Daniel slumped in a wingback chair in the dark corner of an unused parlor. For once, the drafty stone and menacing shadows of Castle Keyvnor matched his mood perfectly.
Rebecca was going to get married.
Perhaps not to either of the insipid greenhorns from the village tavern, but he could no longer pretend that no matter what happened in his life, Rebecca would be somewhere out there, exactly the same as she’d always been.
It wasn’t that Daniel had expected her to wait for him, precisely. He’d been cruel to her. Twice. And he would never make her promises he couldn’t keep.
The surprising thing wasn’t that Rebecca had options. It was that she was still unmarried. If she had bothered to step out-of-doors once or twice over the past few years, some handsome villager would’ve snapped her up long before now.
Daniel would have, if he were a country gentleman. Hell, he’d be tempted to even if he weren’t a country gentleman. He rubbed his temples. If only Rebecca were suited for London life. She didn’t even like the city. Her dream home was a cliffside view of a dangerous smugglers’ cove in the middle of nowhere.
Still, he couldn’t help but imagine what it might be like to have her for his wife. Rebecca’s bloodlines weren’t terrible—no matter what Daniel’s grandmother might claim—and besides, he didn’t give a rotten fig about any of that nonsense.
He liked her for her. He always had.
Yet no matter how hard he tried to protect her, he would never truly be able to keep her safe. He could give her his name, shower her with all the finery she might desire, but the one thing he could not do was control the tongues of others.
If Lady North Barrows chose to make Rebecca’s life hell, it wouldn’t stop at merely barring her from Almack’s. A few well-placed words from the dowager, and no society hostess wishing to remain in her good graces would dare invite Rebecca to so much as a tea.
While Daniel was in convocations or visiting tenants or at Parliament, where would that leave his wife? At home by her lonesome. Day in and day out. Wishing she were back in Bocka Morrow. His muscles tightened. Rebecca would be bored, at best. At worst…hurting. Miserable. Resentful.
That was not the sort of union either of them desired. She would begin to hate him for plucking her from a world she loved and forcing her into one she despised. He would hate himself for the same reasons.
An unselfish man would let her go. If he truly wished to be her friend, he should be doing everything in his power to ensure her future happiness. He absolutely should be helping her find a quiet country husband, just as she had asked.
No matter how much it killed him.
Much as he might like to, he couldn’t give Rebecca what she wanted. What she deserved.
He was going to have to let her go. Stand back and watch her wed some tanned, handsome farmer. In all probability, this might be the last time he and Rebecca ever saw each other again. She would be a wife, perhaps a mother with a brood of happy children, living in the cottage above the sea she’d always dreamed of having.
And he would still be a viscount. Throwing madly-attended soirées full of people he didn’t care about. Wed to a perfect society wife whom he never saw outside of the ballroom, because that was how well-bred marriages worked. Father to a spare and an heir that he likewise never glimpsed, because the aristocracy left the raising of children to governesses and nannies.
Delightful. He could hardly wait.
He pushed himself up from the wingback chair and out of the empty parlor. If these were the last days he’d share with Rebecca, then he wanted to make the most of them. Even if it meant doing so as friends.
After all, that was why he’d come to Castle Keyvnor, was it not? To beg for her friendship?
He sighed. With a woman like Rebecca, friendship would never be enough.
But it was all he was going to get.
With growing anxiety, he searched in vain for her throughout the castle. She wasn’t with any of the other guests or secluded in the library. It was raining too hard for her to be in the maze or the garden, or to have taken a soaking wet stroll into the village.
Daniel strode faster through the twisting corridors in frustration. Rebecca wasn’t in the solar or any of the sitting rooms. She certainly wasn’t in the music room. According to the maid he’d bribed with a shilling, Rebecca was not in her chamber—nor had she left the castle.
She had vanished.
He leaned the back of his head against the closest wall and closed his eyes.
His shoulders slumped. What if one of the men from Bocka Morrow had invited her for a ride in his carriage? What if Rebecca was even now falling in love, pushing Daniel a little further out of her heart with every passing minute?
The delicious scent of sweets being baked wafted into the drafty corridor and Daniel opened his eyes.
Cinnamon-raisin biscuits.
Rebecca.
He dashed around the corner and into the kitchen before his heart had a chance to slow down.
Her eyes widened when she saw him. “How did you know I was down here?”
“Easy.” He tried to look nonchalant. “You weren’t in any of the other rooms.”
“It was the smell, wasn’t it?” She gave him a considering look. “I always did know how to bring you running.”
Daniel held his silence rather than admit just how literal her power over him truly was.
“Want to wait?” Rebecca glanced at an hourglass on a shelf above the oven. “Less than two minutes to go.”
He dragged one of the empty wooden stools closer to her. “What’s the occasion?”
She tilted her head and fixed him with a perceptive gaze. “You probably thought I forgot. I didn’t. When you first arrived, I was still too hurt and angry to wish you a happy birthday.”
“I’m not sure I deserve it now,” he confessed.
“You probably don’t,” she agreed. “Let me check on the biscuits.”
She pulled the tray from the oven just as the last few grains of sand slipped down the neck of the hourglass.
The biscuits looked divine. Perfectly round, perfectly golden, with an aroma so cinnamon-sweet the very air tasted like sugar. He reached for the one closest to him.
Rebecca smacked his hand. “Not yet, goose. You’ll burn your fingers. Give the biscuits a few minutes to set.”
