The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell
Chapter 21
THE LONDONER
A LADY SPURNED!
Whispers abound that the scandal which has shaken Le Libre Club was nothing more than a tawdry orchestration on the part of Miss Emma Gately. For shame!
M. FAIRPOINT
Emma had always wished to receive a note from her former betrothed.
It was a secret she’d carried and shared with no one for the sheer foolishness of having it.
It had been just one of many private longings she had harbored where the gentleman was concerned.
She had let herself to thoughts of pretty sonnets, or even bad ones. Verses drafted just for her, a secret between the two of them.
And at last, he had written.
But once more, in yet another way, it was nothing she’d ever hoped for from him.
Meet me at the Serpentine at dawn. Same place as our last meeting.
—Scarsdale
Seated on the bench of her carriage, she lingered her gaze upon two details: the absence of her name and the addition of his formal one.
It was silly to be disappointed still, in any way, over Charles. Given the rouge-stained shirt that had lain atop garments she’d shed in his room, there shouldn’t ever be any illusions again on her part about who he was. A vise squeezed painfully about her heart, proving the damned organ still wasn’t done bleeding where he was concerned.
It was far better, far safer, to see him for the threat to the Mismatch Society that he was.
Folding the missive along its heavy crease, which had been made all the heavier from the constant reading and rereading she’d done of that scrap, Emma tucked it back inside her reticule. She stole a look across the bench to where Heather snored softly, and quietly let herself out of the carriage. Emma closed the carriage door with a careful click so as to not awaken the young woman she’d dragged along at this ungodly hour, and set off to meet Charles.
Nor did she have any illusions about what this meeting was about.
Or the gossip that had ensued.
And yet none of it had felt like any form of triumph. She’d felt only . . . all the worse inside.
Their truce, if it had ever really been that, had come to an end . . . after they’d made love, when she’d seen the evidence of his deeds that night contained upon his shirt and been reminded of all the ways in which she was still a fool for Charles.
She’d already crafted a response, one constructed on everything he would no doubt say. And focusing on that, as she made her march through the serene grounds of an empty Hyde Park, proved steadying.
Lifting her skirts to keep them from dragging on the dew-slicked earth, Emma found her way along the same path she had when she’d ended it with Charles. As such, there was a poignant familiarity to the impending exchange, a different confrontation that was also not so very different—two people who’d almost been wed, destined to be at odds forevermore.
Emma crested the slight rise and stopped, her gaze instantly finding him; his hands folded at his back, Charles stared out across the serene Serpentine, the faintest traces of the sun just creeping over the horizon bathing that river in an orange light, the water set afire.
Taking a breath, she continued the remainder of the way.
She reached him and opened her mouth to begin the scripted exchange she’d arrived here with this day, when, his back to her still, Charles spoke into the quiet. Cutting off her attempts.
“Do you know, Emma,” he said quietly, his focus still directed out, “I came here knowing exactly what I planned to say to you.” She bit the inside of her cheek under the evidence that they’d been alike, even in this. Charles let his arms fall to his sides, but made no move to look at her. “I’d planned what I intended to say about your sending Miss Lee and Miss Linden to my family’s household.” He spoke as if more to himself. “I arrived earlier, and I just . . . stood here. And do you know what I saw, Emma?” At last, he cast a glance her way, his eyes containing so much emotion, too much to ever make sense of without any deciphering from him.
Dampening her mouth, Emma shook her head.
“I saw you here . . . and myself, marching over that same rise you just walked.” He pointed beyond her to the path she herself had been so reflecting on in the very same way. “I thought of that day you broke it off. And why you did.” He paused. “It was something I’ve understood from that day. Why should you have wanted a life with me? Why, when you don’t even respect me?”
“I . . . respect you, Charles,” she said, joining him at the very edge of the shore. At the look he slid her way, she clarified. “Perhaps not before, but these past weeks . . . I’ve seen—”
“Precisely.” He pointed a finger at her. “That is precisely it. You didn’t know me, and I didn’t know you, and it was because I never allowed for it.” And this time an emotion she did recognize and knew all too well flashed in those dark brown irises: regret. “Instead, you’ve been left to form whatever opinions you have based on what you do know of me.” His lips pulled. “None of which are . . . honorable.”
