Chapter Ten
Adelaide stepped from the stage and handed off the prop sword that had been her character’s demise to Toby. He took it with a brief smile and said, “You’ve flowers that came during the show again. That duke does seem to like you.”
Adelaide returned his smile, but her stomach dropped with the mention of Graham. He might very well have sent her flowers. She would not have put it past him. But he’d made no effort to speak to her in nearly a week, not as Lydia nor as Adelaide. She’d looked for him at each of her performances and she’d sought him out in various ballrooms since, but he was not to be found.
And she had a horrible sense of loss at that thought. One that made her frown draw down as she entered her dressing room and shut the door behind her. Her head ached, her makeup made her skin feel stretched and she just wanted to go home to her bed.
The offending flowers were sitting on her table waiting for her. Hot house roses, thick with scent and bright with happy color. They almost mocked her as she stared at them with their note that simply read To Lydia, From G.
She glanced in the mirror as she sank into the seat to remove her makeup. She looked as drawn as she felt, and she hesitated as she stared at herself.
“You were meaningless,” she murmured to herself. “No matter what name you went by. You were meaningless and he is finished with you, despite how many bouquets he sends.”
She let out a sigh and briefly covered her eyes with her fingers. When she gathered herself and lowered them, she gasped. In the reflection she saw Sir Archibald standing behind her. Somehow he had slipped into her room without making a sound, and now he had shut himself in.
She jumped up and faced him. The man was round and red and had a cruel bent to his expression. And he was obsessed with the theatre. Well, perhaps not the theatre itself. She doubted he could tell Shakespeare from a supper menu, but he was obsessed with actresses. How many of her friends had told teary-eyed tales of his groping hands and hard, unyielding mouth?
Currently he was obsessed with Melinda, Adelaide’s understudy, as had been proven by Melinda’s hiding from his grasping hands and mouth days ago. But his desire for the other woman didn’t stop Sir Archibald from looking her up and down with leering eyes.
“Lydia,” he drawled. “I was searching for Matilda, but you look lovely.”
“Melinda,” Adelaide corrected softly, thinking of her friend’s terror as she cowered in the dressing room just a week before. She was glad Sir Archibald hadn’t found Melinda first.
“Same difference,” he said with an ugly sneer. “You’re all the same to me.”
“She isn’t here,” Adelaide said. “And I’m surprised to find you here. I thought you had been asked not to come back during or after performances anymore.”
Toby had been the one to do that. And how he had managed to do it civilly when he’d been so enraged at Sir Archibald’s treatment of Melinda was beyond her.
“That pup doesn’t run me, Lydia,” Sir Archibald said, taking a step toward her. “I know the man who owns this theatre, you know. I’ll have that manager on the street in a heartbeat if I see fit.”
Adelaide swallowed hard. Men like Sir Archibald could threaten those with so much to lose. She was different, of course. She had a life to go back to that had nothing to do with performing. Such as it was.
“You are not welcome here by any of us,” she said, forcing her tone to be hard and firm even when she felt as terrified as a deer being run down by a wolf. “And I would think that the theatre would be more interested in the money it brings in with actresses like me than with one nasty man’s opinion.”
Sir Archibald’s face hardened in an instant. “You whore, don’t you act for a second like you’re more important than I am.”
He swung on her, the back of his hand cracking across her cheek and staggering her back against the chair she had vacated upon his intrusion. She was made so off balance by the attack that she had no recourse when Sir Archibald threw himself up against her and backed her against the table.
Her mind began to spin as she shoved against him, clawing his fat belly and kicking at him as his thick fingers clenched her dress. She heard the fabric beginning to rend as he dropped his mouth to hers and slobbered a disgusting kiss against her tightly pressed lips.
“No!” she cried out, but her voice was muffled as he continued to cover her mouth with his own. “No!” she repeated.
But he was an immoveable object, nearly twice her weight, and she recognized in that horrible moment that it was very likely he would do whatever he wanted, however he wanted, long before anyone would come to her aid.
