Taken by the Duke (21 page)

He had avoided mirrors since the accident. Seeing himself as a hollow shell of what he had once been gave him no pleasure. But now, he looked…changed. More alive than in months. There was a light in his eyes.

He set the drink down and scrubbed a hand over his face. Ava was getting to him. She was beginning to wend her way past the barriers he threw up between them and into his soul. With her touch, with her kiss, but also with her light spirit. With how she challenged him.

“There is only a short time more,” he muttered to the man in the mirror above him. “Are you willing to throw it all away?”

The man in the reflection shook his head, and Christian pivoted toward the door. He would find Ava, he would make love to her all afternoon and he would worry about the longer-term consequences later. He had earned that, hadn’t he?

He moved up the stairs slowly, but with slightly less pain than that action usually caused him. At the top of the stairs he was about to turn toward the guest quarters in the hopes of finding Ava in her room, but something from the opposite wing of the house caught his eye.

He turned toward the family areas and frowned. There was a door open in the hallway. Not his door, where his servants might be airing out his linens or tidying his space. No, this looked like his sister’s room.

But that couldn’t be. Matilda’s chamber was kept locked except on a very rigid schedule of light cleaning. Her door should not have been open.

He forgot Ava for the moment and moved down the hallway, fists clenched at his sides. He was trying very hard to keep his anger in check, but the fact that someone was in his sister’s chamber was the ultimate act of violation.

He turned into the room, ready to scold a wayward maid or rail at a footman, but he stopped short. There, sitting on his sister’s bed, her back to the door and reading what appeared to be a handwritten journal, was Ava.

He stepped into the room and slammed the door behind him.

She jolted at the loud bang and staggered to her feet to face him. All the color drained from her face as she met his eyes, and the guilt that altered her normally open and friendly expression angered Christian even more.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he barked.

She swallowed. “How did you know I was here?”

“I saw the light coming from the door into the hallway,” he explained.

She shook her head. “But I—I closed that door.”

“To hide your disgusting intrusion from the world, I assume?” he asked.

She flinched. “Christian,” she began.

He held up a hand. “This room was locked. How did you get in?”

She moved her gaze away from his. “Laura is serving as my maid—”

“Laura gave you the key?” he roared. “That—”

“No!” she interrupted, moving a quick step in his direction. “It fell from her apron pocket today. I was curious about it and thought I would try this door, your sister’s door. I was shocked when it worked. I swear to you she did not betray you.”

There was a flutter to her voice, a way she would not look at him that made him doubt the veracity of her statement. But Laura was another subject to be dealt with at another time. At this moment, it was only Ava who held his ire.

“Of all people,” he growled, “of anyone to break my sister’s privacy, that it would be you makes it even worse.”

She flinched. “Because I am part of the Windbury family.”

He nodded.

“And that is all you see when you see me, isn’t it?” she pressed, tears suddenly filling her eyes, though she blinked them away admirably. “You cannot bring yourself to look outside that fact.”

“Why should I?” he said with a shake of his head. “Why did you come here? Why did you search her room except to uncover more evidence to use against me? Or to laugh at what I’ve lost?”

“You idiot,” she said, coming toward him with unexpected bravery considering how angry he was. Grown men had been less bold.

“Be careful, Ava,” he whispered.

She ignored him. “I came here because I am curious about her. About you. And since you refuse to share anything with me of value beyond a few tantalizing morsels of your past, I thought seeing the room of the person you loved most would shed some light on who you are and how I can help you. There were no ulterior motives, Christian.”

“Just to help me,” he said, both moved by and wary of her statement.

She nodded.

He speared her with a look. “And that, I suppose, is why you are holding what appears to be a private journal of my sister’s?”

Chapter Nineteen

Ava flushed as she shoved the journal behind her back. Not that it would help, as Christian had already guessed what it was. But he didn’t know what it said, and she was fairly certain it would hurt him greatly if he ever found out.

“Give it to me,” he insisted, holding out a hand. His jaw was set with anger and infuriation.

She stepped back and held her ground even though his expression made it very hard. She hated that he was looking at her with such accusation. As if they had shared nothing since he snatched her away and changed her life.

“Christian, if you haven’t read this diary by now, why would you do so at this point?” she asked, tone gentle.

He shook his head. “How would I have known about it? You must have searched this room far and wide to find a secret such as this.”

She wrinkled her brow. “It was sitting on Matilda’s end table, Christian, only placed beneath a volume of poetry. I do not even think there was an intention to hide it, so there was no search involved on my part.”

He frowned and for a moment exasperation was replaced by confusion on his handsome face. “That—that cannot be true. When Matilda died, I had this room torn apart trying to find proof of her thoughts, of her heart.”

“You were injured…perhaps the servants did not search as thoroughly as you asked,” Ava offered.

He frowned. “I highly doubt it. Sanders led the search himself and he would not betray me by lying. No matter what my state or his thoughts on the matter.”

Ava shook her head as she tried to wrap her mind around this information. If it was true, that meant Matilda’s journal had been placed where she found it, probably somewhat recently. She had no idea how or why that would happen.

In truth, she wasn’t certain she cared. After all, there were much deeper issues to be faced.

“Christian, I don’t know why this book was not found during your initial search. But perhaps that was for the best. Your sister’s private thoughts and feelings weren’t meant to be shared with you.”

His face darkened with anger, anger equal to that she had seen there over the years when he looked at her brother. Only this was directed at her, and it cut her to the bone.

