Her Perfect Match

chapter Twenty-Three


“How could you?” Vivien burst out as she rushed into the room and snatched the paper from Benedict’s hand. She held it to her chest, but there was no protecting the information now. He had seen it all.

“How could I?” he repeated, popping up to his feet and pivoting on her. “You are leaving London?”

She swallowed. “Yes,” she admitted softly.

What little color remained in his cheeks blanched away, as if he had held out hope that her list was counterfeit, but now he had to fully face the truth.

“When did you plan to tell me?” he snapped.

She shifted. “I just did.”

He shook his head. “Only after I was forced to ransack your room looking for evidence. If I hadn’t found this list and confronted you, when did you intend to tell me you were leaving?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. She was bombarded by so many emotions—anger at him for his invasion of her privacy, guilt that she had lied to him, pain that this was to be their final encounter rather than something loving and pleasant.

But now that it was happening, she knew that honesty was her only weapon.

She looked at him, though holding his gaze was so difficult that it physically hurt her. “I would not have told you,” she admitted. “When I was gone, I would have left a letter to be delivered to you.”

He staggered back, clutching at the chair closest to him. The betrayal in his eyes was palpable.

“When?” he asked after a moment that seemed to stretch forever. “Because there are only three items left to be completed on that list. Give away what you don’t need, my name and disappear.”

She swallowed. “Actually, I finished giving away what I didn’t need this very afternoon. I have let a house on the continent and I intend to depart for it within a fortnight. My solicitor is making arrangements for my travel. I intended to tell my servants the truth this week and help them obtain new positions. Then leave.”

He only stared at her as she continued talking, shaking his head with disbelief with her every word. “You have put so much thought into this.”

She nodded. “I had to, Benedict. I am changing my life, changing everything.”

“You are running again,” he accused with a brutal snap to his tone that made her turn her face away from it.

“I am not running,” she whispered.

“Bollocks,” he barked as he moved on her. He didn’t touch her, but he was almost pressed against her as he said, “Ten years ago, you ran from your family.”

“I had no choice.”

“Perhaps not, but you also did not wish to face the difficulty presented there. And now you intend to run again. As if reinventing yourself will change what you have done or seen or what you feel!”

“You mean it won’t change that I am a whore,” she said, staring at him and daring him to say that wasn’t what he meant with his angry words.

To her surprise, he immediately issued that denial. “The only one of the two of us who believes you are a whore is you,” he said. “What I mean is that when your emotions get too high, you believe you can leave them behind. That by changing your name and address that you can forget the pain. But you’ve already proven you can’t. The pain is part of what makes us who we are, Vivien.”

She stepped away. “A fact you know nothing about. You will find a bride this Season or next, Benedict. You will start over and be allowed to do so. I won’t. If I remain in London, I will always be seen by those around me as a mistress, a whore. I could never be anything else and I want so much to be.”

He didn’t immediately respond, but stared at her. “What do you want to be?” he finally asked.

“I—” she began, then hesitated.

She stared into the eyes of this man. He was angry, yes, but there was so much love there. So much desire for something more than she had ever allowed them to have.

“I want to be me,” she whispered. “Not what my parents wanted, not what I was forced to become due to circumstances. Just me.”

He reached out and briefly touched her face. “The goal is a worthy one.”

She smiled but then reality hit her again and she pulled away. “But not here. Benedict, you must let me go.”

“Why?” he pressed.

She threw up her hands in frustration. “For a hundred reasons you know as well as I do! Because you belong in London, because you are a gentleman and I am most definitely not a lady, because there would be a scandal if you made a life with me, because you would lose your family if I was your choice, even if your brother says he would not cut you off…”

“My brother?” he repeated.

She immediately wished she could take back the words, especially as understanding began to dawn in his gray eyes.

“What does Derek have to do with anything? And when did the two of you talk about me?”

She swallowed. “You are a lucky man, Benedict. You have a family who loves you, enough to try to protect you. Even from your own foolish inclinations. If your brother ever intervened—”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “He intervened…of course, why did I not see it before? He spoke to you and that set you on this path.”

