Her lashes fluttered as she leaned into him. The intoxicating sandalwood scent that clung to him flooded her senses. There was a strength and power to this man that wrought havoc on her; filling her with the desire to know all there was about him. “What of me?” she made herself ask. Gentlemen didn’t put intimate questions to servants. To those men, they were largely invisible. Or that is how it had been with the previous peers she’d served under—until Lucas.
He angled her around, forcing her gaze to his. “You are no servant,” he said with a sobering bluntness.
Eve opened her mouth to counter that accurate supposition, but the sharp challenge in his green eyes quelled those words. She wet her lips and his gaze fell to her mouth. He’d predicted as much the day she’d stepped inside his chambers. “It does not matter who I am,” she said flippantly. Of course it mattered. She was a hated Ormond. The family who’d betrayed him and his kin and there could be no forgiving those past transgressions. A viselike pressure squeezed about her lungs. For when he ultimately discovered that truth, he’d cut her from his life as easily as a bothersome, dangling thread. It doesn’t matter. He is nothing to me. She briefly closed her eyes. Liar. “I am a serv—”
“Do not.” He pressed his fingertips to her lips, silencing her. “You are more than that, to me.”
To me. Oh, God. A dangerous yearning sprang to life in her heart; for all that could never be with this man. “You've known me but a handful of weeks,” she said around a powerful swell of emotion clogging her throat.
“Yes,” he concurred. “And yet, after those short weeks you know more about the man I now am than even my own family, who I’ve known the whole of my life.”
A bond was shared between them that only those who’d witnessed the hell upon those battlefields could understand. A connection that bound them.
He slowly lowered his head, giving her time to draw back. Her lips ached to know his kiss once more. He needn’t know the truth. I can remain here or go elsewhere with him never the wiser... Eve curled her hands, that hungering a palpable force within. For ultimately, she could not lie to him. “I am no widow,” she whispered and their breaths melded as one.
Lucas froze. Her family had wrought enough pain upon him and his kin. He cocked his head at such an endearing, boyish angle that her heart ached. This is who he would have been prior to his captivity. Prior to Talavera.
Unable to meet his piercing gaze, she slipped away from him and retreated over to the fireplace mantel. The gladius gleamed bright, mocking her with its very presence.
“What?” His question rumbled in the quiet of the room.
Never had she hated her father more than she did in this moment. For if life had moved differently and he’d been an honorable captain upon the fields of Europe, she would be more than a servant. She would be a woman worthy of a man like Lucas Rayne. A man who didn’t see rank or gender as marks upon her character, but rather a person. There is still my surname, which would have always divided us. “My father was a...” She curled her toes into the soles of her boots. “Commanding officer in Spain. At Talavera.” That admission emerged faint to her own ears. Mayhap he’d not heard. Mayhap he’d not known
“At Talavera?” he repeated slowly, his voice the same hollow it had been a fortnight earlier.
Pain ravaged her insides and she forced her gaze to his once more. “He turned over the battlefield plans to the French.” Her heart ached. “He was hanged as a traitor.”
That admission hung heavy, sucking the life from the room.
Invariably, it was there in Lucas’ eyes. As it always was when her connection to that famed traitor was discovered. Only this time it gutted her in ways it never had before. Shock. Denial. Disgust.
It was both deserved and too much, because of it.
“Your father was a traitor,” he said bluntly. Her stomach lurched at having him repeat the truth aloud.
“I will leave,” she said quietly, making for the door.
***
When Lucas’ brother-in-law, the powerful Duke of Devlin, had seen him traded over to the hands of English forces, Lucas existed in a haze. Details had swirled about his capture: the gunshot that had pierced his side and knocked him from his horse at Talavera. The Frenchmen who’d dragged him from the fields and who’d ultimately sold him for a small fortune. But from there, he’d retreated. And so, he’d never known there had been a traitor who’d sold the plans at Talavera. Nor had his family shared as much with him.
Then, he’d carefully snipped them out of the fabric that was his existence.
Now, he stood before Eve, daughter of a traitor. A man whose crimes had seen many British killed on that bloody field in Spain, and others, such as Lucas, dragged away as a prisoner of the French. With her revelation, she’d offered him everything he’d asked of her since she’d arrived—her resignation.
No longer. Now, the possibility of her leaving filled him with a greater terror than his days at the hands of the French. She was the only person who had treated him again as a man. She’d boldly challenged him at every turn. A woman who’d seen more than the caged monster he’d become, to the man he’d once been. And she expected he should hate her for her birthright. Mayhap a fortnight earlier, before knowing her, he would have. For he’d subsisted more than two years on hatred alone. He’d allowed it to consume him, feed him, and shape him into an emotionless bastard, who kept even his family out. That isolation was easier than the pity.
Until Eve had stepped into his life and thrown his well-ordered world upside down.
How many people had so judged her for crimes that belonged to another? Disappointment filled him at that low-opinion she had of him. The uncertainty in her eyes gutted him. “Do you think I’m a man who’d hold you responsible for the crimes of your father?” he quietly asked, unable to keep the hurt from creeping into those handful of words.
Her lips parted and she fisted the fabric of her wrapper, her knuckles white under the force of her grip. “Everyone before you has judged me.” How matter of fact she was. Lucas silently damned every bastard before who’d quashed her sense of self-worth. “Why should you not?” she countered, her voice threadbare.
At that hint of frailty from this undaunted woman, his stomach muscles knotted. “Did you turn the English plans over to the enemy?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
Eve flared her eyes and shook her head frantically. “No,” the denial emerged, as though ripped from her lungs.
A woman of her resiliency and courage could never act in cowardice or with self-serving motives. “No,” he repeated. “You were the woman taking care of fallen soldiers in the fields after battle. The woman haunted by those same sights and sounds of war.”
A tortured sound spilled from her lips. “But had I paid attention to what he was doing and who he was meeting, I would have known.” So much guilt she carried.
“No,” he said quietly, that calm utterance breaking across her trembling voice. “You would not have.” Lucas took her by the shoulders and she stiffened, momentarily resisting his touch. He drew her back against his chest and some of the tension seeped from her frame as she leaned into him. The hint of lilac and lemons that clung to her skin wafted about with a cleansing purity. How right Eve felt in his arms, as though she belonged there. As though she’d always been meant to be here. He briefly rested his chin atop her brown, silken tresses and rubbed. “You could never have known to look for that evil, because you yourself were never capable of it.”
Eve turned to meet his gaze. Her abrupt movement knocked his arms back to his sides and he mourned the warmth of her tall, slender frame. Had he truly ever seen her as plain? How, when she radiated more beauty than any woman he’d had in his arms before her? Tears filled her eyes and the sight of those crystalline drops ravaged him. She blinked furiously. Did she seek to hide those signs of her grief? Warmth filled his chest. How very proud she was.