She’d seen the truth.
When his own siblings had been oblivious to the heartache he’d suffered at the hands of Lillian and his closest friend all those years ago, Alice had gathered the secrets he’d kept.
And it scared the bloody hell out of him.
It terrified him because the women Rhys kept company with, the ones he’d taken as lovers and mistresses, had been content to see him as an empty-hearted rogue, capable of bringing them pleasure…. and never delving any deeper, and never wanting anything more.
And so, he’d retreated from Alice. Retreated, even when it went against the arrangement they’d struck, to a place she could never enter without bringing down a small scandal in the household—the billiards room.
A cheroot clamped between his teeth, Rhys leaned over the felt table and positioned his stick. With one fluid movement, he slid it forward.
The satisfying thwack of his cue ball striking the red ball, filled the room.
“Good shot,” a voice sounded from the doorway.
Rhys stiffened. Taking the cheroot between his fingers, he exhaled a circle of smoke. “You sound surprised,” he drawled, facing his brother.
“At your billiards skills?” Miles chuckled. “Hardly. You were always a master of the table. Far more skilled than me.” His eldest sibling drew the door shut behind him.
Rhys put out the remainder of his smoke on the edge of the table. Oh, bloody hell. So it was to be one of those visits.
“May I join you?” Miles was already striding over to the wall and collecting a stick.
“Be my guest.” He motioned to the table. Whether his brother either heard or cared about the drollness of that invite, he gave no outward reaction.
Setting his stick down on the edge of the table, Miles gathered the three displaced balls and meticulously arranged them. Wordlessly, he looked to Rhys.
Rhys waved him on.
Positioning the red ball on the billiards spot, Miles led his play with the safety shot. “You were missed at dinner,” he remarked after the balls had all settled.
“Yes.” Rhys walked a path around the table, considering his move. “Given Mother’s intentions, I trust I was,” he said drolly, positioning his stick.
“I didn’t refer to Mother,” Miles murmured, as Rhys let his shot fly. “Rather by a lady. Lady Alice, that is.”
The leather cue tip scraped the felt, widely missing the ball.
Miles grinned and, in one fluid motion, he took his shot. His cue connected with the yellow ball.
“You’ve never been one to play dirty,” Rhys groused under his breath. Grabbing the chalk, he rubbed it along the tip of his cue stick.
“And you’ve never been one to court a lady.”
There was truth to that. Even Rhys’ secret betrothal had been to a Covent Garden actress.
“And is that what you believe?” he asked, training all his focus on the table, deliberately avoiding Miles’ probing stare. “That I’m courting the lady?” He thrust his cue forward.
His shot just missed the baulk line.
Resting his stick on the edge of the table, Miles abandoned his poor showing of nonchalance. “Playing in the snow with Lady Alice?”
Over the course of his adult life, Rhys had been discovered in any number of compromising positions. This, however, was talk of Rhys and Alice, whose stolen interludes had been far more intimate than any moment before. He loosened his suddenly tight cravat and tossed it aside. “Faith and Violet?” His loquacious nieces couldn’t keep a secret even if it meant they’d secure triple portions of dessert for the remainder of their lifetimes.
Miles lifted his head. “The very same.”
“Traitors,” he muttered without inflection.
“Outside on the terrace last evening?”
Rhys choked on his swallow. “You—?”
“Saw your flight to the gardens below?” A devilish grin played on Miles’ lips. “Indeed.”
Rhys slapped a hand across his eyes. God help him. Discovered by his eldest, always proper brother? Rhys’ reputation as a rogue was officially in tatters. “Did anyone else… see?” he managed to force the question out.
“No,” Miles assured. He paused. “Except for Henry Pratt. The gentleman rushed over to the window and set up camp there while the other gentlemen drank their brandies.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve never dallied with innocents. That is why I trust there is, in fact… something more between you and the lady.”
Rhys and Alice’s courtship was a pretend one. As such, Rhys should be relieved that everyone had formed the exact erroneous conclusion he’d hoped they would. So why did his brother’s questioning leave him so confounded. “Was there a question there?” he asked belatedly.
“It was an observation.” Miles came ’round the table.
Rhys stiffened, bracing for a renewed lecture on respectability and the lady’s reputation. His eldest brother stopped beside him and slapped him hard between the shoulder blades. “I wanted to speak to you,” Miles began somberly, “and say it brings me joy knowing that you are, at last, happy.”
That he was, at last, happy? Rhys tried to muster a suitable quip. A laugh. A half-grin. Anything. But God help him, with Alice, Rhys had been happy these past days; far happier than he’d been since Lillian’s betrayal. Terror snaked around his chest.
Tiny footsteps pattered in the hallway. The door burst open and his youngest niece stormed the room. “Papa!” she cried, flying over to him.
Miles easily caught her about the waist, hauling her up. “Little Bloom,” he greeted, that endearing nickname.
