His head dipped. “Yes, Helena. I was desperate. I thought I could hide in my chamber like some kind of petulant child. To drown my frustrations just this one time. It was churlish and wrong, but I knew I’d be no good company at the party. But when you came in—”
He cut himself off and Helena caught her breath. The pain slashed on his face was so real. “Baldwin,” she whispered.
“No, don’t offer me comfort,” he said, his tone hard. “I do not deserve it. You came to check on me, which was far more kindness than I deserve from you. I rewarded that kindness with markedly ungentlemanly behavior.”
Helena shook her head, but he held up a hand and looked like he would continue this self-berating indefinitely. But she could not let it stand. Not now. Not when her own thoughts on the matter were so different.
She stepped forward, uncertain what she could do to stop him from his self-recrimination. She touched his arm and it became clear. She lifted on her tiptoes, caught his cheeks in her palms and kissed him.
For a moment he was stiff, surprised, but then he softened and his arms came around her as he sighed against her lips in surrender. She deepened the kiss, tasting him for just a moment before she blushed and backed away.
He stared at her, but he did not return to talking.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Please.”
He sighed, ragged and pained. “But—”
“Please, won’t you let me speak?” she asked.
She could see him battling with her request. He clearly wanted to confess more. To berate himself further. To try to convince her that he deserved censure for those beautiful moments in his study.
But finally he nodded. “Yes, yes of course.”
“If the grass weren’t so wet, we could sit together,” she said, motioning to the lakeside.
His eyebrows lifted and then he strode off to his horse. He opened the saddlebag and removed a folded blanket, which he spread out before the lake.
“You are always prepared,” she said with a laugh as she took her place.
He shook his head. “Not me. I was meant to ride with Simon this morning, so my man put the blanket in, just in case we wished to stop and chat.”
“Well, I’m glad for it.” They settled onto the blanket and she drew a deep breath. “You didn’t do anything wrong last night, Baldwin.”
His expression twisted with more of the guilt he carried around with him constantly. “You are a lady,” he insisted.
She sucked in a breath. “No, I’m not. Not by any standard that could be used to judge one such.”
He looked confused. “I don’t know what you could mean.”
She sighed. “You must recall last night. You were not so very drunk, Baldwin.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I recall it and there is nothing that happened that would make me think you’re not a lady. Just that I am not a gentleman.”
Heat flooded her cheeks, and yet she could stop herself from what she was about to do. To say. She didn’t want to. Baldwin had already given so much of himself to her. The only way to comfort him that he was not a monster was to make him understand her own secrets.
“Do you recall when you said that someone had hurt me?” she pressed.
His eyes came shut and he made a low sound in his throat. “Yes,” he whispered. “You told me I was right, but I went forward anyway. If I’d been a little more sober—”
“You went forward because I wanted you to,” she insisted, catching his hands and forcing him to look at her. “You did not force anything on me. You told me again and again that I could say just a word and you would stop. I never said a word because I didn’t want that.”
“Still, what I did was wrong,” he said softly. “There is the topic of ruination—”
“Do you think you’re the only one with secrets, Baldwin?” she interrupted with a shake of her head. “You did not ruin me last night. Not just because you didn’t…you didn’t…take me. But because even if you had, you would not have been the first to do so.”
She watched his face change. He went pale and his expression tightened. Her heart broke as it did, for she knew what would happen next. The censure, the distancing, perhaps even the talk.
“Tell me,” he said, and his voice was so soft, so gentle. She heard his empathy and she saw it, too, as his face continued to change as what she said sank in.
This was not a reaction she was accustomed to. She turned her face and looked out at the lake. “He was a suitor of Charity’s, back in Boston,” she said. “Looking to get her purse, of course. She didn’t want him and she had given him a vicious set down. I felt…sorry for him.”
He nodded. “Of course you did. You’re kind.”
“Too kind, it seems,” she said with a laugh she had been using to cover up her pain for years. “I found him in the garden, angry and pacing. I tried to be sympathetic, to soften what she’d said. I thought I’d helped, but then he grabbed me and—”
She cut herself off and drew a ragged breath as those images she fought so hard to keep at bay came back. That other man’s hands, his mouth, his cruel smile as he took what she did not want to give.
Baldwin’s jaw set. “He forced you.”
She nodded. “Yes.” A tear escaped her eye and she wiped it away. “He took what he desired and he left me in tatters in the gazebo. My cousin found me. She was actually…kind, as she can sometimes be. But once my family found out, it ruined me.”
He wrinkled his brow. “But they knew you’d been assaulted.”
She shrugged. “Whether I gave or he took, they felt I could have been more prudent. Perhaps they were right at that. I should not have followed him.”
“Just as you shouldn’t have followed me,” he ground out.
She jerked her gaze to him in horror. “Don’t you dare compare yourself to him, or what we did last night to what he did three years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and it was so very clear that he was. “That was cruel of me to do so after what you’ve endured. How did you survive?”
“I cried quite a bit,” she said with a sigh. “I reached out for support and found no one there to reach back. So I learned to depend upon myself. I learned to ride out all the horrible emotions that come out when I think of that night. I learned to forgive myself and to recognize that it wasn’t my fault.”
He tilted his head. “You constantly amaze me,” he murmured, almost more to himself than to her. “You are beautiful and kind and so damned strong. There is no one in the world like you, Helena. No one in any world.”
Heat flooded her cheeks, not just at his compliment, but at the way he looked at her. Like he truly believed she was some singular, wonderful creature. When she was with him, she could almost believe it, too. And that was why what they’d shared mattered so much. Why she didn’t want it to be a regret.
“Last night you said something,” she said. “Something about how everyone else gets to have what they want.”
He ducked his head. “I was rambling, my tongue loosened by one too many drinks.”
“But you weren’t incorrect. It does sometimes seem like the rest of the world gets to have their dreams and that no matter how hard I try, I cannot. My reward for kindness or hope or survival is to trail after Charity, carrying her train.”