It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t dare come here.
Her hand drifted to her throat, fingers grazing the skittery jump of her pulse. “No.”
“Miss O’Rourke.”
She dropped the curtains at the sound of her name. Spinning around, she tried to offer up a reassuring smile for Mr. Collins. Even so, she felt her head shaking in denial, panic and pleasure warring inside her. She took a step in one direction, and then another, unsure where to run.
Footsteps sounded outside the door, the swift tread growing, matching the thundering tempo of her heart. Unable to summon forth an answer, she shuffled back, retreating to the far shadows of the room. Her back bumped a screen and she quickly ducked behind it just as the door swung open.
From the crack in the screen she saw _him _ standing there. Impossible as it seemed. His body overfilled the room, broad shoulders stretching the fine cut of his jacket. Everything else shrank away. Her palms tingled, remembering the sensation of his warm flesh beneath her hand.
Dominic. More than she remembered. More than she ever remembered _feeling _ in his presence.
Stronger. Deeper. Her chest tightened. Her breath would not come. Her stomach dipped, sank, twisted. _Grand. _ She’d already come to terms with the notion of loving him. And not having him.
She had not yet realized, however, that loving meant hurting. Always hurting. More so each time she saw him. Because she would never have him. Because she would forever want to.
Dominic stared at the shrunken shape of his grandfather beneath the counterpane in the massive bed. As a boy, Rupert Collins had loomed tall, an intimidating figure in his black broadcloth.
This image of the past conflicted with the reality of the present.
The room felt airless, stale. A lamp burned on the bedside table but otherwise very little light pervaded the room.
“Dominic.”
The feeble voice startled him. Almost as much as the use of his name and not one of his grandfather’s usual designations. Forsaken sodomite. Devil. Satan’s spawn.
He approached the bed and peered down at the waxen face, hardly recognizing him, so changed even from his last visit. Sunken cheeks moved, working for speech. “I’m glad you’ve come. I waited…” his voice twisted into a garbled mutter.
Tension knotted his shoulders. He recalled the words hurled at him during the last visit. My last hope for your soul is to see you well and settled. I cannot embrace the comforts of Heaven until you do.
From the looks of his grandfather, God would no longer wait on Dominic to come up to scratch.
Sinking onto the bed, he braced himself for whatever stinging reprimand his grandfather would heap upon him, knowing he would suffer it. _For Fallon. _ It had mattered to her that he ventured here. When he found her, he would tell her he had. That he had found the strength to try and rid himself of the past, so that he could move on and be whole enough for her.
“I tried so hard to keep you from becoming the sinner your father was. A chronic gambler…to his death. A womanizer in his life. I didn’t want you to grow into a man like him. He ruined my girl. Corrupted her and then broke her heart. As good as killed her, he did.” He shook his head slowly on the stark white pillow. “I wasn’t going to let you turn out like him.” Stopping for breath, he added, “I tried. The only way I knew. Perhaps I was too hard. Perhaps I was wrong to place my trust in Mrs. Pearce…” His voice faded and he shook his head again. “I should have dismissed her. I know that now. I am sorry, Dominic.”
Dominic stared down at his grandfather, hot emotion thickening his throat, disbelief rippling over him, puckering his skin to gooseflesh. He blinked fiercely, regarding the frail hand so close to his own on the bed. It looked pathetically small. And the man…the man suddenly bore no resemblance to the cold distant shadow of his youth. Dominic had come here braced and ready for familiar recriminations to be heaped upon him. He’d come prepared to feel his old hatred.
But that, too, was gone. Evaporating like fast-fading smoke on the wind. He felt only loss.
Regret for what could have been…but what he would now never know.
But what he could perhaps still have if he would only take it. With Fallon.
He eased his hand over the papery skin of his grandfather’s hand. Incredibly, he heard himself say, “I wish we had time to start again.”
A floorboard creaked and he stood in one swift motion, looking behind him. His gaze narrowed on a figure hovering in the shadows.
“Who’s there?” he demanded, mortified to know someone stood witness to the intimate conversation.
“Forgive me.” A woman stepped closer, her whisper a familiar caress to his starved soul. She left the shadows behind. Her face fell into the lamp’s glow.
“Fallon.” He breathed her name, his chest squeezing tight.
“I did not mean to eavesdrop.” Her words flew in an agitated rush, her hands twisting together before her. “You entered the room, and I just panicked.” She gestured to the screen. “Then you started talking—” She stopped abruptly. Even in the gloom of the room he detected the flood of color to her cheeks. She stared at him a long moment, her gaze searching. “My apologies.” She fled the room, wide skirts swishing at her ankles. Apricot-colored skirts, he thought in stunned silence. Had he ever seen her garbed in color?
He uttered her name again, staring at the open door through which she had fled. Questions whirred through his head. What was she doing here? In this house? With his grandfather?
The rasp of his grandfather’s voice penetrated his thoughts. “You’re the one, then.”
He turned and looked down at the bed, staring into eyes so like his own. Without even thinking, he nodded. “Yes.”
“I should have guessed.”
His spine stiffened. “Why is that?”
“The girl’s been nursing a broken heart. She said you didn’t love her. That you _couldn’t _ love.”
