Silk And Seduction Bundle 2. Louise Allen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      ‘At least she kept you!’ he spat. ‘Have you any idea what it was like for me, being sent to that place for children nobody wants? They told me I should be grateful for being taken in and fed, since my parents and friends had deserted me. Grateful! And every time I ran away and tried to get home, somebody would drag me back, and they would whip me in front of all the other boys and make me wear a red letter R pinned to my jacket!’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ Midge whispered, horror struck. How could anyone have been so cruel to a child that clearly needed love and reassurance? A boy who had just been ripped from the place he had been taught to believe he belonged? The scars on his body were as nothing compared to the scars that experience must have seared into his soul.

      ‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘You said, outside your fancy church, that you wondered if that had been a lie, too. Well, it was not! The chaos it caused gave me the chance I needed to escape.’ He held out his hands and looked at the open palms for a brief second, before clenching them into fists and raising his dark head to glare at her again.

      ‘Where did you go?’ She looked at the hoop in his ear and the silver bracelet that adorned his wrist, and thought she knew the answer. ‘You found your way back to your real mother’s people.’

      Something flashed across his face. ‘Not immediately.’ The expression settled into one so bitter, Midge knew she was not going to like what he was going to tell her next. ‘I had to survive by begging and stealing for a long time before I found my way back to anyone who would offer me a home.’

      ‘I am sorry,’ was all she could think of to say. Though it was not enough. ‘So sorry,’ she said again, as a single tear slid silently down her cheek.

      ‘So, you maintain she married an old man because he said he would search for me?’ He laughed. The unexpectedness of the sound, harsh and cold, made her flinch. ‘But you and I both know he would not have given me a home. Had he found me. He would have taken one look at the wild thing I had become, and thrown me straight back in the gutter.’

      Midge could not deny it was a possibility. Not now she had seen through Hugh’s facade to the coldness at his heart. He might well have said whatever he had deemed necessary to make Amanda marry him, so that he could have control of her fortune and his boys would have a loving mother. But he had not been much of a father to her.

      ‘What does it matter now, what he might or might not have done?’

      ‘What does it matter?’ he exploded, his rage a tangible force she could feel battering her. ‘I was torn from my home. Forced to live in a way you cannot possibly begin to imagine! And now, I—’ he pulled himself up short. Drawing himself up to his full height, he threw his shoulders back and declared, ‘I came to your wedding to spoil your day. Don’t you know that? Don’t you hate me for it?’

      ‘No.’ Midge looked him straight in the eye as she delivered that truth. ‘And you have no reason to hate me, either.’ She felt more tears sting her eyes. Stupid tears, that, since she had become pregnant, seemed to threaten at the least surge of emotion within her. ‘None of what happened to you was my fault, Stephen. I missed you. I have missed you all my life.’

      Stephen’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you expect from me, Imo? That we can play at happy families again? As though these years, all the injustice of it, had never happened?’

      Midge lowered her head, burying her face in her hands as she saw that that his life had been so harsh, he had been so convinced that everyone he had cared for had betrayed him, there might be no getting through to him. The embittered man who stood before her now was a complete stranger to her. The loving little boy she remembered was gone forever.

      He was lost to her. As lost as Gerry.

      ‘I do not expect anything from you, Stephen,’ she sighed wearily. ‘But I would like to ask you a favour.’

      His face took on a sardonic cast that was very discouraging, but Midge decided she might as well ask anyway. He could only say no. And then she could simply walk back to Shevington Court and face the music.

      ‘I came out yesterday in such a hurry, I forgot to bring any money. And I need to go to London.’

      She needed to see Nick. He was the one person on earth who must, surely, miss Gerry as much as she did. With whom she could mourn the loss of that laughing, carefree young man. Oh, she knew it was a forlorn hope, considering the coldness he had exhibited towards her after Hugh’s death, but any kind of hope for shared fellow-feeling was better than the certainty of the total isolation she would face on returning to Shevington Court. And she knew, too, that the earl would not permit her to travel anywhere for quite some time. If Stephen would not help her out…she choked back a sob, lifted her head and gazed up at him imploringly. Just a few days with Nick, that was all she was asking for. A few days away to come to terms with everything.

      ‘Will you take me there?’

      ‘Take you to London,’ he echoed. ‘After so short a time, you are ready to leave your husband? Or are you chasing after him?’

      She flinched at the very notion she would demean herself by pursuing a man who had only ever feigned interest in her, and a chilling smile slashed across his face.

      ‘If you are so set on ruining yourself, who am I to stand in your way? I will settle up and order a carriage. It will be my pleasure to take you to London.’

      ‘Yes,’ she said, regarding him sadly. ‘I thought it would.’ For Stephen did not care a fig for her reputation. In fact, the blacker he could make things look for her, the better pleased he would probably be.

      Midge dozed in the coach, nearly all the way to London, while Stephen rode alongside on his magnificent black stallion. It was only when they drew up outside a house in Bloomsbury Square that she realized she had not made her intentions plain.

      ‘I meant to ask you to take me to my stepbrother’s lodgings,’ she said as he opened the coach door.

      His face closed. ‘So, all that talk about missing me, wanting me to be part of your family, was just words! I might have known you were just using me!’

      ‘No,’ she protested. ‘It is not like that…’

      But he was striding away, shouting to the coachman to take her wherever she wanted to go. He mounted the steps of his house, and the door banged shut behind him.

      Only then did she see that for all Stephen’s apparent hardness, something about what had passed between them at the inn must have touched him. Because he was furious that she had not intended to make her stay in London with him.

      She sank back into the squabs, reeling at her capacity for doing the worst possible thing on any given occasion.

      But late that same night, Midge was back at Stephen’s house, banging in desperation on the front door. If she had truly alienated him, she had no idea what she would do!

      The dark-skinned servant who opened the door was garbed in green, though Midge had never seen the like of the cut of his coat before. And he wore a turban wound round his head.

      While she gaped at him, he said impassively, ‘State your business.’

      ‘I need to see Stephen. Please.’ When he did not give a flicker of response, she added, ‘I am Imogen Hebden. His СКАЧАТЬ