This Wicked Gift (Carhart 0.5)(10)
There was a vital difference between lust and love. It had been lust—desperate lust for her body—that had brought him to this point. Lust did not care about the loss of a woman’s virtue. Lust did not care if a woman’s feelings were wounded. Lust howled, and it wanted slaking. It didn’t give a fig as to how the deed was accomplished. Lust was a beast, and one he’d nurtured well with a decade of resentment.
William thought of his four pounds ten a quarter—eighteen pounds per year of drudgery—and of the many years ahead of him while he garnered the recognition and the recommendations he would need so that he could one day become a man who earned…what, twenty-three pounds a year? He thought of the hole in Lavinia’s glove, and her brother asking when she’d last had a new dress.
“Lavinia,” he said carefully, “I don’t deserve such a gift.”
“Nobody gets gifts because he deserves them.” She stood up and shook out her wrinkled chemise. “You get gifts because the giver wants to give them.”
She wasn’t arguing. She wasn’t throwing herself at him. She wasn’t weeping and carrying on. If she had done any of those things, he could have borne it. But she exuded a calm, cool competence that lay entirely outside William’s understanding.
“I can’t support a wife,” he continued. “And even if I could, I’m not the man for you, Lavinia.”
She reached for her dress. “I knew that the minute you tried to coerce me into your bed.”
He shifted and fixed his gaze past her on the blighted tree outside his narrow window. “Then why did you agree to it? You had no need.”
She had not trembled when he’d threatened her, when he’d made his horrible proposition. She had not shivered, not even when he’d claimed her body. But her hands betrayed the tiniest of tremors as she fastened her dress and reached for her cloak.
“No need? You said that everything worthwhile had a price. You were wrong. You are absolutely and without question the most completely misinformed man in all of creation. Everything really worth having,” she said, “is free.”
“Free?”
“Given,” she said, “without expectation of return.” And she looked up at him, a fierce light in her eyes. “I wanted to show you.”
That clear trust in her eyes was unbroken yet. He’d taken her virginity. How had she managed to keep her innocence?
“I have no notion what love is,” he told her, almost in a panic. “None at all.”
She picked up her cloak and shook it out. It flared about her shoulders and then fell, obscuring in thick wool the figure he had seen in such heartbreaking detail mere minutes before. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps one day you’ll figure it out.”
And like that, she slipped past him. He listened, unmoving, as she stepped down the stairs and out of his life.
CHAPTER THREE
T WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Lavinia slowly climbed the stairs to the family rooms above the lending library. She ached all over, a vital, restless throb that twinged in every muscle.
“Lavinia?” Her father’s weak call came from across the way. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Papa.” She took off her cloak and hung it on a peg by the door. Half boots followed. “I went out on a…constitutional after service. I’ll freshen up and join you shortly.”
She ducked into her own room.
As far as the basics went, her small chamber was not so different from William’s. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture plain and simple, and almost identical to his: washstand, bed, chair and a chest of drawers. Lavinia crossed to the other side of the room and poured water from a pitcher into the basin. As she washed, she examined her reflection in the mirror.
She knew what she was supposed to see. This was the face of a girl who’d been ruined. A woman of easy virtue.
The face that peeked back at her looked exactly the same as the one she’d seen in the mirror this morning. There was no giant proclamation writ across her forehead, denouncing her as unchaste. Her eyes did not glow a diabolical red. They weren’t even demonically pink. And her body still felt as though it belonged to her—sore, yes, and tingling in ways that she’d never before experienced—but still hers. Perhaps more so.
He didn’t love her.
Well. So? The reckless infatuation she’d felt hours before had been transmuted into something far more complex and…and cobwebby. She wasn’t sure if the emotion that lodged deep in her gut was love. It felt more like longing. Maybe it had always been longing. In the year since he’d first started coming to their library, he’d looked at her. Until recently, however, he’d always looked away.
It had been an unpleasant surprise when he’d put his proposition to her so baldly—and so badly. But it hadn’t taken her long to understand why he’d chosen to approach her in such a fundamentally uncouth manner. She’d realized with an unbearable certainty that he was deeply unhappy.
In generalities, her room was not so different from William’s. But the specifics…There were nineteen years of memories stored in this room. A blue knit shawl, a gift from her father, draped over one side of her chest of drawers. A lopsided painting of daisies, a present James had given her two years ago, hung next to the mirror. A pine box on her nightstand contained all of Lavinia’s jewelry—a gold chain and her late mother’s wedding ring. These were not mere things, of course; they were memories, physical embodiments of the nineteen years that Lavinia had lived. They were proof that people loved her. Her brother had similar items in his room—a stone he’d picked up years ago on the beach in Brighton, the pearl pendant he’d inherited from his mother, to one day give his wife, and the penknife Lavinia had scrimped to buy him.