An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,53
gut.
“I didn’t particularly enjoy it and I tried not to let it upset me too much. He wasn’t you, Dalton. He didn’t do the things you knew—or cared—to do.”
Dalton sat very still and willed himself to keep inhaling and exhaling. Breathing. That was something he could do when he felt so damned powerless and cowardly. This was old news, he protested silently to himself. It was none of his business. It was the way of the world. She had chosen the duke and all that over him.
She deserved it, he told himself.
No one deserved it, or what she described next.
“It was after the second or third time that I started to think I might have made a mistake. He wanted an heir and a spare, of course, to go along with my astronomical dowry. And all I had to do was endure. Submit. Endure. Submit. Endure. Because what other option did I have?”
Leave, he thought.
Fight, he thought.
But these were things more easily said than done. Especially by twenty-year-old debutantes in a world dominated by men.
“It’s very trying on one’s soul, all that submitting and enduring. Until finally he gave up. Thank God.”
“Good.” His voice was rough.
“It was better. But . . .” Here, she paused. Dalton was aware of her turning to him, lifting her lashes, and settling her gaze on him. “But I still wanted to be touched in the way that you had touched me once upon a time. And duchesses locked in castles are not touched. They are politely tolerated until they have the graciousness to expire and make way for a new, younger, dewier duchess.”
Fools. Because he knew no one compared to Beatrice. This woman had a light of her own. She outshone New York City at nightfall.
“And despite all the submitting and enduring, tedious days and torturous nights, after years of purgatory in an old drafty castle still . . . my fire hadn’t gone out.” Her eyes flashed with the wonder of it. Could he believe it? She could not. It was a miracle, that, and she spoke of it as reverentially as a miracle. “My fire hadn’t gone out.”
He nodded, speechless.
“They couldn’t snuff me out of existence and once I realized that, I came roaring back to life. So here I am,” she said, arms wide to the night sky and New York.
They sat side by side in the darkness.
Beatrice reached for his hand.
My name is Wes Dalton. You stole my—
She didn’t steal anything. She’d made a choice and lived with the consequences of it until she could not. During all those years apart, he had imagined her flitting around the castle, duke on her arm. That was not what she had described.
All these years Dalton had been so consumed by his own heartache and fixation on how he’d been wronged that he hadn’t once paused to consider that perhaps she wasn’t flitting about the castle. She was submitting and enduring.
Now he knew.
Since he knew, he would have to rearrange his understanding of him and her in the world.
“Why are you telling me this, Beatrice?”
She turned to face him. “I’m telling you so that you know why I’m about to kiss you. Because I have years of deprivation to make up for. I am telling you, Dalton, why I’m going to kiss you right now even though I am going to ruthlessly compete with you for customers. All. Day. Long.”
“Rivals by day, lovers by night?”
“You can say no,” she said and he had to laugh. Because Beatrice was not someone a man said no to. Not when she was offering the deal of a lifetime.
He could say no.
He could also say yes.
He could suggest that they discuss this more.
Dalton didn’t say anything as he cradled her face in his hands.
What a waste of time and heart and years.
What the world had missed. What she could have done if she hadn’t been all caged up. What they might have done together.
Now she was free to do whatever she damned well pleased and she wanted to kiss him.
A man didn’t say no to that.
Not when he felt the same way.
Her mouth found his, and all that pent-up passion became his to revel in. And he did, oh, he did. Dalton was helpless to resist the pressure of her lips against his, the way she leaned into him, soft and warm and tasting sweet. He sank his fingertips into her hair and held her close and kissed her deeply.