After the curly-haired girl squished his face between her small hands. “I’ve been looking for you,” she scolded. “I wanted you to read the story.”
Rhys stared on, an interloper to the tender exchange between father and daughter. Although Rhys and his siblings had shared a bond, there had been an absence of the tangible warmth of Miles’ young family. It was a dream he’d once carried for himself and long ago abandoned.
Now, with the pair before him quietly chatting, Rhys allowed himself the whisper of that dream, once more. In his mind’s eye, Alice flickered forward as she’d someday be; a young mother, chasing her spirited children about.
And for a dangerously tantalizing moment, he saw himself as the equally joyous papa.
“Uncle Rhys?”
All the blood rushed to his ears and he jumped. “What?” he croaked.
Violet scrunched her brow up. “Are you sick? You look sick,” she went on before he could speak. “Is that why you weren’t at dinner? You didn’t come play parlor games, either. Aunt Lettie and her friend, Alice, did. But I think she was sad that you weren’t around. Why weren’t you there?”
Flummoxed by the rapid-fire questioning, Rhys looked hopelessly at his brother.
Miles’ eyes twinkled and he took mercy on his brother. Setting his daughter down, Miles ruffled the top of her head. “Come, we have a story to read.”
“But Uncle Rhys—”
“Had an upset tummy but is better now,” Miles assured, holding his hand out.
Violet nodded. “Very well.” She pointed at Rhys. “But I expect to see you tomorrow.” The little girl slid her fingers into Miles’ and the pair started from the room. But Violet suddenly stopped in the doorway. “And Lady Alice. She wants to see you tomorrow, too.”
A sharp bark of laughter exploded from his brother, as he urged his daughter on. “My apologies,” he mouthed.
Rhys gave a flick of his hand, staring after the pair until they’d gone.
It would seem he’d done a rather convincing job at his pretend courtship of Alice. So convincing that he himself had gotten his thoughts about the lady all jumbled.
He started over to his cue and stopped, feeling her presence before he saw her.
“Alice,” he called, collecting the stick.
Framed in the doorway, in an ice blue wrap front gown, her gleaming blonde tresses swept back, she had the look of a thawed ice princess. They stared at one another, time ceasing to matter. Rhys drank in the sight of her, his mouth dry. The imposed distance he’d kept between them that evening, proven wholly ineffective.
Her lips quirked up in a smile. “Tsk. Tsk. We had an arrangement, Lord Rhys.”
Lord Rhys. It didn’t escape his notice that she reverted to that formality when displeased.
“Were you looking to the empty doorway for me, madam?” he murmured, as she started forward.
“I may have been,” she acknowledged. That directness was contrary to their Society, and his appreciation for Alice Winterbourne swelled. The lady picked up Miles’ discarded cue and balanced it in her hands.
As his brother and niece had just shared, Alice had been searching for him. A lightness suffused his chest. “And I trust Pup Pratt noted your frequent glances about?”
Her smile faltered and it was like the room had been doused in cold. He mourned the loss of that camaraderie. “That is why you didn’t come to dinner or join in the parlor games,” she said flatly.
As much as he admired her frankness, he battled with himself to share that same honesty. For with every exchange and interaction, she kicked down the protective walls he’d carefully erected about himself. “No. That wasn’t why,” he quietly acknowledged.
“Is it…” Alice fiddled with the cue stick “Because of what I’d asked earlier, about your broken heart?”
Rhys stiffened. How could she, this woman he’d only known a few short days, have such a terrifyingly accurate read on him and his thoughts? Fingers shaking, he rescued his thoroughly rumpled jacket from a nearby sofa and fished out a cheroot. Presenting his back to her, he used a nearby sconce to light the tip. He took a long, slow inhale, letting it fill his lungs. “I didn’t say I’d ever had my heart broken,” he said carefully after he’d exhaled.
“Yes, you did.” Alice positioned the cue and expertly slid the stick forward. The cue ball struck its mark.
He searched his mind.
“Just not directly,” she clarified, straightening from her shot. Abandoning her stick, she circled back around and stopped a mere handsbreadth away. “It’s how you know,” she said softly, searching her clever gaze over his face.
“Know what?” he asked cautiously, taking another draw from his cheroot.
“Wounded eyes… strained smile… slumped shoulders,” she said, a repetition of the charges he’d leveled at her days earlier. Alice turned her delicate palms up. “You recognized all the signs of heartbreak because you yourself experienced it.” Hers wasn’t a question, but rather a statement that left him raw; splayed open before her.
When no one ever delved beyond the surface of the façade Rhys had presented before the world, this woman had gathered the secrets he kept.
Contemplating his response, he flicked his ashes into the rose medallion tray at the end of the table. “I did.”
“What happened?” she asked quietly.
