The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,104

said quietly. “I saw you with him but once, and know you are the manner of parent to build him up and celebrate his interests and indulge them when most parents of the peerage”—her own included—“do not bother with them in that way.” As for Miss Lee and Miss Linden? Her gut clenched. Coward that she was, Emma didn’t want to know about the women in his life. The named ones she’d spent all her adult life resenting as much as Charles for what they had shared. The knowledge all society had of their identities had made their realness and his betrayal all the more acute.

“Miss Lee and Miss Linden,” Charles began in solemn tones, and every muscle in her body tensed. She was not to be spared talk of those women whom he still had dealings with.

“It isn’t my business, Charles.” Not anymore. Emma took a step away from him, but he shot out a hand, catching her fingers, holding them gently, asking her with that slight action to stay. To listen.

Oh, God. She was not to be spared this, then, after all.

“No. I want you to know. I need you to.” His features were strained, a physical exertion of a man who’d less wish to share the next details than Emma. “It began with Camille.”

Of anything he might have said about the women to whom he’d been publicly linked . . . mention of his sister was not what she’d expected. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head.

“My sister lost her heart . . . and . . .”—hatred flared to life in his eyes, a vitriol so strong it sent gooseflesh rising on her arms—“and her virtue to a man. She was just seventeen.”

Emma gasped. “My God.” Not a whisper or a word or a hint of impropriety clung to the young woman. And in a society that found its sustenance on the falls from grace and heartbreak endured by its members, they’d somehow missed those morsels.

“There was no god in this,” he said with so much bitterness dripping from his tones it oozed off his words. “He was a rake of the first order. And I was oblivious to the attentions he was bestowing upon her, and the meetings he’d coordinated on our family’s Kent properties.” His lip curled in a snarl, giving Charles the look of a feral wolf eager to shred the man who found himself the subject of his telling. “He bedded her with only the intention of securing her dowry, and when he presented her ruin to my father, and my father made clear he’d never see a pence, the cad left.” His features collapsed. “And I let him. I was her brother, and I should have fought for her honor.”

Emma moved quickly, placing a hand on his sleeve. “Calling him out would have not changed what happened to your sister, Charles,” she said, willing him with her words to see. “It wouldn’t undo what he did. The hurt he inflicted. It would have only led to one of you perishing on a dueling field”—and knowing the shot Charles was, likely the bounder would have paid the price with his life—“and everything exactly as he left it.”

He balled and unballed his fists at his sides. “I was her eldest brother,” he said harshly. “I failed her.”

She tabulated the details of what he’d shared. “Charles, you were at university. You were a boy yourself.”

He turned quickly toward her. “I wasn’t a boy, any more than you were a girl at the age of twenty-two, Emma.”

Fair point. He was right on that score.

She tried again. “Murder isn’t a mark of honor, and that is what it would have been,” she said with a gentle but firm insistence. “Men are taught that duels are merely a matter of good. They are not, Charles.”

A muscle rippled along his proud, noble jawline, the only indication he heard her. “I couldn’t help my sister before she was ruined. My parents came to me, after the fact . . . and revealed . . .” His words trailed off, and yet that punctuated pause ushered in a thick tension.

She waited, allowing him the time he needed. All the while, she ached to be closer to him, to take him in her arms and give him the strength necessary to finish what he needed to say.

Charles glanced around, searching the empty grounds, before landing on a point just over the top of Emma’s head. “She was with child.”

My

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