“If one was predisposed to believe the wretch—which your father certainly should not have been.”
“Unfortunately he did not agree with you.” Edwin’s voice went cold. “He believed the butler. Father said we were children and didn’t understand that our mother had been playing the whore. Why else had she invited the man into the drawing room alone, after all?”
“Because she was being a courteous hostess?” Clarissa said, irate on his mother’s behalf. “Because the man was supposedly your father’s friend?”
“Father didn’t see it that way. He saw it as her fault, and their marriage was never the same. Though he cut off his friend because the man had ‘accepted his wife’s advances,’ he also withdrew from Mother and claimed that they’d both betrayed him. If she hadn’t already been in the beginning stages of pregnancy with Yvette when it happened, I suspect my sister would never have been born.”
“That’s appalling! How dared he believe those wretches over your mother?” At least Niall had realized the truth about what had happened to her, had never doubted her word for one moment.
When he didn’t say anything more, she eyed him warily. “You . . . you didn’t come to agree with your father when you were older, did you? Blame your mother for . . . for . . .”
“Of course not,” he bit out. “I might have been a child, but I could tell that she didn’t want what that bastard was trying to do, even if Father was too stupid to realize it. My father broke her heart. I could see the pain in her eyes whenever he was cold to her, hear her crying at night when she thought no one knew. And as the years went by, I could see her grow hardened by it.”
His expression was troubled. “She died without him at her side, because the man who’d claimed to marry her for love blamed her for that bastard’s attack. It’s why Father was never around, why his jaunts to London got longer and longer.”
“Oh, Edwin, I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing to have to hold inside you. Is that why you’ve always been so strict with Yvette about what women should and shouldn’t do—”
“Yes. Because I know that some men will use any excuse to justify hurting a woman.” He locked his gaze with hers. “Better that women curtail their freedoms than end up broken and battered and betrayed.”
“Better that men just stop hurting women,” she countered fiercely. “Better that people stop allowing it, condoning it, excusing it.”
That brought him up short. “Yes. You’re right. That would be the best alternative. Sadly, we don’t live in such a world.” He approached her with a serious expression. “But I think you know that already.”
Oh, Lord, the time had come. She had to tell him. Glancing away, she murmured, “Yes.”
A shuddering breath escaped him. “Some man hurt you, scared you so badly that you’ve had trouble being touched intimately ever since.”
He spoke the words so gently that it made tears clog her throat. “Yes.”
Coming up next to her, he cupped her cheek. “He tried to do to you what that son-of-a-bitch tried to do to my mother.”
Unable to bear his sympathy, which she didn’t quite trust, she pulled away and turned her back to him. “He didn’t try.” Lord, but it was hard to say. Especially to Edwin. “He succeeded.”
The long silence behind her made her wince. Then he let out his breath in a whoosh. “Are you saying that some man—”
“I’m saying I’m a ruined woman. That years ago, a suitor of mine got me off alone and . . . took my innocence.” Now that the words were spilling out of her, she couldn’t seem to stop them. “That’s why I—as you put it—shy from you. It’s why my nightmares, which I fought so hard to extinguish, erupted again recently.”
She could feel his stare boring into her back. “That’s why I . . . didn’t want to marry you or anyone else.” Bitterness crept into her voice despite her attempts to quash it. “Because I didn’t want to spend my life like your mother—wed to a man who despised me because I ‘let’ some scoundrel assault me.”
Twenty
“Let? No woman chooses that,” Edwin said softly, determined to banish the bitterness from her voice. “And I do not despise you. I could never despise you.”
Her shoulders shook violently, but when she spoke again, her tone was still harsh. “Perhaps you misunderstood me. I’m not chaste. I have lain with another man.”
“I understood you. I simply don’t give a damn.”
It was true, oddly enough. Even as a boy, he hadn’t understood the idea of being possessive of another person. Slavery was outlawed in England; people should belong to themselves and no one else. No matter what the law said, it had never made sense to him that women should be chattel.