“No,” she said with raised hands. “I decided to change my life before you and I were even together again. Your brother has no bearing on my leaving London.”

“Then when did he talk to you?” he asked.

She folded her arms. If she told him the truth, the truth about three years ago, the truth about three days ago, he would be destroyed. His relationship with his family would be destroyed. She could not do that to him.

“Please, my dearest,” she soothed. “Let this go. Let me go and we will call this time together what it was, a stolen moment that could never last.”

He stared at her. “It was before this latest affair of ours, wasn’t it?” he asked, breathless with disbelief. “He spoke to you when I was your protector three years ago.”

She pressed her lips together, but she could think of no lie that he would believe. “Yes. He spoke to me, we talked of how tangled up you were in your love for me.”

“That bastard!” Benedict slammed his hand against the closest tabletop and the items on it shivered with the force.

“I already felt the same way as he did, Benedict,” she pleaded. “I saw that our affiliation had to end. He never threatened me, he never bribed me. He asked me to let you go.”

“And you were more than willing to do so,” he said, his voice suddenly icy cold.

She stared at him. “I died that day, watching you walk away in pain. Knowing we would never again be together. God help me, I was weak and I ran back to you, but leaving again is the right thing to do.”

“According to my brother?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Right is right—it does not matter who points it out.”

He nodded and paced away from her. For a long time, he was silent, staring out her window to her gardens, breathing in and out with shallow, shaking breaths.

“Perhaps you are right that Derek means well,” he finally said, turning toward her. “And that you are only doing this in order to protect me.”

She nodded. It seemed that perhaps he was ready to be reasonable.

Except he didn’t look reasonable as he moved on her a step.

“But I never asked for your protection. Yes, if I marry you, I would be shunned from good Society in London. And,” he continued, “it is very likely that my mother would show her disapproval by cutting me off, at least for some amount of time. She might never accept you, for her propriety is a part of her that is bone-deep. I believe Jocelyn would be kind to you in private, but in public she could never acknowledge you. These things are facts, and I am not so stupid as you and my brother think I am that I do not realize they are true.”

She flinched. He had to admit these things, this was an excellent first step, but, oh, how those words stung.

He gently cupped her shoulders and pulled her closer. “But what you and my brother failed to consider, what you have always failed to ask me, is whether or not I care.”

She sucked in a breath. “You think you would not care, but in time—”

“Do you know how much I hate Society?” he asked. “Living by their rules, marrying for status, pretending to like someone because their title is higher than yours…it has never given me pleasure and it never will. If I do as you and my brother ask of me, I will be respectable and miserable. In time, as you put it, I will despise my Society-approved wife and heirs. I will drink myself into a pickled state and probably die by drowning in my bathtub, which will be very undignified.”

She didn’t want to smile, but she did. “You overstate it.”

“Do I? It is just as possible an outcome to the one you assume, which is that I would marry you and end up regretting not being invited to parties at Lady Frickenbottom’s house.”

“There is no Lady Frickenbottom,” Vivien insisted with a shake of her head.

He shrugged. “You know what I mean. None of us can tell the future, my dear. There is only one thing I know and I know it more than I have ever known anything in my life.”

Vivien swallowed and her voice cracked. “What is that?”

“I love you. And you love me.”

She stared. Confronted directly by the facts she could no longer deny, she couldn’t think of something to say. She turned slightly, trying to escape his arms.

“That is two things,” she muttered.

He shook his head and held fast to her. “It is one. We love each other, Vivien. Can you not see how powerful that fact is? Not one couple in a thousand, in ten thousand, has the kind of love we do. Throwing it away is a reckless, selfish act. Running from it will never allow you to escape it. Trust me, I tried. When you left me, I did everything I could to crush the love I felt. If you do the same, it will only fester and infect everything in your life. But once you embrace it, it brightens everything. It elevates the mundane to the amazing.”