“As if her thoughts were meant for
you
,” he breathed, his words clipped and short. “You are the last person she would have ever wanted to steal her confidence.”

Ava dipped her chin. His words hurt her in ways she never would have imagined he would be capable of a short time ago, but what was worse was that he would not let this go. He would demand the book, take the book—there was nothing she could do about it. She could not protect him.

“I’m so sorry to have your hate turned on me, even after everything we have meant to each other,” she whispered. Slowly, she came around the bed between them and held out Matilda’s journal with shaking hands. “This is yours, of course. I only hope it will not break your heart.”

He glanced up at her, concern lining every angle of his face, but he took the journal. He stared at the leather cover, then opened it. Immediately, he buckled, leaning on his cane for support. And though she felt a distance between them she had not experienced since her arrival, she stepped forward and offered a hand to steady him.

“Come sit by the window,” she said softly, motioning to a comfortable chair that was flooded by natural light.

He allowed her help him and sat down. She paced away to the fire and stared into the flames, knowing that Christian might be as destroyed by what he was about to read as one of the crackling logs in the fireplace. And there was nothing she could do now to prevent it.

Once the horses had collided and the carriage overturned, Christian had little memory of the night of the accident that took his sister. What he did recall were the feelings. He remembered crushing grief as Matilda’s life left her eyes. He remembered throbbing, ripping pain in his body that made him scream in agony, that made him lose consciousness. That pain had lasted for days, for weeks—it had lasted until he had no sense of time or place. Until he had prayed for death.

Now, as he read his sister’s journal, a whisper of that pain returned. It wove into his mind and broke him apart like a heavy stone thrown through a beautiful stained glass window.

“She wanted a part in my war,” he murmured, blinking to clear his vision as he stared at Matilda’s small, even handwriting, which he knew so well. He could not even pretend this work wasn’t hers. “She wanted to fight at my side.”

Ava’s head dropped and she shuddered. “Yes.”

“She turned to your brother in an act of war, a way to hurt him, to obtain information from him,” he continued with a shake of his head.

“But she fell in love with him,” Ava offered, her lips pale and shaking as the words fell from them. “It tore her apart, knowing how you would disapprove the match, but she fell deeply in love with Liam.”

“She ran because she feared my reaction,” Christian said. “She died because I drove her into your brother’s arms. She died because I tried to drive her out of them.”

He set the book down carefully, gently on the arm of the chair in which he sat and stared at the light as it streamed through the windows. How dare it be so beautiful? How dare anything exist now that was beautiful when the world,
his
world, was such a dark and dank place?

Ava moved toward him slowly and dropped to her knees before him. She reached up and cupped his cheeks.

“Christian,” she whispered. “She might have done this for you, but it isn’t your fault. Your sister made her choices when it came to my brother. And there is so much blame to go around for the war between our families. Blame for our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. Please don’t shoulder it all yourself.”

He stared at her, her face upturned to his, her eyes soft with caring and a desire to help him. Perhaps for the first time, he realized this woman had
no
ulterior motives except to make peace. To help him. To give him something he had not felt for so long, perhaps had never fully felt before.

And all this even after he had kidnapped her, forced her into a humiliating bargain, accused her of lying and worse and essentially been an ass of the highest order. But she was still here. She was still cupping his face gently. She was still absolving him of sins he knew full well were unforgiveable.

“Christian,” she repeated, and her soft voice pulled him from those maudlin thoughts. “Please hear me, even through your grief and pain.”

He stared into her eyes, trying to hold on to this statement she was making him about blame, but it was impossible.

“I am a murderer,” he insisted and to his shock he felt tears sting his eyes. “Do you know how much I loved her?”

“Tell me,” Ava whispered.

He shuddered. “When my mother died, my sister was the only person in the world who gave a damn about me. I tried to protect her from my father’s fists, from pain and fear, but in the end I became just like him.”

Ava flinched. “That is not true, Christian. You are
not
your father.”

“I am.”

The tears flowed now, cresting over his cheeks. They should have been humiliating, but he didn’t care anymore. The pain was too powerful to deny.

“I am like him because I let my hate blind me,” he continued, voice shaking. “I let my drive to destroy take over until it was out of control. I should have seen Matilda’s intentions. And once she cared for your brother, I shouldn’t have turned away when she tried to tell me. Oh God, she tried to tell me.”

He covered his face as he thought of a day, just before her death, when Matilda had come to him and tried to soften his stance, tried to free him from the chains of this war. He had pushed her away. He had ignored her. In fact, his last words to her before she left to run away with Liam had been, “Don’t be a foolish girl—I expect more from you.”

Ava pushed up and wrapped her arms around him, holding him as the pain and guilt racked him. She smoothed her hands along his back, she rocked him in comfort as she murmured soft, incoherent words of support and love and forgiveness.

He clung to her, allowing her to see his weakness, allowing her to give him her warmth and her protection. It made him vulnerable, he knew it. And yet he somehow trusted her to see that frailty and never use it against him. No matter what happened next.

He trusted her. Such a foreign sentence and yet so true.

He pulled away from her slightly to look into her face. She smoothed her fingers over his cheeks, wiping away tears as she smiled at him.

“Christian, all this pain, all this anguish—she wouldn’t want you to carry it with you. I know she loved you.” She leaned down and pressed her lips to his briefly. “Let go.”