What was he saying? What was he trying to say? She hung on, her breath bated, wanting to understand what exactly he was saying, a puzzle of a mystery she couldn’t solve without his explanation.
He sighed. “And so I initially came driven by anger that you’d dare send Miss Lee and Miss Linden to me. But then as I stood, waiting for you to come and thinking of the day you severed our arrangement, it hit me—you don’t know anything about my relationship with them.” Those words cleaved her in two, left her splayed in ways she hated because she cared about him. “You don’t know about my relationship with Seamus.” His features spasmed. “Hell, Emma, you didn’t even meet him . . . because of me. Because I never let you in, and that was wrong.”
I never let you in . . .
She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. “Why?”
He stared questioningly at her.
“Why was it wrong?” she clarified, her arms wrapped about her middle in a solitary embrace she didn’t recall making. “It was ordained by our parents. You were never required to have to let me in or want me in your life. There was no fault in your not wanting me.” It had taken until just recently for her to realize as much.
His throat moved. “Because I never gave us a chance, and I failed to see you as you deserved to be seen. I failed to appreciate you as you deserved to be appreciated.
“And mayhap it wouldn’t have changed anything,” he continued, running his eyes over her face. “Mayhap you still would have chosen the very path you have . . .” He looked to the graveled one they’d both traversed this day, and another before it. “But the truth remains, I’ve shared nothing with you. I’ve let you to your beliefs. About Seamus. About Miss Lee and Miss Linden.”
He’d let her to her beliefs . . . which implied not everything was as it seemed in terms of those people in his life.
“I know you are a good father to Seamus,” she said quietly. “I saw you with him but once, and know you are the manner of parent to build him up and celebrate his interests and indulge them when most parents of the peerage”—her own included—“do not bother with them in that way.” As for Miss Lee and Miss Linden? Her gut clenched. Coward that she was, Emma didn’t want to know about the women in his life. The named ones she’d spent all her adult life resenting as much as Charles for what they had shared. The knowledge all society had of their identities had made their realness and his betrayal all the more acute.
“Miss Lee and Miss Linden,” Charles began in solemn tones, and every muscle in her body tensed. She was not to be spared talk of those women whom he still had dealings with.
“It isn’t my business, Charles.” Not anymore. Emma took a step away from him, but he shot out a hand, catching her fingers, holding them gently, asking her with that slight action to stay. To listen.
Oh, God. She was not to be spared this, then, after all.
“No. I want you to know. I need you to.” His features were strained, a physical exertion of a man who’d less wish to share the next details than Emma. “It began with Camille.”
Of anything he might have said about the women to whom he’d been publicly linked . . . mention of his sister was not what she’d expected. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head.
“My sister lost her heart . . . and . . .”—hatred flared to life in his eyes, a vitriol so strong it sent gooseflesh rising on her arms—“and her virtue to a man. She was just seventeen.”
Emma gasped. “My God.” Not a whisper or a word or a hint of impropriety clung to the young woman. And in a society that found its sustenance on the falls from grace and heartbreak endured by its members, they’d somehow missed those morsels.
“There was no god in this,” he said with so much bitterness dripping from his tones it oozed off his words. “He was a rake of the first order. And I was oblivious to the attentions he was bestowing upon her, and the meetings he’d coordinated on our family’s Kent properties.” His lip curled in a snarl, giving Charles the look of a feral wolf eager to shred the man who found himself the subject of his telling. “He bedded her with only the intention of securing her dowry, and when he presented her ruin to my father, and my father made clear he’d never see a pence, the cad left.” His features collapsed. “And I let him. I was her brother, and I should have fought for her honor.”
