Page 10 of Not a Chance in Hell (The Chances #6)

March 30, 1840

“A letter, my lord.”

Arthur looked up, sandwich in one hand and newspaper in the other. “A letter?”

Haslehaw sighed. “A letter, my lord.”

It was the most delicate of sighs, but it was audible nonetheless. Perhaps Arthur was a little self-conscious about these things, but he was almost certain that butlers were not supposed to sigh in disappointment about their masters. Not all the time. Not to their faces.

“Right,” said Arthur bracingly, taking the envelope from the silver platter proffered by the servant. “Is that all?”

God, he hated the imperiousness in his voice. When had that creeped in? When had it become impossible to speak like a normal man, like he had been only months ago?

When had being an earl changed him?

“I think that is all, my lord, except…”

Arthur leaned back in his seat and raised a brow as he waited for his butler to untangle himself from whatever knot he had managed to create. “‘Except’?”

Haslehaw delicately picked off a speck of dirt from his cuff, eyes averted from his master. “Were you not meeting Lady Lilianna Chance for a walk at two o’clock?”

Arthur’s stomach lurched as his eyes snapped to the longcase clock. It was ten minutes to two. “Three o’clock, wasn’t it?”

“Whatever you say, my lord,” the butler said graciously before bowing and leaving the dining room.

Oh, hell. Which was it? Two or three?

Arthur wracked his brains but could not recall. It was a constant challenge when in Lilianna’s presence; one’s thoughts tended to disappear over the horizon to be replaced, only by giddy admiration and lust.

It was a heady concoction, though it didn’t require a great deal of thinking.

Staring longingly at the orange pudding Cook had prepared, which would now go to waste, Arthur stuffed the letter unopened into his pocket and strode into the hall.

Better to be waiting there for an hour if he was correct than be an hour late if Haslehaw was…

As it turned out, the ducks and swans meandered contentedly across the Fish Pond as the minutes slid by and Arthur was left fuming while he sat on a damp bench. He knew it had been three o’clock! What on earth had the old man been playing at?

Ah well. He had that letter, whatever it was. That would pass the time.

Arthur slipped it out of his pocket and broke the seal, a simple wax blob suggesting it was from no one in particular. Only when his focus fell onto the handwriting in the enclosed sheets of paper, five of them, did he realize who had sent it.

Jesus wept. He’d thought she’d understood.

Despite knowing none of the elegant personages promenading up and around the lake, passing him on his bench, could read the tightly scribed lines, Arthur tilted the letter so it could not be viewed by another.

No one needed to know what Celeste had written.

Arthur’s eyes scrutinized the paragraphs, hopes sinking with every line.

I knew if I was good enough, you would have chosen to make me your countess, and I had hoped—but my hopes were wild, and I know now you made me no promises. And yet sometimes, the way you looked at me, I could half-convince myself that you were falling in love with me.

His fingers tightened on the pages. He’d never made her any promises. That did not seem to matter.

His eyes flickered further down the page.

When you came to my bed the last time, I knew it would be goodbye, but I did not know it would be forever. Are you never bored, Arthur? Do you never long for the warmth of my arms? Do you never reach out in the night, hoping your fingertips will graze my—

Arthur put down the letter.

This guilt was far worse than he had expected. This was what it was to truly care for someone, then. He’d never intended it, but unintended consequences were a bad habit of a man who had spent so much time in the arms of women.

One at a time, obviously. He wasn’t a complete rogue.

Celeste had never been given any assurances—he had always been very careful about that—but clearly, it did not matter. She had fallen in love with him, cared for him, longed for him. And he…

Arthur sighed. He had not thought of her from the moment he had left her bedchamber.

Strange. He had never seen himself in this particular light, and he did not like it. What was he, some sort of heartbreaker? Worse, a brigand? Was he playing with people’s hearts just to keep himself amused?

He looked back at the letter, moving from one page to the next, when something caught his eye.

I know that when you find a wife she will be far superior to me. But can she love you like I do?

“What have you got there?”

The letter disappeared.

Arthur snatched at the air where the letter had been but to no avail. It had been completely removed from his grip—and horror of horrors, when he looked up to see who had taken the pages…

“Good afternoon,” said Lady Lilianna with a beam. “Have you been waiting long?”

It was all he could do not to choke on the words. “Letter—g-give back!”

He had risen to his feet—when, he did not know—his pulse was hammering because he had to get that letter back.

He had to.

The very idea of Lilianna reading it…

Arthur snatched at the letter but almost as though she moved purely on instinct, Lilianna jerked the pages away, her laughter delightful in any other circumstance but this. “Taernsby! What is it?”