Graham came up the long hallway toward Lydia’s dressing room with a spring in his step. He couldn’t wait to see her, even if his thoughts about her were still tangled. He’d stayed away for days, trying to see if his attraction to either woman would fade if he avoided them a while.
It had not. So he’d chosen to come here first, to see Lydia and try to connect with her in some way that was deeper than the physical. Try to see into her secrets.
As he neared her door, he heard a soft sound from behind it. A muffled cry of pain, and he caught his breath before he barged forward and crashed through into the dressing room.
What he saw there froze his blood. Sir Archibald, a man who was far too well-known to him, loomed over Lydia, wiping his mouth over her as she struggled to keep him at bay. The shoulder of her gown was torn and the fabric gaped forward as the brute cupped one breast and squeezed.
A red veil of rage settled over Graham’s vision. Unstoppable, uncontrollable and driven by more than a mere desire to help Lydia, Graham careened forward and caught Sir Archibald by the lapels to fling him off of Lydia. His mind went blank of reason. Replaced by thoughts of another woman being hurt, another set of angry hands, another life he tried desperately to forget as often as possible.
He rained down fists on Sir Archibald’s fat face, crushing him over and over without speaking, without hesitating, without thinking. He only wanted to destroy.
“Graham!” He heard Lydia’s voice behind him, loud and filled with pleading. He ignored it.
“Graham!” she said again, but this time it was Adelaide’s voice that spoke to him.
He felt her hands close around his arm and pull with all her weight. The touch cleared his mind and his vision, and he stopped, fist cocked back and looked down at Sir Archibald.
The man was covered in blood and his nose was broken. Perhaps his jaw too, given how swollen his cheek was. He sputtered, his hands lifted to protect himself, his eyes wide with fear even though they were starting to swell shut.
“Graham.”
He turned and it was Lydia who held him. Not Adelaide. He’d just been confused. She stared at him in horror and empathy, but didn’t release his arm.
“Stop,” she said softly. “Stop now.”
He became aware of other things in the room now. A gathering of people was at the door, staring at him like he was a monster. He looked down at himself. His jacket had blood on it, his waistcoat, even his cravat. And his hand hurt. His knuckles had split open sometime during the relentless assault, and they bled just like Sir Archibald’s face bled.
“Lydia,” he whispered. His ears began to ring as he looked at her horrified expression to his knuckles to Sir Archibald’s swelling face. And a wave of horror overcame him.
He was out of control. He was violent. He was everything he’d always fought not to be.
In that horrible moment, he was his father.
Adelaide all but pushed Graham into her little carriage, and he didn’t resist. She had never seen anyone like he was in that moment, blank, numb, mechanical. He staggered against the carriage seat and leaned there, staring straight ahead as she gave a quick direction to her driver, climbed in across from him and the vehicle began to move.
She looked at her seat beside her and flinched. Her Adelaide gown was sitting there, waiting for her. She always changed in her carriage on the way home. It was a thirty-minute drive, long enough to transform herself back into Adelaide from Lydia.
If Graham recognized the gown…
But he continued to stare at nothing, his silence and the pain on his handsome face keeping her from worrying about anything but him. She drew a deep breath and gently moved to the opposite side of the vehicle beside him.
“Graham,” she said softly.
He jolted a little, like he’d forgotten she was there. He turned his gaze down toward her and his vision cleared slightly.
“Lydia,” he whispered, and his voice was like nothing she’d ever heard before. “I’m sorry.”
Tears flooded her eyes as she stared at him. This man was broken. Not broken like everyone thought he’d been after the betrayal of the Duke of Crestwood. This was something different. Something deeper. This was something she doubted he had ever allowed any other person to see, even those friends who he loved so deeply.
This was a glimpse into the soft underbelly of a man who was nothing but muscle and bone and sinew. This was what he fought to hide.
