A Good Debutante's Guide to Ruin_The Debutante Files

“I’ll serve, thank you,” she said.

The maid bobbed her head and backed out of the room, once again leaving them alone.

Melisande leaned forward and selected several biscuits. She bit into a pink frosted one with a moan. “Delicious.” Her gaze fastened on Rosalie. She licked a bit of icing from her finger with slow deliberation. “Just like Declan.”

Silence stretched between them before Rosalie whispered, “You lie.”

“Oh.” Melisande feigned a wounded look and tsked. “A mother doesn’t lie to her child.”

Rosalie laughed. She held her side, rocking where she sat even though humor was the last thing she felt.

It cracked her mother’s facade of composure. “What is so funny?” she snapped.

“You. Acting the loving mother.” Her laughter died and she leveled her gaze on Melisande. “Let’s end with the pretense of caring mother. Why are you here?” Clearly it was only to cause trouble.

Melisande blinked wide eyes. “I thought you should know the man you’re marrying . . . well, I had him first.”

Rosalie struggled to keep her expression blank, but her right eyelid flickered wildly. “Get out.”

Her mother gathered her bonnet and rose with a satisfied sigh. At the door, she paused and turned in a half circle, smiling back at Rosalie. “Congratulations again.” With that parting remark, she left.

Rosalie fell sideways on the sofa, burying her face in a pillow to muffle her cries.

Her mother was a beast. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Dec hated her mother. He wouldn’t have . . . he couldn’t have been with her. Sitting up, she dashed the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, resolving to find out.

Dec looked up from his desk as Rosalie barged into the room. He stood at once, alarmed at the sight of her. She looked pale, ashen. Her eyes, however, looked haunted. Large topazes in her bloodless face.

“Rosalie? What’s wrong? Why are you here?”

“Is it true? Did you—” She choked on the words, struggling, it seemed, to spit them out.

“Did you and my mother . . .”

Bile rose in his throat. He knew what it was that she couldn’t say. He understood.

She continued, “Never mind. You don’t need to say it. I can tell by your face it’s true.”

“Who told you?” Will and Max knew, but he couldn’t imagine either one of them told her. That left one obvious culprit.

“She did, of course. She relished every moment in the telling.”

He schooled his features to reveal nothing, donning the familiar mask he wore, carefully blocking out anything he might be feeling. “Of course she did.”

“Not even a denial.” She visibly swallowed. He knew she needed to hear him deny it. More than she even realized, she wanted him to say it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. They couldn’t have been intimate. Not him and her own mother.

“I’m going to be sick.” Turning, she started to flee, but he was there, his hand on her arm, forcing her around.

“And there you are. Just like my father,” he snarled, his mask cracking. He could feel it slipping, emotion bleeding through. Just like it always did with her. “Thinking the worst.”

“You deny nothing! What am I supposed to think?” She searched his face. “Am I wrong? Please, tell me! Is it not true?”

“You would believe me if I were to say it was not?” He snorted. “That would make you the exception. He never believed me either.”

She hesitated, bewilderment flickering on her face. “He who? Who did you tell? Who didn’t believe you?” Again she was wondering, doubting, hoping that perhaps it was all a lie, some twisted machination of her mother.

His heart slowed to a dull thud in her ears. “My father. I told him what happened.” He laughed brokenly, bitterly. “I rather had to. When he walked in on us.”

“What?”

“She hunted me, Rosalie. From the moment she married my father, she was always there with the smiles and long glances. The lingering touches. I was ten and four when she came to my room. I told her to stop—” He stopped to swallow.

He felt her stare, watching him struggle with the words, watching him remember it like it was some sort of bad dream. He gave a rough laugh. “I was just . . . inexperienced. It was rather bewildering . . . waking up with your stepmother’s mouth on your cock.”

She blinked at his harsh language . . . at the harsher, uglier image that filled her mind. He saw that. Saw it in the reflection of her eyes. She covered her mouth with her hand, speaking through her fingers. “She did that to you?”

His voice came out flatly, controlled and monotone. “I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I had never—” Again he broke off, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes tight against the memory.

He reopened his eyes.

She stared at him, eyes so wide. “Fourteen. You were so young. When I was that age . . . I still slept with a doll.” She looked down as though recalling herself then. “An old rag doll my father gave me.” Her gaze snapped back up, fiery and bright, full of wrath. “You were just a boy.”

“Man enough.” His lips twisted. “In my father’s eyes, at any rate. He said I should have known better. Hell, he saw me as the instigator. Rather absurd now when I think on it. When she was in my bed? Had I dragged her there? He was deluding himself.” He shook his head and squared his shoulders. “No matter. It’s all in the past now.”

Except it wasn’t. It was here now. Between them. In her eyes and in the tension lining his shoulders. It was in the distance he felt welling between them.

His mind worked, thinking back to all those years, struggling with fragments of memory that he had fought to bury.

“That’s when he stopped letting you come home from school.”

He nodded. It was all falling neatly into place for her now. He had been fourteen when he stopped coming home from school. The duke’s sudden disinterest in his son. The son he once doted on. His only heir. She understood why now.

Her face scrunched up bitterly. “My mother . . . what she did to you. That’s why your father gave you the cut?”

“The cut? That’s a gentle euphemism, but yes. I was dead to him after that. Your mother did nothing wrong, of course. She was his innocent young bride that his wretched beast of a son had abused. I was a monster in his eyes. If he could have disinherited me, he would have. You should have seen Melisande. She wept such copious tears. She really should have been on the stage. If he could have called me out and withstood the scandal of killing his own son, he would have.”

She blinked at the shock of this. “No, that can’t be. He would not have gone to such—”

“He told me that, Rosalie. That’s not dramatic supposition. Those were his own words.”

The last bit of color bled from her face as it all sank in for her. Her mother had taken so much from him. His youth. His father. The ability to feel, to touch a woman without the memory of her.

She shuddered. “How you must have felt when I turned up in your drawing room.” He watched her throat work as she fought to swallow. “Dear God. You hated me.”

He could practically track her thoughts crossing her expressive face as realization sank deeper, grinding into her. Her throat worked as she swallowed. “You must hate that you are marrying me. Her own daughter.”