Emma moved quickly, placing a hand on his sleeve. “Calling him out would have not changed what happened to your sister, Charles,” she said, willing him with her words to see. “It wouldn’t undo what he did. The hurt he inflicted. It would have only led to one of you perishing on a dueling field”—and knowing the shot Charles was, likely the bounder would have paid the price with his life—“and everything exactly as he left it.”
He balled and unballed his fists at his sides. “I was her eldest brother,” he said harshly. “I failed her.”
She tabulated the details of what he’d shared. “Charles, you were at university. You were a boy yourself.”
He turned quickly toward her. “I wasn’t a boy, any more than you were a girl at the age of twenty-two, Emma.”
Fair point. He was right on that score.
She tried again. “Murder isn’t a mark of honor, and that is what it would have been,” she said with a gentle but firm insistence. “Men are taught that duels are merely a matter of good. They are not, Charles.”
A muscle rippled along his proud, noble jawline, the only indication he heard her. “I couldn’t help my sister before she was ruined. My parents came to me, after the fact . . . and revealed . . .” His words trailed off, and yet that punctuated pause ushered in a thick tension.
She waited, allowing him the time he needed. All the while, she ached to be closer to him, to take him in her arms and give him the strength necessary to finish what he needed to say.
Charles glanced around, searching the empty grounds, before landing on a point just over the top of Emma’s head. “She was with child.”
My God.Emma’s eyes slid closed once more, and she made herself open them, thinking of how young Camille would have been . . . and what terror and heartbreak she would have known.
Through it, Charles spoke, his words rolling together rapidly, his voice still hushed so that she edged closer to hear every one of them. “A girl who’d just turned seventeen? With child? In this world? She would forever be an object of scorn. Her future settled by society. Her life uncertain.”
But a gentleman . . .
Those three words lingered in the air, a whisper that percolated, and then the realization hit her square in the chest, rocking her back on her heels. Emma’s breath caught on a noisy gasp that sent a still-gliding pelican off into flight. Incapable of words, she urged him with her eyes to confirm what could only be imaginings in her head, because the alternative would mean so much about Charles and her belief of him had been . . . wrong, in all the worst ways.
He nodded tightly. “He is Camille’s son.”
All the muscles in her legs turned to putty, and she sank onto a nearby boulder. Unblinking, she stared up at him as he spoke, his words a whir in her ears.
With that, he continued on, quickly, almost as if he delivered a rote telling he knew too well and was eager to have done. “I’d already been a wild student. Society knew I was reckless and given to mischief; as such, my parents . . .”—his lips formed another of those wry twists—“encouraged me to fulfill those expectations. That any ill behavior on my part would feed into the perception.” Twisting at the sides of his Oxonian, Charles glanced down at the article. “Until the perception became the reality. I would go to gaming hells and dens of ill repute, and I lived that part, Emma. That was true. It became true anyway.”
A wave of hurt rushed through her; it brought her to her feet. Burning with jealousy at what those nameless women had known with him . . .
“Some years ago, I was at one of those clubs, and there was a woman there.” He paused. “Miss Lee.”
“Oh.” She wetted her lips as Miss Lee became more real, with a beginning with him. And a tale between them.
“Her father was a merchant.” His jaw tensed. “He sold her on a losing hand to some dissolute lord.”
Another gasp escaped her, but Charles continued over that interruption.
“She was the same age as Camille when Camille had been so used. I helped free her from that man.” He took a step toward her. “I gave her the funds to maintain a townhouse, and provided a stipend over the years so she might survive, but that has been the extent of my connection with her.” He lowered his brow to hers. “From that night on, I returned to my clubs, and I searched for hints of women in those same straits . . .”
“Miss Linden,” she whispered.
“Miss Linden.” He grimaced. “I didn’t pay enough care to being discreet in the help I was providing until it was too late. For them . . .” He held her eyes, the intensity of his stare piercing through her. “And for you.” Charles ran his knuckles along her cheek. “But you were the first for me since that night I . . . vowed to change my life.” With a last, lingering caress, he let his hand fall and returned to the edge of the river.
