Another instant of silence as the import of his words cascaded through Sara bodily.
“God help me.” She scooted forward and again would have left the room, but Beck put his hand on her nape, not gripping, just a warm, careful weight.
“I beg you, Sara.” He took a breath, his lovely, precise voice dragging like a rasp over Sara’s soul. “I beg you, do not lie to me now. Do not lie to yourself.”
The fire hissed and crackled on the hearth, the rain pelted the windowpanes, and the wind soughed around the corner of the house. In the warmth and solitude of the cozy sitting room, Beckman fell silent, and Sara…
Gave up.
Gave up pretending it didn’t hurt so badly to be without him, didn’t devastate her to consider his leaving, didn’t leave her howling in endless inner darkness to sleep one floor and a load of regrets away from him each night.
She loved him. He’d carried her secrets for her, waited for her, and now, in the face of his relentless pursuit, she just… gave up. Gave up her loneliness, her fears, her insecurities, and her bondage to a past that had come to cost too much. She curled back against him, along his side but facing away, because she could not bear for him to look upon her eyes. She felt Beck shift to curl himself around her on the sofa, the warmth of him providing a comfort beyond words.
“A man can’t tell if a woman is chaste. I’ve been promised a man can’t know for sure,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“I couldn’t tell with my body,” Beck said, “though I suspected, but with some other sense, I knew. You were like a gift, just for me, not like a woman who’d had a child with a man she loathed.”
“Reynard assured me our affection for one another would grow after we wed, though when he whisked me off to the Continent, it soon became apparent his affection was for the coin I could bring him. Being married to him gave me a veneer of respectability, but I think he sensed that if he forced me, I would take Polly and go, regardless of the folly involved.” She hoped she would have, and hoped equally some vestige of honor had informed her late husband’s unwillingness to assert his intimate marital rights. “So you knew about Allie all along?”
“I still don’t know about Allie,” Beck countered, wrapping an arm around Sara’s waist. “I only suspect and worry and wish I could help.”
“Reynard got to Polly.” Sara heaved a sigh the dimensions of the universe. “His strategy was to divide us, divide our loyalties, so Polly would fall in with his schemes and set herself against me. She was so young, Beckman. A child, and it never occurred to me Reynard would seduce a fifteen-year-old under his protection.”
“He cannot be dead enough to suit me.”
How she loved Beckman Haddonfield. “Once Polly conceived, Reynard was of course off on his other liaisons,” Sara said. “He nearly destroyed her, nearly destroyed us both. She tried to talk herself into hating me, but when his perfidy became undeniable, she hated the child and herself and me—and him.”
“For the last, we can be thankful.”
“If that kept her alive, then yes, we can be thankful even for a hatred like that.” Sara found herself lifted bodily and settled on Beck’s lap. “She nursed her baby but couldn’t really open her heart to Allie, not as a new mother.”
“Hence the subterfuge was made easier,” Beck said. “The child was yours and legitimate, but alas, as a legitimate child, also under Reynard’s authority. He went along with the scheme to put you, Polly, and Allie more firmly under his control, and probably saw the advantages to him from the start.”
“Of course,” Sara said, burying her face against Beck’s shoulder. “I think so far as he was capable, he loved Allie, but then when we visited England, she began to draw, and her talent was obvious.”
“That must have hurt you, to see such tangible evidence of her relationship to Polly.”
“No.” Sara shifted slightly. “The art is what drew them back together. Polly matured a great deal and loves Allie every bit as much as I do. But as my child, Allie would be legitimate, as you say. As Polly’s, she’d be a scandalous indiscretion and reflect poorly on Polly and me both. I’m not sorry we did what we did—even Allie seems to understand the why of it—I am sorry Reynard exploited the situation for his own advantage.”
“It can’t have been easy.” Beck’s lips found Sara’s crown. “Raising another woman’s child while she looks on.”
“It wasn’t, particularly when that woman is your younger sister and blames you for the child’s existence, when she’s not blaming herself, then berating herself for feeling any resentment, and on and on. It was during one of our periodic feuds that Reynard suggested to Polly the various nude studies of me.”
“They are breathtaking.”
He would focus on that, and he wasn’t wrong. “What a tangled web.”
“We’ll untangle it.”
He might have been referring to enlarging Hildegard’s wallow, for the simple conviction in his tone.
“We?” Sara tried to wiggle off his lap and was gently restrained. “Beckman, I have lied to you, about myself, my daughter, my sister, my past, my marriage. You have no responsibility to me or mine. None at all.”
“You are entitled to your privacy, Sara, but I’m going to ask you a question, and would have truth from you or nothing at all.”
“Don’t do this.” Sara tried to leave him again but was again gently dissuaded. “Beckman, you aren’t thinking clearly. You aren’t considering your situation.”
Beck looked straight at her, and God help him, his every emotion was in his beautiful blue eyes. “Sarabande Adagio Hunt… I love you. I love you, and I want to marry you if you’ll have me. Do you love me?”
She reared back, surprised.
“I can live with not marrying you,” Beck went on. “I can ask you to marry me twice a day for the next fifty years, or fifty times a day for two hundred years. The only real question is do you love me? Because if you love me, there is no way on God’s green and beautiful earth that I will walk away from you. There is no foreign land I will visit, no vice I will descend into, no family project I will turn my hand to. You are my home, and I was put on this earth to love you.” He slipped his arms from around her, leaving Sara at sea and desperate to find the shore.
“Do you love me, Sarabande Adagio? Can you love me? A drunk, a fool, a man who drove one woman to take her life and that of her unborn child, a man who nearly killed himself rather than admit his family loves him and he them? Can you, do you, love that man? For he certainly loves you.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side, her face turned from him. In the patient silence, a tear fell from her jaw onto the back of her hand.
“I love your courage,” Beck said softly, lifting her hand to kiss the spot where the tear glistened in the firelight. “I love your determination, your fire, and your tremendous heart. I love your passion and the way you protect your own. I love your unbending integrity and your tender feelings, your—”
Sara pitched into him, wrenching sobs breaking from her. He encircled her in his arms while she cried for the exhausted, bewildered, mean, angry years of her marriage. She cried for herself and Allie and Polly. She cried for her brother and her parents and for the girl she’d been and never would be again.
And then she cried in relief, because she could, because Beckman Haddonfield must truly love her to hold her this way, to bear her secrets and Allie’s and Polly’s. To trust her and wait for her and trust her yet more. When she had cried herself out, she rested in his arms, absorbing the warmth and strength of him for long minutes.