“But I won’t…surrender,” she panted out, her voice full of resolve even as she arched herself against him. “No matter what…happens between us…”
“No matter what?” Devilishly, he slipped his hand between her legs. “Even this?” He stroked his thumb across the little nub buried at the top of her folds, and her hips bucked.
She tightened her arms around his shoulders and buried her face against his neck. “Even that,” she forced out. Then she inhaled sharply and shivered. “Oh, Robert, do that again!”
Biting his cheek to keep from laughing, he did as she bade. This time, a whimper of need fell from her lips.
“You’re not my enemy, Mariah,” he murmured against her temple as he slowly withdrew his hand. Making love to her again was so very tempting. But it was too soon, and she would be too sore. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, in any way. “You mean so much more to me than that.”
She pulled back just far enough to look up at him, and her eyes searched his face, as if she couldn’t quite believe him. “Do I?”
“A great deal,” he assured her, tenderly brushing an ebony curl from her cheek.
Yet her face fell as she whispered, “But you don’t trust me.”
“I do,” he insisted, having given her no reason to doubt him in that.
But she slowly shook her head, and sadness darkened her face as she whispered, “Not about your father. You still haven’t told me everything about the day he died.” She hesitated. “Or why your mother thinks you blame yourself.”
He froze, his hand stilling against her cheek. The soft accusation in her words cut into him like shards of glass, and he hesitated, needing a moment to steady himself before explaining, “I don’t want to burden you when you won’t understand.”
Her eyes softened as they searched his face, her fingers combing tenderly through the hair at his temple. “Are you so very hard to understand, Robert?”
His chest squeezed painfully, not to hold in the anguish he’d suffered for the past two years but with a desperate desire to share it. Perhaps she would understand the horror of that day and the weight of the blame he carried. After all, she knew the frustration of trying to please a father, just as he did, and she knew the loss of a parent.
“Richard Carlisle,” he offered cautiously, carefully testing the new trust forming between them, “was a good man and a kind husband, a concerned father…” He sucked in a deep breath. “And I disappointed him.”
She rested her palm sympathetically against his cheek. “You didn’t disappoint him.”
“A great deal.” He shook his head in self-recrimination. “I was always the one who caused the most trouble, thought up the pranks, planned all the games and wagers. Quinton would agree with whatever wild scheme I’d concocted, and Sebastian would go along to keep us from harming ourselves too badly. But I was the ringleader, the one who kept thinking up even wilder antics for us.”
“You were young,” she whispered. “Boys are often wild and uncontrollable.”
“But it didn’t stop when we grew up. It became worse.” At the somber darkness that flashed across her face, he turned his head to kiss her palm. He appreciated her concern, if not the pain she was forcing him to dredge to the surface. “I was a grown man and old enough to know better, yet I kept partaking in the same wild debauchery as I did at university, racking up huge gambling losses, and damaging the family’s reputation. Finally, Father had enough.”
A knowing empathy lit her green eyes. “He spoke with you about it?”
“More of a lecture, in public and with every intention of trying to bring me to my senses.” Even now he could hear his father’s deep voice speaking the words as clearly as if he’d said them only minutes before rather than two years ago…I raised you to be a man. But when I find you like this, behaving as you are, I am disappointed in you.
She asked softly, “Why did he lecture you?”
“Because I’d launched into a spree of drinking, gambling, and whoring of such infamous proportions that it threatened the reputation of the Carlisle family and the new title.” He wasn’t exaggerating, and he could tell by the emotion in her eyes that she realized that, too. “I’d been missing for three days when Father came after me. When he found me, I had just lost five hundred pounds in a game in which I’d been too foxed to see the cards clearly and was attempting to assuage the grief of my losses by letting the barmaid…comfort me in the back room.”
She swallowed hard at that bit of news, the only outward sign that his actions shocked her. “He was worried about you.”
His chest tightened with guilt. “And what kind of son makes his father worry about him?”
“Every son,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Not like that.”
She knew not to press the issue and turned her attention instead to caressing her thumb across his chin. “What happened then?”
“He’d pulled me out of the hell, stumbling drunk and furious,” he explained, his voice raspy with emotion. “He ordered me back to Park Place with him, but I had every intention of finishing my spree.” The bitter taste of grief rose in his mouth. “After all, I wasn’t a child to be ordered about by his father. I was a man, and I was going to prove it by gambling away even more money and tupping as many women as possible.” Then he added quietly, “An hour later, he was dead.”
She gasped, the breath tearing from her in her pained surprise.
He squeezed shut his eyes, unable to bring himself to look at her for fear of the shock he’d see on her face, or the pity. Or worse—the same condemning disappointment he’d seen on his father’s face.
He forced himself to continue. “As he was mounting his horse to leave, someone fired off a pistol. The horse startled and threw him, and he struck his head.” Sharing what happened that night was brutal, but he had to tell her everything now. Telling Mariah was the only way to purge the shaking that gripped him and the metallic taste of helplessness forming on his tongue. “I heard the shot and saw him fall backwards, saw his head hit the cobblestones and the blood pool around him…” He shuddered violently. The same helplessness that had consumed him that night returned as the image flashed through his mind, branded there forever. So much helplessness that it choked the air from him even now, and he had to force out around the knot in his throat, “For Christ’s sake! I was less than twenty feet away, and I couldn’t do anything to save him.”
Her arms tightened around him as she silently tried to console him, but even her loving embrace wasn’t enough to ease the guilt he’d carried since that night. And always would.
“I never had the chance to apologize, to promise to correct my ways,” he murmured, burying his face against her shoulder. “He died thinking I was a drunkard and a scoundrel. That I was nothing more than a worthless scapegrace who didn’t give a damn about the family’s reputation. Or mine.”
“He didn’t think that,” she whispered soothingly. “He knew you would change your ways.”
“Did he?” he bit out. “Because I sure as hell didn’t. Not until it was too late.”
She cupped his face between her hands and gently lifted his mouth up to kiss him, her lips touching his in a kiss so tender, so filled with comfort that he trembled.
When she lowered herself away, he opened his eyes, expecting to see pity on her face. What he saw instead ripped his breath away. Her eyes glistened brightly with unshed tears for him, and her compassion tore deep into his heart.
“That’s why you’ve been pushing yourself so hard, why you’re so driven,” she whispered. “Because you’re trying to prove that you’re worthy of the Carlisle name. And your father’s love.”
A ragged sigh tore from him, and his shoulders sagged, his head hanging. “Yes.”
She hesitated before gently whispering, “But you’re never going to.”
His heart stuttered painfully. Then he narrowed his eyes. Did she think so little of him after all? “I am well on my way to being successful—”