
Except he would have noticed her.
Yes, she now had the gloss of sophistication. But what drew him, what had always drawn him, was some indefinable essence that was purely her. What she told him might answer his abiding curiosity, but nothing tempered his fascination. He was coming to accept nothing ever would.
He didn’t tell her this. Instead, he a
sked something that had always intrigued him. “Where did the name Soraya come from?”
Then he was sorry he’d voiced the question. A fond smile crossed her face, and his doubt hardened into certainty. She’d loved Morse.
It made him yearn to smash something. Violence might ease the tempest in his soul, a tempest he had no right to feel.
“You must know about Eldreth’s collection of naughty books. It was famous.”
“Yes.”
During his investigations into Soraya’s background, he’d ended up learning as much about her rich protector as he had about her. More, in fact. The celebrated collection of obscure erotica had befitted a man with a beautiful young mistress, a great fortune and no troublesome responsibilities to home and hearth.
“Soraya was the heroine of one of his favorite stories. He used to read it to me—she was a young captive in the seraglio who restored an aging sultan’s vitality. Eldreth started calling me Soraya as a joke shortly after we arrived in Paris, and the name persisted.”
This recollection of laughing intimacy provoked another surge of churning envy. It hinted at a relationship richer than anything Kylemore had ever achieved with her.
What did he and Verity really share? Sex, which he now had to exact from her. Suspicion. Dislike.
He stared sightlessly out the window and tried to stifle his turbulent emotions. He had so many reasons to thank her dead protector. Morse had saved her from assault and poverty. He’d recognized her qualities and fostered them. Few men would have done so much.
A vivid memory arose in his mind of the moment he’d first met Soraya.
When Sir Eldreth Morse had presented his mistress to that crowded room, Kylemore had read only gloating ownership in the baronet’s face. Now he looked back with the eyes of experience, of six years desiring that same woman. And he saw something else.
Pride. Morse had been openly proud of the perfect jewel he’d produced to dazzle society.
Without the old man’s intervention, this incomparable woman would never have moved into Kylemore’s orbit. Any sensible man would curse Morse to hell for that fact alone.
Without Morse, he would never have endured years of frustration and misery. Soraya was the only thing that had ever come close to destroying him. She was his torment and his peril.
She was his only hope of salvation.
The predawn light let him make out the bruised fullness of her lips and the wary expression in her beautiful gray eyes. Surely, she couldn’t fear he’d condemn her for what she’d done. Her dilemma had been impossible, with other people’s survival hinging on her actions. She’d had the courage to use the beauty and wit God had given her to forge a future. A brilliant future, at that.
“Where’s John Norton now?” He focused on her story’s least ambiguous element.
“Kylemore, it’s too late to call him out for what he did to a servant girl over ten years ago,” she said quietly, her gray eyes not wavering from his face.
He knew she was clever and perceptive. But even so, it surprised him she saw so much. He’d tried to hide the full extent of his reaction to what she’d told him.
“It’s never too late,” he said grimly.
He broke the wordless connection between them and turned back to the window. Without pleasure, he watched the pale light gleam on the loch. The bars had been on the window so long that he hardly noticed them.
He heard the rustle of bedclothes as she rose, then the soft pad of her feet as she came toward him. She stopped behind him and her scent drifted around him, urging him, as always, to sin.