“I can,” he spit out fiercely, feeling challenged, denied, and not liking it one damn bit. Especially since he had realized almost from the moment he let Fallon walk out of his life that he had to have her back. At the harshness of his voice, he swallowed, amending his tone. “I do.”
“Go then.” His grandfather’s voice gained volume as he added. “You haven’t run out of time with her.”
The words struck him with force in the chest, winding him. Nodding again, he started from the room. First at a walk, then a run.
Chapter 30
Fallon halted at the bottom of the steps, cursing her poor luck to find the Reverend Simmon’s smiling face beaming up at her.
“Miss O’Rourke! Splendid meeting you here. Are you visiting with our unfortunate Mr.
Collins?” His pleased features fell then, adopting an appropriate look of concern as he clucked his tongue.
Fallon nodded, stepping down into the foyer, her heart racing too quickly to form coherent speech. Dominic. She dragged a hand down the side of her face, loathing how it trembled.
What was he doing here? This was the last place he should ever appear given his relationship with his grandfather. She had thought herself perfectly safe at Wayfield—the last place he wished to be. And yet here he was. Upstairs. With the man he most hated…and showing him kindness, saying things she never thought to hear him say.
“And how is the gentleman?”
She shook her head at the young vicar, doing her best to give him her attention. “Not well. He struggles.”
“Ah, but he is blessed with a hearty constitution.” His fair head bobbed. “He has been strong for so long now.” He took her elbow and leaned forward as if to confide some great secret. “I suspect your arrival into his life has renewed him.” His brown eyes warmed as they crawled over her face. His fingers moved a small circle over the inside of her arm. “Many an expiring soul would feel heartened in your company and find the will to live again.”
“God’s teeth, woman.”
Fallon closed her eyes in one pained blink, recognizing the deep voice at once and wincing at his choice of words. Before the local vicar, no less.
“Every time I turn around, some man is pawing at you. Can you not try to project proper modesty?”
She turned and glared at Dominic, all remorse for overhearing his very private and long-awaited words with his grandfather fleeing in the face of his rude words.
“A lecture on propriety from you? ”
His gray eyes glinted with what almost looked like… delight? “We’re not discussing me.”
“Have you no shame,” she hissed, hot mortification sweeping her face.
“Whomever you are, sir, I can assure I was not pawing Miss O’Rourke.” Even so, Mr. Simmon’s dropped his hand from her arm as though burned. He pulled his narrow shoulders up and back, stretching to his full height, which brought his eyes level only with her chin.
“Miss O’Rourke—” he paused to glare at Dominic, “_Fallon. _ Who is this person?”
“You were correct the first time. It’s Miss O’Rourke to you.” Dominic flicked the man the barest glance before looking back to Fallon and taking her hand. His warm fingers wrapped around hers, firm and unyielding as a vise. Facing each other, they fell utterly still. Mr. Simmons and the world disappeared for a long moment as their eyes locked, and clung. The blood rushed in her ears, a roaring buzz as she lost herself in the murky gray depths, the line of blue circling the iris especially dark. Then he blinked. The moment ended as quickly as it arrived.
Before she could tug her hand free, he hauled her from the foyer without a word. She shot a quick glance behind her. The sight of the reverend’s pale, stunned face almost looked comical.
Almost. She could have cracked a smile, if not for the very real feel of Dominic’s hand on hers, or the small thrill of heat that sizzled through her at the contact, bringing back in a flash all they had shared. All that she had tried to put behind her.
He pulled her behind him into a drawing room she had never seen before. Not so surprising. In her limited exposure to Wayfield Park, she had yet to see all of its vast grounds or countless rooms. Mr. Collins was hardly up to giving a tour.
The room was lovely. All yellow and creams with faint accents of blue. White and ivory-striped drapes were pulled back to allow the afternoon sun inside. She would have taken more time to admire the sunny room if not for the duke backing her up until she bumped into the pianoforte, his body a very large wall of heat at her front.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, eyes drilling relentlessly into her.
“Lord Hunt provided me his old nanny’s cottage. Near the old mill east of Little Saums. It has been vacated these last—”
“You’re living here?” He made a stabbing motion at the floor. “He sent you to live here?”
“Well, not here.” She motioned to the room lamely. “Nearby.”
Dominic smiled suddenly then, and she felt as though someone had thrust her from a very dark room into the warm sunshine again. “I don’t know whether I should thank him or trounce him the next time I see him.”
Her stomach flipped at that smile. He had smiled so few times without mockery or wicked purpose since she knew him, it was like seeing a stranger. With that smile he was a greater threat than ever before. Enticing, charming…dangerous. More dangerous than the wicked duke she had first thought him to be.
“Fallon,” he whispered, his hand lifting, brushing back a lock of hair from her forehead. She resisted the impulse to lean into his touch. It would be so easy to fall if she let herself, to give in to all that she had resisted by running away.
Running away. She shook her head, her intemperate self disliking the notion. She had not run.
She merely moved on with her life. A life thatstill did not include him. Nor the pitiable role of mistress he had offered her, scarcely a spot at all in his world. No matter how she loved him, she could not surrender herself to him.