“It’s private,” he said hurriedly, his stomach lurching as Lilianna’s gaze dropped, just for a moment, to the pages she was holding. “Give it to me, please.”

The tension in his voice felt so obvious, taut and strained, yet Lilianna did not seem to understand. She was grinning, almost… almost as if it were a game. As though he were teasing her for her own amusement.

“Love letter, is it?” she said with a hollow laugh, taking a step from him and holding the letters in the air, whirling them about so the paper snapped. Arthur caught sight of the dowdy, young woman he recognized to be Lilianna’s lady’s maid. She sat on a bench quite some distance away at the other end of the pond, watching her mistress spin about with what seemed like equal wonder to Arthur’s own right now.

The panic was fast becoming terror and Arthur did not know what to do. At any moment, she could drop them and they could flutter about the Fish Pond, or she could drop them in the mud and ruin them or—

Or heaven forbid, she could read them.

Arthur knew full well which was the worst outcome. He reached out again, hating that she had them, hating that he did not seem able to grab them.

“Perhaps I had better read it, see who my competition is,” Lilianna teased.

Her eyes were bright and her color high, and if this had just been a game, a flirtation, Arthur would have been thrilled. There was clearly a playful side to Lilianna and he had somehow found it—but in the worst possible situation.

She jested about the letter being from a lover. What would she do… if she discovered she could not be more correct?

“Lilianna, please, it’s private.”

“Not anymore,” she said laughingly. “So, what do we have here? ‘When you came to my bed’—your… your bed?”

Arthur cursed under his breath. The damage was done. There was no way to recover from this. “Lilianna, just give me the letter.”

She took another step back, both hands now on the letter, holding it before her as though she could not look away.

“Don’t read any more,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

Lilianna wetted her lips. “‘When you came to my bed the last time, I knew it would be goodbye, but I did not know it would be forever. Are you never bored, Arthur? Do you never long for the warmth of my arms? Do you never reach out in the night, hoping your fingertips will graze…’”

Her voice trailed away and Arthur wished he had never met Celeste, or Haslehaw, or ever lived to see this day.

Her face was pale now. The sporting colors in her cheeks had gone, and so had the glint of happiness in her eyes.

Lilianna swallowed, then looked up past the letter. “And are you bored, my lord?” she asked quietly.

“That letter.” He swallowed. “It’s nothing. It means nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t know. From what I can tell, some poor woman has spent a great deal of time on it,” said Lilianna with a forced cheerfulness that tore at him. “Pages and pages of it.”

She shuffled them in her hands as though to emphasize just how many there were, her gaze never shifting from his face.

Arthur’s hands dropped to his side and he wondered if he should just leave now, before it got any worse. How it could become worse, he could not tell.

Hell, he’d… he’d never made promises to Celeste. And he’d never lied to Lilianna—she had never asked about his past, and he had quite firmly never told her. Why would he? It was before her, before he had ever met her.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

Arthur’s head jerked up. When it had fallen, he couldn’t recall. Looking at her was painful, like looking at the sun, but Lilianna deserved to see his pain, deserved to know what it cost him to admit this.

On the one hand, there was the truth. And then there was what he wanted from himself but had never been certain if he could be enough.

“This letter?” Arthur jabbed a finger at it. “Never.”

“Not the letter, Taernsby. You know what I mean,” Lilianna said quietly.

If only they could be having such a discussion in… in a private room somewhere, just the two of them, where he had the time to explain. Not that he was particularly sure how long it would take. How much time did a man need to explain that he had bedded more women than Lilianna had probably had hot dinners?

But they were here, out in the open, her chaperone within sight if not too close to hear, with the added possibility of strangers walking by them during the conversation and Lilianna looking as though she could bolt at any moment.

Arthur took a deep, painful breath. He’d been forgetting to do that. “My instincts told me never to reveal to you that I had… what I had… who I…”

Damn, but these words were difficult. Since when had speaking been such a challenge? He had always known how to charm the ladies!

Yes , muttered a voice inside his head. And how well is that going for you right now?

“Your ‘instincts’?” Lilianna raised an eyebrow.

She was all coldness and aloofness and distance again. Arthur could have wept to see the change in her. He’d hardly noticed how she’d taken to him until all the heat had been taken away and he’d been left with the icy expression and distant calm he had first met, when he had caught her in his arms.

It would be difficult to say, but he had to say it. “Yes, my instincts. I thought, when I came to take a wife—”

“I wouldn’t start getting any ideas.”

He deserved that. “I am afraid you are a little too late for that.”

He met her eyes, hoping that through his expression she would understand just what she meant to him. What she had been meaning to him for weeks now.