She saw it all. And she knew it was a gift. Not one he meant to give, perhaps, but a gift nonetheless. That it was given to Lydia, someone who wasn’t real…that was something to be faced another day.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she soothed him. “You came to my aid. You saved me.”
He shook his head slowly. “I saw him hurting you and I went…blank. I went back in time.” His voice broke and he turned away from her to stare back out the window. She didn’t push. Not yet. She just reached across and took his hand, resting it in her lap as she smoothed her fingertips across his damaged knuckles.
The rest of the ride was silent. She wanted so much to talk to him, to press him, but she didn’t. Not in her carriage. It didn’t feel safe to do it here. She waited until they stopped in front of Graham’s big townhouse. The same place where he’d made love to her so sweetly.
Now she stepped out of the carriage and turned back, holding out her hand to him as she ignored the servants who came rushing to help. He took her hand, staring down at her with an intensity that was sudden and powerful. She forced herself to hold that stare, praying he would see her support, her trustworthiness.
Praying he wouldn’t see a fact that had become very clear to her the moment he rushed into the room to save her. She was beginning to care for this man. Deeply. Powerfully. She feared how strong those feelings were, especially considering the dangerous line she was treading between reality and fiction.
One Graham didn’t even know existed.
“Come,” she said as they moved toward the house together.
His butler hurried down the steps as they moved toward the front door, and she could see from the look of surprise and concern on the stern man’s face that he was as stricken by the expression of his master as she was. “Your Grace?”
Graham lifted his gaze slightly. “It’s fine, Rogers. I’m…I’m fine. Mrs. Ford will assist me.”
The butler’s gaze came to her and she met his eyes. It was almost impossible to do so, knowing what he would see. Knowing what he’d judge her as. But he merely nodded. “May I…may I do anything, Mrs. Ford?”
She smiled at his kindness and his loyalty to Graham. “I’ll need some towels,” she said softly. “Perhaps a bit of whiskey.”
“Yes, miss,” he said with another quick nod before he stepped off to arrange everything.
“I don’t want whiskey,” Graham said as they started up the stairs together toward his room. She recalled every step toward it from the last time they’d been there. What a very different walk that had been, with charged excitement in the air around them.
“It isn’t to drink,” she said softly as she opened his chamber door and led him in. “Your knuckles are injured. I’ll clean the wounds with some whiskey.”
He staggered toward the fire, shrugging out of his jacket as he did so. He dropped it behind him without looking and then went to work on his waistcoat. She heard him suck in breath through his teeth, and she moved toward him.
“Let me,” she whispered. “Your hands are bruised.”
She reached him in a few steps and touched his bicep to turn him. She felt the muscle tighten beneath her fingers and he stared down at her, expression unreadable as she lifted her hands to unfasten his buttons. He caught her fingers before she could.
“I’m bloody,” he ground out. “I don’t want to…to sully you with what I did tonight.”
She shook her head. “There is no sullying, Graham.” She shook his grip off and unfastened his waistcoat. He was right, there was blood on the fabric and the buttons. She winced as it slid across her skin, proof of the violence that had brought this man to his knees in a way she’d never expected.
Men fought all the time, didn’t they? But Graham had lost control. This was the consequence. She didn’t understand it. But she was terrified of it.
When the buttons were parted, he pulled the vest away. She would have gone to work on his cravat and his shirt, but there was a light knock at the door. She turned away from him and moved to answer, finding Rogers there with a tray containing a pitcher of water, a bottle of whiskey and a pile of small towels.
“Will there be anything else?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. Thank you.”
He glanced past her into the room, his face drawn with concern, but then he nodded and she closed the door. She moved to the table beside Graham’s window and set the items there, then filled the small basin on another table with the clean water. She took a towel and dipped it into the water. As she turned toward him, she found he had already managed out of his bloody shirt on his own and had dropped it with the rest.
She caught her breath, taken in by how beautiful he was, just as she had been the last time she’d been here with him. Tonight, though, his expression was far different. Gone was the predatory, confident, sensual man who would seduce her.
And what was left was something painful, someone she very much wanted to console and protect and heal.