Properly chastised, he returned his hands to his lap. “Thank you. I mean it.”
She lifted a narrow shoulder. “They’re just biscuits.”
He shook his head. “Nothing is ever just biscuits.”
She blinked. “What does that mean?”
“I…have no idea. It sounded deep until I said it.” He reached forward and took her hands. “Rebecca, believe me. I never meant to hurt you. When I was awful to you outside that ballroom when we were children, it was because we were children. I don’t know if you know this, but seventeen-year-old boys are incredibly stupid. Me more than most.”
She arched a brow in silence.
At least she hadn’t slapped him. That was encouraging. He took a deep breath. “I was dying to impress you. But I wanted to impress my grandmother even more. My father had never been good enough for her, and then he died and I became heir. To this day, I have never lived up to her standards. Back then, I was still young enough and scared enough to want to try. You never deserved to be caught in the crossfire.”
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “I didn’t.”
“Nor did I mean to hurt you during your come-out Season in London.” He stroked the back of her hand. He had to make her see. “Twenty-one-year-old lads are marginally more intelligent than their seventeen-year-old counterparts, but I happened to inherit a viscountcy in the meantime.”
She gazed back at him flatly.
He forced himself to press on. “Not only was I trying to live up to my grandmother’s impossible standards, I was now under the magnifying glass of the entire ton. Anything I said, anywhere I went, every little detail appeared in the society papers. I no longer care what the caricaturists and society matrons think of me—”
“Obviously,” Rebecca muttered.
“—but I desperately wanted to make a positive difference in the House of Lords. And I knew nothing. About anything. I spent every day immersed in the estate and taking care of my tenants, and every night researching every topic that came up in Parliament. When you arrived, I couldn’t afford a distraction…and you had always been my greatest weakness.”
Her expression was skeptical at best.
He tried again. “I can’t claim I didn’t mean to ignore you, because I did so on purpose. Not because of anything against you, but because I knew one tea, one dance, one moment in your company and I would never be able to be anywhere else.”
Her eyes narrowed.
He couldn’t blame her for distrusting him. “I did it for my own self-preservation, even though I knew I was hurting you in the process.” There. Now that she knew the truth, he knew no excuse would suffice. “I recognize that I behaved like a blackguard. And I am truly, truly sorry.”
She pulled her hands from his grasp. “I was young. You were young. That was then. I forgive you for telling me I wasn’t significant enough to bother dancing with…right in earshot of your grandmother and all the other guests.”
His neck flushed in shame.
Her eyes flashed. “I even understand the pull of wanting to fit in with the ton, and the pressure of suddenly having to run a viscountcy and vote responsibly because England’s future depends on it. That’s not what still stings.”
He tensed in trepidation.
“What hurt me for so long weren’t your little snubs, but that you could forget me so completely.”
His head shot up. “I swear I never—”
She held up a hand. “Don’t. Things obviously got better. The viscountcy was solvent. You were elected to committees. Your name began to appear next to words like ‘flirt’ and ‘rake’ and ‘masquerade’ in all the society papers.”
He winced. All that was true.
Her eyes betrayed her disgust. “Clearly life had finally settled down and you now had more time and money on your hands than you knew what to do with. Yet you never so much as penned a single letter. Not one sorry word.”
He had been a coward. And he had hurt her more than he’d ever known. His throat grew thick.
She rose to her feet. “Years passed, Daniel. I never heard a single word unless I read it in a newspaper. Yet you expect me to believe I’m the one you never forgot?”
“I wanted to write you,” he burst out as he pushed to his feet. “I was terrified to. I knew it wouldn’t be enough. After everything that had happened, everything I’d put you through… What use was a letter? You would have torn it up, burned it, and I would have deserved nothing less. I decided to come in person. It was the only way. The best way.”
“Then why didn’t you?” Her voice cracked.
He hated himself for causing her pain. “I had waited so long and had so many excuses. The viscountcy, the House of Lords, the weather. What I really feared was that you wouldn’t forgive me. That you never would. And as long as I didn’t try, as long as I didn’t ask, I could let myself believe there was still a chance for us to be friends again someday.”
“Is that what you want?” she demanded, her eyes flashing dismissively. “To be friends?”
“No,” he said as he cupped her face in his hands and tilted her mouth up to his. “I’ve never wanted that.”
He crushed his mouth to hers and kissed her with all the passion he’d kept bottled up for so long. He kissed her for the little boy he’d been nine years ago, when they’d shared the first kiss of their lives with each other, right there in the same kitchen, with the scent of fresh-baked biscuits in the air.
He kissed her for the scared turnip he’d been four years ago, who had been drowning from the pressure of trying to be a perfect viscount and dying to be a credible representative and secretly wanting nothing more than to run away from it all with a pretty dark-eyed girl with glossy black ringlets.
Most of all, he kissed her for her. For always being true to herself. For being the smartest person he knew. The bravest. The strongest. Whenever he asked himself what kind of man he wanted to be, the answer wasn’t to become his grandmother’s puppet, or to be like some duke or legislator.
He wanted to be good enough for Rebecca. He wanted to be wise and brave and strong. He wanted to be the kind of man she deserved.
But he wasn’t. He never had been.
“You’re everything I want,” he rasped as he ripped his mouth from hers. “But we both know I can’t have you.”
While he still had the will to do so, he forced himself to let her go and walk away from the dream.