Lady Lilianna Chance looked calmly and resolutely back at him.

“I thought, when coming to take a wife, I would keep all that hidden. All my past, all that I had been, I would leave it where it belonged, in the past,” Arthur said, pushing forward in the desperate hope something he said would reach her. “But you… Since you and I…”

Hell, there’s no point in holding back, is there? Look where it’s landed me.

Stepping aside for a gentleman and lady who were walking arm in arm, Arthur waited for them to be a few more yards away before saying in a rush, “You make me want to be a better man.”

Lilianna’s face was impassive. She did not move. Not even a twitch.

Arthur sighed, his shoulders slumping. “You deserve a better man. Not one who had a mistress and cast her off when he…” Hell, hell, hell . “When he tired of her.”

For a few shimmering seconds after his words had left his mouth, Arthur waited. Waited for the shouts, the screams, the cries, perhaps even the sobs. The gentle patter of soft fists against him. The pleading, the negotiations, and eventually, the tears.

It was all so predictable. He’d caused such reactions in women before and, lord knew, he would do it again.

He braced himself. It shouldn’t last too long.

Only after his brain caught up with him did Arthur realize that none of that had happened.

He blinked.

Lilianna was standing there, her focus fixed upon him. Without looking at her hands, she was folding up the letter from Celeste. Then she was stepping forward.

Arthur readied himself.

But there were no shouts. No yells. No fists pummeling his chest. No tears.

Lilianna slipped the folded letter into his coat pocket, her sudden closeness a blessing he had not anticipated. It was gone before he could revel in the intimacy.

“So, she was your mistress?” Her voice was quiet, and her footsteps small, and she was walking away.

Away from everything he had started to hope could be.

Lilianna paused, glancing over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”

Coming?

Arthur almost stumbled over his own feet in his haste to join her. It was too much to hope that Lilianna would ever look past the fact that he’d had a mistress, but perhaps she was not so innocent, so sheltered as he had imagined.

One mistress, fine. Understandable. Forgivable. But the number of women he had bedded…

“She was your mistress.”

“Yes.” Arthur hated the hoarse scratch of his voice, but swallowing did not appear to make much of a difference.

“And was she the only one?”

He could see her arched eyebrow out of the corner of his vision as they followed the path, curving around to the right.

Hell, but he could lie. She’d never know. There was no possibility of Lady Lilianna discovering just how many women he’d—

But he would know.

Damn .

“No,” Arthur said quietly. “And I’m not… Christ, this is difficult to describe. But I am not ashamed, Lilianna. What I did with them, it wasn’t wrong.”

“Society would argue differently,” she said, her voice distant.

“Would you?”

The widows he had…befriended, for want of a better word, had never had any cause for complaints, but it felt churlish to say such a thing—akin to being a braggadocio, and he was not that sort of gentleman.

He had not intended to grab her arm, to halt Lilianna in the middle of the pathway and demand in that movement that she answer his question. Yet that was what he did.

Lilianna did not pull away. “You… You didn’t… You never…”

There was pain in her eyes now, and Arthur waited, pulse hammering in his ears.

Eventually, she murmured, “You didn’t ever… I mean, not since we, since you asked me to—”

“No,” Arthur said confidently, relief pouring through him that he could answer this one honestly. “No, I’ve not—not since I met you.”

There was a flicker of something in her eyes, but he could not discern what it was. Relief, that he had not been with any other woman during their acquaintance? Surprise, that he had been so forthright?

Lilianna nodded. He’d hoped she would speak, but she remained silent as she gently pried his fingers from her arm and continued to walk. She had not ordered him away, not blamed him, so Arthur returned to her side.

They walked together for some time, her lady’s maid keeping an eye on them from a great distance at times from that same bench. At first, the tension in Arthur’s shoulders refused to settle, aching in jolts that caused him to flinch, but eventually, the minutes slipping by without hysterics or remonstrances or tears, the tightness melted away.

This was… nice. Walking together. There was something about her company that was infinitely calming.

Finally, Lilianna spoke. “Tell me why.”

Why.

Oh, God, how long does she have?

There were a myriad of reasons why, and some of them Arthur wasn’t sure he could articulate on a cold, spring afternoon in public. How was a man supposed to tell a genteel woman like Lady Lilianna Chance that sometimes a man needed a… a release?

He prepared a ream of reasons, each one coherent and respectable, though all of them disappeared as he looked into her deep, sky-blue eyes.

Eyes that were open. Like her heart.

Arthur’s jaw tightened. “I… I was lonely.”