“Come here,” she said, motioning to the chair beside the table.
He did as she asked, sinking into the chair and watching as she lifted one hand and began to gently wash the combination of his blood and Sir Archibald’s away. He winced as she did so, but didn’t try to pull away or stop him.
“I hit Simon,” he said softly after a silence that had seemed to stretch out forever.
She lifted her gaze to him, searching his face with renewed concern. “No, darling. Not Simon. You hit Sir Archibald, it wasn’t your friend.”
Graham shook his head slowly. “Not tonight. I-I hit Simon when I found him with Meg. I broke his nose. Like Archibald’s. I looked down tonight and I saw Simon’s face for a moment and I thought—”
He cut himself off and jerked his hand from her grip before he got up and paced away from her. The muscles in his shoulders rippled as he dragged a hand through his hair, freeing it from the queue so it fell around his handsome face.
She clenched her hands in her lap, willing herself not to get up, not to go to him. To just let him speak. She could feel the dam of whatever he held inside straining. It was bound to break. At least with her…with Lydia…he would be safe.
She would make certain of it.
“I think you could be forgiven for punching Simon after how he betrayed you,” she said softly.
“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “It wasn’t that I hit him. It was that this…thing rose up in me. This…thing. This angry, cruel, out of control thing. I reined it in that day, but tonight I couldn’t. Tonight it broke free. If you hadn’t caught my arm, Lydia, I would have killed that man. I wouldn’t have stopped until he was dead.”
She rose at last, setting the bloody cloth back into the basin before she took a tentative step toward him. He flinched even at that barest movement so she stilled immediately. She drew in a few breaths, fighting for calm because she knew he needed it.
“Graham, you stopped him from attacking me,” she said.
“I could have thrown him off of you and stopped him,” Graham said. “I may have grabbed him for the good and honorable reason of staying his attack, but I pummeled him because I wanted to. Because I felt good while I was doing it. Because I’m him.”
Her brow wrinkled, for she was truly confused. “Him who?” she asked slowly. “Him, Sir Archibald? Him, Simon?”
All the air left Graham’s lungs and he was perfectly still for a moment. Then he lifted blue eyes so clear and perfect that her chest hurt when she looked into them. He held her gaze, unblinking, unwavering, and said, “I’m my father.”
She saw it all so plainly then. Saw a glimpse, brief but bared, of a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes, one that had seen a monster, a real monster, and now the man before her feared that the monster had returned. She saw what no one in Society knew or had ever whispered about.
She saw the truth of Graham Everly, Duke of Northfield, and she choked on her grief for him. For whatever he had seen and gone through.
“Tell me about him,” she said, moving a step closer. He didn’t back away this time, and she was grateful for that. She didn’t touch him yet, though, and he seemed equally grateful.
She watched his throat work, she watched the pain on every line of his face. Then he choked out, “No one knows the truth.”
She nodded. “I imagined as much.”
When she said nothing more, he jerked his gaze to her. “There were a few who knew that he beat me,” he said. “James, Kit, Ewan…Simon. That was why I’ve always been so protective, like tonight.”
She smiled softly. “Protective is not a bad trait in a man with so much power, you know. It is far better than the alternative.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded slowly. “But protective didn’t save me when I was eight and he broke my arm. Protective didn’t save me when he scarred my shoulder with a cigar when I was eleven.”
She winced. She’d seen those little scars on his skin and written them off as the typical bumps and knocks an active man would find for himself. Now they took on a sinister edge, marks that indicated the strength of him in character, not just in body. He had endured.
And Adelaide understood a bit of that, herself.
“Protective didn’t keep him from—” He broke off and bent his head, his shoulders slumping slightly. They began to shake.
“What did he do?” she asked.
He lifted his gaze once more, but he was looking past her now. Through her. Into a time and place she couldn’t see. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted to see. But she pushed anyway, because this was no longer about what she needed. It was about the man across from her.
“He…he murdered my mother.”