Her chest rose and fell quickly, and Emma ran a hand over her brow. She took a step nearer and then stopped, her world knocked out of kilter by everything he’d revealed.
He’d taken his sister’s child as his own . . . He’d rescued women who’d been wronged and in peril. All the while, he’d let the world believe the worst of him when he’d only been giving the best of himself to the sister he loved.
She looked to him, her heart stricken. “My god, I doubted you,” she whispered. She’d been so blinded by jealousy she’d not allowed herself to believe in him. “I saw the rouge on your shirt.” Emma’s eyes slid shut briefly. “And I believed every worst thing about you.”
Charles took several angry steps forward, closing the small distance she’d put between them. “Don’t do that,” he said harshly, splotches of red suffusing the sharp planes of his chiseled cheeks.
She moved her eyes over his face. “Don’t . . . ?”
“Do not make me out to be more honorable than I am. I’m not, Emma,” he said bluntly. “I still did . . .” His color deepened, and when he spoke, he did so in a furious whisper. “All of those things you’ve hated me for doing.” As if he were unable to meet her eyes, Charles directed his gaze out on a pair of pink pelicans gliding to a graceful stop atop the water.
Emma stood there, studying Charles, her mind putting together all the pieces of the puzzle this man had been to her. His parents had come to him, a young man at university, and thrust the weight of their family’s broken world upon his shoulders. And he’d done as they wished, agreeing to live a lie to protect his sister.
And in that moment, she fell in love with him. Her eyes slid closed as she staggered under the weight of that discovery. She’d always been in awe of him. Enamored and charmed. But this? This was deeper. She fell in love with who he was, a man who’d love Seamus, fostering the boy’s love of learning. She fell in love with him for having allowed her the freedom on Regent Street to stand up for herself.
And she loved him for all he was.
A noisy splash of the fowl at play on the river brought her eyes open, and her heart lurched at finding Charles frozen, immobile in the same way he’d been.
These past weeks, she’d come to see Charles in a new way, but she’d still been left with more questions about the man he truly was.
All along, she’d resisted what her eyes and heart had been showing her about who he was. She’d been so blinded by her own hurt pride . . . until this moment. For in this moment, she understood him.
At last.
Emma’s silence was far worse than any words she could have spoken. It was heavy and vague, and he didn’t know how to make sense of what she was thinking. About him.
Even with that, however, having shared with her the truths that had tormented him filled Charles with a lightness he had been missing.
At last, someone knew.
Nay, she knew. He’d wanted to share it with her. From the moment they’d been betrothed as children, their lives had intersected in ways that had brought them to this very moment.
As such, she’d been deserving of not only the history he’d withheld, but his fidelity as well.
He pulled his gaze from the Serpentine and made himself at last look at Emma.
She hugged her arms about herself and glanced out at the sun creeping higher upon the horizon. That orange orb bathed her features in a soft light, burnishing the tightly drawn-back strands of her golden hair, and his breath hitched. One day, just one day, he wished to see her as she was, with the sun about her, in this very spot, without the world falling down around them . . . or without either of them resurrecting past pains. He wanted it to have been different.
Forcing himself away from the hungering of that thought and those wishful yearnings, Charles directed his attention forward once more. “I know none of what I shared really matters,” he said, his voice hollow to his ears. He returned his hat to his head. “It doesn’t undo . . . anything.” Nothing would. “But I . . . wanted you to know anyway.”
There came several beats of silence.
The crunch of gravel filled the morning quiet, blending with a noisy splash as one of the pelicans dunked its head under the water’s surface in search of its morning meal.
He stiffened, feeling Emma’s presence even before she took up a place directly beside him, so close their arms brushed, and she stared out with him at the river ahead.
“Of course it would have mattered,” she whispered, and his entire body stiffened. Emma slid her fingers into his. “It does matter.”
It does matter . . .
And with that, she held forth an absolution.