Lonely. It was the sort of word that no gentleman ever wanted to admit to. It was weak. It was pathetic.

“I don’t think I realized just how lonely until my father died and my brother—Archibald, you saw his painting—became the earl.” Where is this all coming from? A deep well had opened within him and Arthur almost watched in astonishment as truths he’d half-buried and half-ignored poured out. “Being the spare, being the boy then man whom people needed but nobody wanted, knowing there was no place for me in the family, in life, no estate or title waiting… My father had little interest in his family, Olive and her parents moved to York when I was small, my mother died when I was very young… I wanted meaning. I wanted purpose. I wanted someone to want me.”

I wanted someone to want me.

Christ on a stick, he was pathetic.

The self-loathing Arthur had always worked so hard to push away was rising up like a tide, inexorably and unstable, and he hated it. God, he—

“You wanted to be wanted,” Lilianna repeated softly.

It sounded even worse when she said it. But though the instinct rose to deny it, to laugh and say it had all been a jest, to pretend none of it truly mattered, Arthur pushed through it all.

If he couldn’t be honest with this woman, the woman he was determined to marry, then with whom could be honest?

Did he want to be alone forever?

“I was never meant to be the earl,” Arthur said quietly. “But precisely what my father, or my grandfather, ever thought I would do, I do not know. There isn’t a separate income from the title, no second castle to be cared for, and though I know it is not the case for every family, the Nelsons have always been firm that a gentleman of my standing would be considered demeaning himself to join a profession. I was—”

“Bored.”

“Lonely,” he corrected quietly.

Color had returned to Lady Lilianna’s cheeks. Some of the ice had melted away, yet there was still a distance between them.

How could he cross it? Would he ever be able to, now he had admitted to such weakness?

Arthur pulled himself together. This was ridiculous. He was out here, in public, admitting to being so lonely that he’d half-leapt, half-fallen into any bed that would have him.

“I always thought my brother would have children and live a long life, that I would have time to—well, to figure it all out,” he said bracingly, as though they were discussing nothing more serious than the weather.

“So you believed yourself free to do whatever you wanted until then,” Lilianna said quietly.

“Not quite,” Arthur said with a wry smile. “I knew I had to be discreet. Knew that… Well.”

His gaze returned to her.

Lady Lilianna nodded humorlessly. “Knew a future wife would not want to know of such exploits.”

Exploits . Yes, perhaps he had exploited the women he had bedded. Some had exploited him in turn, hoped a little coin would go their way, a few introductions at court. Some, like poor Celeste, had hoped it would be emotions, not favors, that Arthur would offer her.

“Tell me the truth.”

Arthur blinked. Lady Lilianna had halted again, and this time, her cheeks burned with the impropriety of speaking so boldly.

“I have told you the truth.”

“Not all of it. Not the part of you you’re holding back, even from yourself,” she said softly. “I can see it, even if you think you’re doing an excellent job at hiding it.”

And his jaw dropped.

How did she do it? Look past his bluster and his arrogance and his pride, and see—see more than he saw in himself?

“I-I don’t know what you mean.”

“What do you want, Arthur Nelson, Earl of Taernsby?” Lady Lilianna was standing close, far closer than he had thought possible in public, her eyes trained on him and nothing else. “I don’t want to hear the bravado. What is it that you want? What do you want?!”

“Connection.”

The word had spilled from his lips before Arthur could stop it, before he could think it. Where it had come from, he did not know.

Lady Lilianna’s eyes widened.

“I want—I crave connection,” Arthur said, his words swift now as something within him unlocked as it never had before. “I don’t want to crawl out of someone’s bed and not remember her name as I leave. I want—I want to know someone. Really know them, all their secrets and the dangerous thoughts they hide, and I want to feel known. I want to look someone in the eye,” he said softly, swallowing hard, “and have them tell me that they can see me. All of me. Even the parts I’m holding back. Even the parts I’m holding back from myself. And I want them to love all those parts of me.”

He wanted her. He wanted this to be far more than just an impulsive decision to marry the first attractive woman who’d fallen into his arms.

Lady Lilianna was smiling. Her lips quirked and there was joy dancing in her eyes.

She slipped her arm through his. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I wanted to—I think I always wanted to,” Arthur admitted, his cheeks burning as they started to walk arm in arm. Hell, that part of him had been calling out to her the moment she had refused to marry him, the minx.

“I am sorry for taking the letter.”

He could feel the folded pages in his pocket. Somehow, Arthur no longer cared. “I’m glad.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. “Glad?”

Arthur nodded. The tension had gone. “It forced me to be honest with you—to tell you the truth. I never want to hide anything from you again.”