Chapter19
“I’ll not,” Drew promised, but he gulped. It was not a decision he’d made lightly, but it was the right one for him. He met Aurora’s gaze and realized she had overheard everything his father said to him. “I’ll not bow to blackmail and have already written letters to the hostesses, sending my regrets again. Father will calm down soon enough about my forgetting to inform him of my relocation from Mayfair, and having a mistress now, too. He’s kept a mistress himself for years. No one thinks twice about it now. The family want me wed, and an heir on the way, and that is all they have ever cared about. They do not understand that what I want is to be with the woman I love.”
Aurora winced. “You keep saying you love me and yet you cannot mean that.”
“I love you more than anyone in the world,” Drew promised, annoyed that Northport had come now and upset Aurora. “I will have my way. I love you more than the title and fortune that’s been dangled before me all my life. My family can go to hell for all I care.”
“Anyone living,” she murmured, looking at him hard.
“What?”
Aurora closed her eyes briefly, and when they opened, they were bleak as they looked upon him. “She’ll always be your first love. First choice. The one you dream of at night. The one you cannot let go. If she was alive, you’d never want me. I’m merely a temporary replacement until you marry again.”
He gaped. “That is not true!”
“Of course, it is true. You’ve told me many times how empty your life had become without her. You were lonely, and I knew from the start your heart was already taken.”
“Aurora, no.”
“You’ve spoken so much about Clare and the wonderful life you shared together that I can see it too. It was the life you were born to live. Not this. Not with me, here of all places. You belong with your family and to be a leader in society. You talked so much about what you lost when Clare died that I came to pity anyone who might have married you before you were over her loss. It is not possible to compete with a ghost.”
Drew rushed to take up her hands. “What we have is different.”
“It’s just a little passion, so you can forget her for a short while. I was lonely too. But I’m sure not a day goes by when you don’t regret her loss still.”
“I cannot deny I don’t wish Clare still lived,” he whispered. “I’d be a cold-hearted bastard if I did.”
“And you are anything but,” she promised and then her smile slipped away, and she winced. “But I know how easily men’s minds can be turned to lustful interest with a female they find attractive. I saw your desire for me and instead of turning aside from it, I allowed your seduction to succeed. I thought being your lover would help you forget Clare so you could marry. But don’t think that you can own me now, too, or control me.”
“I would never seek to control you,” he protested. “Why would you even suggest it?”
“That is what all men do to women in the end.”
“Not me.” He promised. “We want the same things.”
“Yes, we did. Once.”
He tightened his grip on her hands. “There is no reason for anything to change between us because of my father’s threats.”
“There is every reason,” she promised. “I never imagined this. Living together. The duke said you moved from Upper Brook Street, and you never told me! I thought you would come and go.”
“But it’s our house,” he argued, becoming annoyed that she would give up on them so easily. The calmness of her voice unnerved him, too. She had always been much more passionate when they discussed their affair.
“You offered me a house to live in.”
“And me!”
“But you never said it that way in the beginning. You just assumed I’d have no objection to keeping house for you along with sleeping in your bed.”
“This is our home. This is where we love each other,” he protested. “No more secret meetings. No hiding our love. It was what you wanted.”
She lifted her gaze to his slowly. “When did I ever say I loved you?”
Her question hit him like a punch in the gut. “You do.”
She pursed her lips a moment, and then her expression set in determined lines. “I never said it, and I won’t.”
He could not believe that. Even Scarsdale saw it clear as day. He leaned close to her, looking deep into her eyes. “Are you trying to suggest you were pretending to enjoy being with me?”