Rhys studied the burning tip of his cheroot. “I was young, nine and ten, nearly twenty when I… met her.” He stared beyond the top of Alice’s golden curls, to the opposite end of the room. “You fell in love with Pratt for his love of books and seriousness. I fell in love with Lillian for her smile.” In the end, that artful expression had proven nothing more than a trick she’d employed upon the stage. “She was quite the actress,” he murmured to himself.
“She lied to you?” Alice ventured haltingly.
“There was that.” He took another puff of his cheroot. “But it was also what she did. Lillian was a performer, one of the most acclaimed actresses in Covent Garden.”
Alice’s lips moved but no sound came out. And then… “You fell in love with an actress.”
Knowing the tenacious lady before him would never be content with only that partial telling, he hurried on with his accounting. “My father and mother discovered my intentions to wed Lillian. They threatened to cut me off. I told them to go to hell, that I was marrying her anyway.”
Alice clenched a hand at her breast. “What happened?”
The memory of that day came rushing back; the shock, the agony, the absolute… numbness. “One afternoon, I paid a visit to my friend’s residence. We were to ride that morning and he never arrived. I was shown to his study. I came upon Anthony and Lillian locked in an embrace.”
Horror wreathed Alice’s features. “Your friend?” she choked out.
He nodded. Odd, how now those remembrances didn’t threaten to rip him apart. When had they ceased to hurt?
Alice let fly a black curse that singed even his ears.
Rhys grinned, a lightness filling him at her fury on his behalf.
He finished his telling. “I turned around and walked out. Lillian never knew I was there. Anthony, however, came rushing after me and explained why he bestowed his attention upon her. It was a bid to save me from myself. My mother had put him up to it and he acted on my behalf.”
“Oh, Rhys,” Alice whispered. Stretching a hand out, she brushed his fingers.
“It was just a kiss. But it didn’t matter. It was what that kiss represented. Betrayal. The end of a dream. The death of a friendship.” And a new person had been born that night.
Warm, delicate fingers covered his.
It was the first time he’d spoken of that night… to anyone. And there was a catharsis in this moment. “I was better for it,” he acknowledged to the both of them. “I know that now.” He hadn’t at the time. Just as Alice would someday come to find herself fortunate to have escaped marriage to Pratt.
“That doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t make the shame and regret go away,” she said gently. Alice worked her gaze over his face. “Their betrayal is the reason you became a rogue.”
He lifted his shoulders in a negligent shrug. “It is far easier to feel nothing than… the sting of heartbreak.”
“I thought that after Henry.” Layering her palms to the edge of the table, she arched up on her heels. “But is it, truly, Rhys?” Alice shoved away from the mahogany piece and drifted close. The faintest hint of lilac filled his senses. “Just days ago, I myself thought the same… but now?” She tipped her head back, holding his gaze squarely. “I’m not altogether certain.”
Rhys swallowed hard. Her lush mouth beckoned. Hooding his lashes, he dipped his head, lower—
A sharp voice sounded from the doorway, killing the moment. “Where have you been, Rhys Winston Grayson Brook—?” That sharp question came to a screeching halt.
Her cheeks ablaze, Alice leapt back.
And for the first time in the whole of his life, the impossible had been accomplished—his mother, the dowager marchioness of Guilford… had been silenced.
“It is fine,” Rhys whispered for Alice’s ears alone. The last thing his mother would do was reveal to the world that she’d found Alice and Rhys together, without a chaperone… not when it went against her marital hopes for Rhys.
Horror wreathing Alice’s features, she dipped a hasty curtsy, and he ached to call her back. To tell her his mother’s opinion mattered even less now than it had to him all those years ago when she’d found another young woman wanting.
In the end, he said nothing, and Alice escaped past the miserable harpie still frozen to the thin, Aubusson carpet.
The faint click of the door closing jerked his cold parent from her shock. “What in the blazes is the meaning of this?” She swept forward in a noisy rustle of her taffeta skirts. “You sneak off with that harlot—”
“Have a care,” he warned in frosty tones. He’d be damned to hell before he allowed his mother to disparage Alice. With her spirit, wit, and honor, she was a far better person than any of the rotted souls he’d met in Polite Society.
The dowager marchioness pursed her lips. “Is this about your business dealings with her wastrel brother?”
The air hissed between Rhys’ teeth. “My God, you truly are heartless.” She believed Rhys’ interest in Alice had something to do with a desire to grow his already plentiful coffers.
“Is it?” she demanded.
Rhys swiped his jacket from the sofa and shrugged into the garment. “Go to hell, Mama.”
“What of Aria?” she implored. “Our familial connection. Surely, you’ll not throw those expectations away on the Winterbourne girl. With her blood, she’ll hurt you just as that other woman did.”
Fury lanced through him. Stalking forward, he grabbed the door handle. “Rhys,” she screeched, as he opened the oak panel. “Come back here. I am not finished. She will hurt you. Mark my—”
And with her furious diatribe trailing in his wake, Rhys took his leave.