The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [109]
“Open your eyes, Helen.”
She did then, gasping again with the pain. She looked up at Gerard Yorke, an older Gerard Yorke, one who had lived hard. She knew dissipation when she saw it, and Gerard had not spent the past eight years in search of sainthood.
“How are you, my dear?”
“I knew you were alive, I just knew it. What rock were you hiding under?”
“Do you want me to strike you again? I suggest you keep your insults behind your teeth. Now, you wanted me dead, didn’t you, Helen? Then you could marry that womanizing rakehell Beecham. Actually I hadn’t planned to come get you so very quickly, but I did not want to wait until after your damned ball.
“You wanted to flush me out. Well, you succeeded. I waited as long as I could, hoping that society would forget about me and the lamp, but it is just growing and growing. I have kept myself so well hidden that I even wondered if I could find myself. But it is over now. It simply hasn’t turned out the way you planned.”
“You came as a thief in the night, not as an honorable man, the hero, back from possible captivity in France.”
“You are even lovelier than you were ten years ago, Helen.”
“Why are you alive, Gerard?”
He sat back. He was more in focus now. She realized she couldn’t move. She was tied down, her wrists tied in front of her, her ankles bound together. She was still wearing her nightgown. A blanket was pulled to her waist. Her feet were bare. It was cold in the room, wherever the room was.
He touched his fingertips to her mouth. She didn’t move, didn’t make a single sound. She wanted to bite his fingers to the bone, but she couldn’t take the chance that he would knock her silly again.
“Yes,” he said, his face too close to hers, far too close. “I didn’t believe it, but it’s true. You have become more beautiful.”
She was afraid, but she would never let him see it.
“I have been sitting here, looking at you, wondering what it would be like to take you again. Ah, there was always so much of you to touch and caress. Now you are twenty-eight, a veritable chewed-up old spinster. No, I have that wrong. You are a widow, poor thing. Did you love me so much, dearest Helen, that no man after me could compete with what you had for such a very short time?”
“I was sad when I heard of your death, Gerard, but I will be honest with you. I had no more love for you than you did for me about a month after we were married. Actually, if I recall aright, I was quite disillusioned after about two weeks. You weren’t the man I had believed you to be. You really weren’t much of a man at all. All you wanted from me was an heir.”
“That’s right, and you never gave me one. Why else do you think I married you? My life was quite fine just the way it was, but I had no choice. I had to wed you. But then you were barren. Does your Lord Beecham know that you are barren, that he’ll never breed an heir off you?”
“He knows.”
He was silent a moment, studying her face. “You didn’t tell him, did you, Helen? You lied to him. Just as you lied to me. He has no idea that you are not going to produce children for him.”
“He knows.”
He slapped her, not hard, but it did sting. “You have started beating women, Gerard?”
“It was naught but a little slap, Helen. Don’t even try to pretend that I’m a monster. I never touched you in anger when we were together.”
“No, you only touched me to impregnate me, never anything more, and that was perhaps more soulless. How could I have possible lied to you about being barren? There was no way I could have known.”
He didn’t want to hear about that. “If you had known, you would have lied.”
That was remarkable, she thought, but she said only, “You have been gone for eight years. A very long time. Where were you, Gerard? What were you doing? Your father believes you are dead. I sent him your letter, but he said it wasn’t your handwriting. He told me not to harass him anymore. I never did like your father. He seems even more mean-spirited now than he did then.”
He said nothing and she continued after a moment, “Lord Beecham and his friends went to see