The Cinderella Countess. Sophia James
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‘I have told you again and again that there are no ghosts who stalk you and that I do not know of these people you see.’
‘Then who were my parents?’
‘I never met them. I took you in when a nun from the convent in the village asked it of me. A sick child from England who was placed in the hands of the lord when a servant brought her there, to the church of Notre-Dame de la Nativité. Maria, the nun, was English herself and spoke with you every day for years until your French was fluent and you could cope. That is all I know. I wish there had been more, but there was not. I’d imagined you would stay with me for only a matter of weeks, but when no one came back to claim you and the months went on...’ She stopped, regathering herself. ‘By then you were the child I had never had and I prayed to our lord every day that the situation would continue, that I would not have to give you up because that would have broken my heart.’
They had been through all this before so many times. It all made perfect sense and yet...
Today Lady Lucy had made perfect sense to her as well, hiding there in her bed in a darkened room where no one could get to her. She had stopped eating. She had ceased to want to live. The anger in Belle surfaced with a suddenness that she did not conceal.
Everyone was lying.
Her aunt.
Lady Lucy.
Even the handsome Earl of Thornton with his succession of mistresses and his bitter mother.
Taking leave of her aunt and walking to her own room, Belle lifted up a paintbrush, dipping it in oil and mixing it with red powder after finding a sheet of paper.
Nothing was real. Everything was false. She liked the banal deceiving strokes she drew as they ran across the truth and banished it. Lives built on falsity. Paintings borne on fury. Lady Lucy was young and well brought up. Belle wanted to kill the man who had left her the wreck that she was, but as yet there could be only the small and quiet steps of acceptance before the healing began.
* * *
Lytton spent the afternoon entwined in the arms of the beautiful widow Mrs Susan Castleton in the rooms he had provided for her in Kensington.
She had impeccable taste, he would give her that, but what had been wonderful, even as recent as last week, now was not.
His mother’s words had stung and the look on Miss Annabelle Smith’s face had stung further.
Why did the healer have to be so damned unusual? His sister had gulped down the broth and the crust and asked for a cup of tea to finish her lunch with. She had not eaten properly in weeks and now after a ten-minute visit with the contrary Miss Smith she was suddenly pulling herself out of the mire. Lucy thought she was a witch and had told him so, a woman of fearful evil and unspeakable power. She did not wish for her to visit again.
Well, if a witch could cajole his sister into re-joining the real world then so be it, and her alchemy would certainly be welcome in his town house after the disappointing efforts of all the other renowned physicians. He would be asking her back.
‘You are so very well formed, Thornton.’ The whisper in his ear had him turning, Susan’s chestnut curls trailing across his chest when she tweaked his nipple, her body nudging his own in further invitation.
God, she was insatiable. When he had first met her he could barely believe his luck, but now...now he wondered if she might squeeze all the life from him and leave him as much a wreck as his sister.
‘I want to eat you up. All of you.’
Her words were so like what he had just been thinking that he pushed her from him and sat up.
He didn’t want this any more, this salacious liaison so far away from what he knew to be right. Even a few weeks ago he would have found such passion exciting. Now all he wanted to do was escape.
‘I need to go, Susan. I am not sure if I shall be back.’
If this was too brutal for her then he was sorry for it, but he disliked lying. To anyone.
‘You joke, surely, Thornton. We have been here all afternoon feeding off one another.’
The further reference to food made him stand and find his clothes. Fumbling with the one ring he wore today, he twisted it from his finger.
‘It is worth the price of the rent on this place for at least another year. I thank you for your patience with me, but now it is finished. I can’t do this any more.’
Tears began to fall down her cheeks. ‘You cannot possibly be serious, Thornton. I love you, I love you with all my heart and—’
He stopped her by placing a finger across her generous reddened lips.
‘You loved Derwent a year ago and you loved Marcus Merryweather before that. There will be another after me.’
As he walked away, garments in hand, she picked up a vase and threw it at him hard, the glass smashing against the side of his head and drawing blood as it shattered.
‘You will regret this, I swear it. No one will ever make love to you in the way I have, especially one whom you might take as a wife. They are all cold and wooden and witless.’
Hell. Had Aurelian or Edward said something publicly of his plans to be married before the end of the Season? He hoped not. If that happened he would have a hundred mamas and their chicks upon him, courting him with guile and hope.
The day that had begun strangely just seemed to get stranger. He could feel warm blood running across one cheek and yet he couldn’t go home because his mother was prowling through the corridors of his town house and Lucy had spent almost the entire morning crying.
His younger brother was in trouble again with his school and Prudence, his oldest sister, was in Rome seeing the sights with her new husband. He would have liked to talk with her, but she was not due back for at least a few months, skipping out of England with a haste that was unbecoming.
No one in his entire family was coping. His father’s death the Christmas before last had seen to that and here he was, bogged down by the responsibility of a title he’d little reason to like and a mistress who had just tried to kill him.
Once he had been free and unburdened. Now every man and his dog wanted a piece of him. Once the most reading he had done was to glance at the IOUs from the gambling tables where his luck never seemed to run out. Now it was writing reports, filling out forms and doing all the myriad other things a large and complicated estate required.
He had barely come up for air in weeks save in the bed of Susan Castleton, but that was now also lost to him. He couldn’t regret this even a bit, he thought, as he finished dressing and made his leave.
He’d spend the evening at White’s and when the place closed he’d go to Edward Tully’s town house. At least Derwent would understand his fading interest in a woman whom he, too, had once been intimate with.
* * *
‘You need to go abroad, Thorn, and escape your family.’ Edward’s words were said with the edge of strong cognac upon them.
‘Easy for you to say with your father still hale and hearty and an older brother who will take on the heavy mantle of the title.’
Edward laughed as he upended yet another glass of cognac and gestured to a servant going by to bring another bottle. ‘How are the marriage plans going?’
Lytton swore.
He’d confided in Lian and Edward about his intention to marry as a result of Lucy’s ill health, his own mortality staring him in the face. He now wished he hadn’t.
‘Wide hips and a passable face wasn’t it?’ Edward plainly saw a humour that Lytton himself did not. ‘The first girl you saw with both qualifications?’
‘I was drunk.’
‘More drunk than you are tonight?’
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