Her words hinting at a future, and not a broken past. “You played the part you were asked to, Charles,” she said with a gentleness he didn’t deserve. “Because it was asked of you. You played a part, Charles,” she said firmly, capturing his hands and tightening her grip when he made to pull away. “You became the part.”
“And I fell into it entirely too easily.” He couldn’t hold back the trace bitterness at his own moral failings. Of which there were so many.
She sighed, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “We always see ourselves through the lenses of how the world views us, until it distorts our vision and . . . we can’t even truly see clearly who we are. But you . . . ?” Emma’s eyes roved over his face. “I have learned these past weeks, and in these past minutes, who you are.”
“And who am I?” he entreated, because he’d been lost so long he felt like a mere facade of a man, an empty shadow of a person.
“You really don’t know?” she said softly.
Some emotion stuck painfully in his throat, something that felt like tears, and he struggled to swallow around it.
“You’re a man who has put his family first when most any other man would have never made that sacrifice. You are a man who would storm across streets to save women.”
“You didn’t need saving,” he pointed out. She’d been gloriously in control, and marvelous in her spirit.
Her expression grew contemplative. “There are different ways to save a person, Charles. You have done far more than you ever give yourself credit for.”
Because it had been so very easy to focus on all the ways in which he’d failed his sister. “I stole your idea.”
Emma smiled wryly. “Yes, well, there is that. Perhaps don’t remind me of that,” she said, startling a laugh from him, transforming dark into light as she did. Her teasing smile faded, and a glimmer lit her eyes. “You made the idea your own.”
“I’m rubbish at it,” he said in honesty. For with Emma, it was somehow easy to speak of his failings.
Emma scoffed. “You’re rubbish at it? Charles”—she framed his face between her palms and squeezed slightly, shaking his head back and forth—“you managed to call the interest of some of the most respected women, friends I hold dear.”
“Because of . . .” He winced, unable to complete the rest of that thought.
“What?” Emma released him, that twinkle back in her eyes. “Because you and Landon are dashing rogues whom ladies are eager to interact with? That may have been part of it”—she paused—“at first. But many of them are women I know. And respect. If curiosity about two rogues running a club drew them in, whatever it was you shared at your meetings? It kept them there.” She pressed her palms against his chest. “You created a forum for people to come together, and did so in a way that uses literature they love.” Emma darted out her tongue, the tip of it trailing along that flesh that continued to torment his days and his nights with equal fervor. “That is the manner of gentleman who is honorable, Charles.” She paused. “The manner of man I could see myself spending my life with.”
His heart forgot its function was beating. He frantically moved his gaze over her face. “What are you saying?”
Emma smoothed his lapels the way a devoted, loving wife might, tempting him all the more with that promise. “I am saying I want us . . . to try. To be a couple without our parents’ interference. Not because of the arrangement they had, but because . . . we want to.”
He briefly closed his eyes. And just like that, she offered him all he’d ever wanted, and had discovered he wanted only after she’d gone.
Her expression wavered. “Unless you don’t—”
“I do!” he blurted, and touched his brow to hers. “I want that very much, Emma.”
She smiled and tilted up her head.
Charles lowered his to meet her, but she drew back.
He stared at her questioningly.
“I will have you know that this does not mean I don’t intend to woo back my former members, Lord Scarsdale,” she whispered against his lips.
“You may try, Miss Gately.” Charles nuzzled at her neck, laving the place where her pulse beat.
“O-oh, I intend to do far m-more thannn”—Charles suckled on the shell of her lobe—“Mmm.”
“What was that?” he teased.
“I was going to say something about . . .” Charles kissed the remainder of that admission from her lips in a brief meeting of their mouths.
Her lashes fluttered, and when she opened them, a dazed little glimmer shone within those blue depths, one he reveled in. “What was I going to say?” she breathed to herself.
“That you’d won the battles, but I would win the war.”
And then twining her arms about his neck, she drew herself up on tiptoe and pressed against him. “Yes, but in the reverse, Lord Scarsdale.” And with that bold, husky whisper, she kissed him.
And he was fairly certain he’d never been happier than he was in this moment.