She reached up to cup his cheeks. He seemed so certain that she could almost believe him. Except the consequences of his request loomed so large in her mind that they pushed at all other thoughts.

“Admitting, accepting that love as you say may very well do all you suggest, but our love also has the power to destroy. Destroy you. You have said it yourself. And that would destroy me.”

He moved away. “You are determined to start a new life, away from London?”

She nodded even as tears began to spill down her cheeks. “It is the only way.”

He sighed and her stomach clenched at his expression. Despite his beautiful declaration, he was going to let her go.

“You are probably right. Leaving is the best answer for you, to find yourself, to find acceptance.”

She nodded as she backed away, beginning the painful process of parting from him forever. “I’m glad you understand. You will forget me soon enough, I know. Whatever else you think, that will be true.”

He wrinkled his brow. “Oh no, that will never happen.”

She shook her head. “I—I don’t understand.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” He smiled like she was a child. “You don’t believe in devotion because it terrifies you. In time you will. Vivien, I am not letting you go with my blessing. I am coming with you.”

She blinked. “I—what?”

He laughed at her confusion. “You must leave London and I accept that. But I cannot live without you again. I have tried and it is remarkably unpleasant. So I will go with you. We will change our names and buy our house on the continent and explore museums and create a life that will free us both from the constraints that have long held us down.”

“You could not leave your family,” she insisted.

He sighed. “My family does love me. I know you are correct on that score. And I have to have faith that someday, when their disappointment has faded, perhaps they will accept me again, accept you. But when I consider leaving them behind or being left behind by you, there is only one choice.”

“Benedict—”

“Make a new family with me, Vivien. One we will love with all our hearts.”

She could not speak. Not when he was saying such lovely, lovely things.

He moved closer and finally his arms came around her. “If you leave, I will follow you. I will out you in every city you run to until you are forced to accept me. Do yourself a favor and avoid all that upheaval. Take me with you on your adventures.”

He was smiling but his eyes were serious. He meant what he said. He was not letting her go this time. And her reaction at this heavy-handed refusal to accept her choices, much to her surprise, was joy. Excitement.

“Benedict, you would be throwing away everything that matters,” she whispered, still reticent to steal him from his life.

He shook his head. “Have I not made myself clear? You are what matters. Perhaps it will take a few years to prove that to you. But I’m willing to work hard at making you believe. At coaxing you to accept that you love me.”

She blinked. “You think I must be coaxed? No, I know I love you. I accepted that, though reluctantly, shortly after we began this second affair.”

He blinked and there was such a wash of relief and joy on his face that she nearly stumbled at the sight of it.

“You are willing to admit you love me?” he repeated.

She nodded. “I love you, Benedict. And that has been very hard for me to realize when I knew I would leave you.”

His face reflected sudden understanding. “That was why you had such desperation. Such pain.”

She nodded. “Because I loved you and I knew we were bound to lose each other.”

“But we aren’t. Losing each other is a choice, Vivien, and I refuse to make it. So what will it be? Will you force me to follow you from country to country, dodging the dangers of Napoleon as I declare my undying affection in ways that would put a novel to shame…or will you surrender now and allow me to love you the way you should be loved? Forever.”

Vivien swallowed. What he was asking for was the ultimate leap of faith. But not just for her…for him, as well. They would both lose something in the gamble in order to gain something far greater.

She reached out and took his hand. “May we love each other the way we both deserved to be loved instead? It seems to be a more equal exchange.”

He laughed. “You have always been a born negotiator. And the answer is yes.”

She smiled. For the first time since she was a girl, she looked at the future and felt joy and excitement, terror and bliss, all rolled into one. And for the first time ever, she knew she had a partner to share it all with.

“Then may I show you our new home?” she asked, moving to the closet and the plans she had hidden there. “Unless you already found these?”

He laughed as she laid the sketches and information out in front of him. “No, not yet. But I cannot wait to see the future we will share.”

He moved to examine the paperwork, but she caught his chin with her fingers. As she moved in for a kiss, all her fears, all her pain melted away. All she felt was love. All she would ever feel was love.