Ethan: Lord of Scandals

“Ethan?”

He glanced up sharply and was on his feet in an instant.

“Alice?” He came around the desk, gaze fixed on her as if he were afraid she’d disappear. A large, elegant hand reached out toward her, then dropped. “May I take your shawl?”

She said nothing, merely stood there, drinking in the dear, handsome, hopelessly unavailable sight of him. Gently, he eased her shawl from her shoulders, folded it neatly, and offered it back to her.

He’d done this once before, after one of their walks, a small intimate consideration so characteristic of him it had melted her heart. She burst into tears and stood there like a complete fool, clutching her shawl to her middle.

“Don’t cry.” Ethan stepped closer. “Alice, please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Alice?”

He did not want to touch her, Alice concluded miserably. He was such a gentleman, but he could not stand to touch her now, knowing what he did about her.

“Come sit.” He steered her by the shoulders to the sofa. “I’ll ring for tea, and you can tell me what has you so upset.”

“No tea,” Alice choked out. “I don’t want another blessed cup of blessed tea.”

Gingerly, Ethan sat beside her, taking one of her hands in his. “No tea then.” All it took was the touch of his hand on hers, and Alice lost any pretense of composure. She went from an inconvenient case of the sniffles to full out sobbing, clutching his hand to her with desperate strength.

“I miss you,” she managed. “Ethan, I’m sorry, but I miss you so. I ache with it. I don’t want to go.”

“Go?” Ethan edged closer. “You just got here.” Her nails were digging into his hand, gripping him for dear life. “No one will make you go anywhere.” He tucked a lock of her hair back around her ear, and it was all the invitation she needed to pitch herself hard against his chest.

“I just won’t go.” She clamped her arms around him. “It wasn’t my fault, what I saw. I tried to get help, Ethan. That’s how I got hurt, and it was too late, anyway, and he had a knife, and I was too scared to think.”

Slowly, Ethan’s arms closed around her. Alice inhaled his evergreen scent, and she felt a wave of calm envelop her. Whether he was merely being gentlemanly or not, she was in his arms again, and it felt right.

Absolutely right.

“Tell me,” Ethan murmured, his lips close to her ear. “Tell me what you want me to know, Alice.”

“I don’t want to tell you.” Alice gulped and accepted his handkerchief. “It’s awful.”

“It might be awful”—Ethan kissed her cheek—“but you are not awful. Tell me.”

Alice closed her eyes, tears leaking from the corners, while she tried to find words for something she hadn’t mentioned to anybody in twelve years.

“Hart Collins was engaged to my sister.” She tucked her face to Ethan’s neck and would have climbed inside him if she’d been able. “He put on the pretty for her. Then we began to hear rumors. I barely understood them, but Avis is a little older than me, and she was much more worldly, not buried in books. Hart was always getting sent down and into trouble. His papa was a baron, though, so the trouble was kept quiet. Still, Avis had second thoughts and decided to break the engagement. There was another fellow who caught her eye—a worthy fellow. The day before our papa was to call on the baron to explain Avis’s change of heart, Collins and his friends snatched her from her horse and made off with her. I was so foolish…”

“You were fourteen,” Ethan said gently. “Fourteen is still a child.”

“I should have gotten help right then,” Alice said miserably. “We were on our own property, and Papa never made us take a groom if we were riding on Blessings land. I trailed after them and rode right into a trap, with Hart’s cronies pulling me off my horse as easily as Hart had taken Avis. They’d been drinking, and when Hart dragged Avie, screaming, into a gamekeeper’s cottage, they cheered and tossed me in after.”

“Go on.”

“He cut her clothes right off her, laughing all the while,” Alice went on, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “When Avie screamed at me to get out, he noticed I was there and held the knife to her throat.”

“I’m listening.” Ethan’s hand went to her hair. “I’m right here.”

“She stopped struggling,” Alice said, voice catching. “She motioned me to leave, and I knew she was trading her virtue for mine. When he started rutting on her, I bolted. I jumped on the first horse at the hitching rail and took off at a gallop.”

“You did the right thing,” Ethan said swiftly, before she could say another word. “You tried to go for help and made your sister’s sacrifice worth something.”

“He hurt her,” Alice wailed softly. “He hurt her terribly, Ethan, and all I did was run, and even then, I couldn’t control the horse. I ended up coming off, getting dragged, and taking forever to get her help. When the neighbors found her, Collins was long gone, and Avie was a wreck. He assumed no other man would have her, and he’d get her and her dowry despite her change of heart.”

In the safety of Ethan’s arms, Alice realized something else: Collins had hurt Avis, abominably, terribly, unforgivably, but he’d hurt Alice too.

“Avis couldn’t contemplate marriage to anyone, and you could no longer walk,” Ethan concluded. “Alice, you did the best you could, and you have to forgive yourself for not being older, wiser, stronger, and meaner. You have to. You were just a girl, a child, just… Good God, you were just fourteen…”

Ethan fell silent, and Alice let him hold her in that silence for a small, fraught eternity. At that moment, she didn’t care why he was holding her; she only knew she needed his arms around her for as long as he would spare her an embrace. She needed that gentle caress of his hand in her hair, needed the scent and heat and strength of him.

And then his hand stilled, and the silence shifted.

“I was fourteen,” Ethan said, surprising her enough that she pulled back to see his face. His voice was calm, almost meditative. “Collins’s modus operandi was already established. He gathered his little mob, plied them with liquor, ambushed me, and had his pleasure violating me. Because Heathgate came upon the scene, we were able to do some damage to Collins and his thugs, but nothing permanent. He went on to rape others, including your sister, and for that, I will always, always be sorry.”

Alice wrapped her arms around him. “You were only a boy, and so far from home, and it was just wrong.”

“It was wrong.” Ethan repeated her words quietly. “What happened to you and your sister was wrong too, Alice. I let Collins’s brutality limit who I was and whom I allowed to love me for a long, long time. I am unwilling to give him that control any longer.”

She blinked up at him, but burrowed back into his embrace without saying a word. As her mind calmed and she absorbed the quality of his embrace—sure, uncompromising, and snug—she realized something else: Ethan wasn’t disappointed in her. His words assured her of it, but more fundamentally, so did the quality of his touch.

“Why did you stay away, Ethan? I waited for you to fetch me home, and you didn’t.” She’d been waiting years for somebody to fetch her home, in fact.

He brought her knuckles to his lips for a lingering kiss. “Why didn’t you come home? I waited for you to come to me, and you didn’t.”

Alice nodded, accepting the validity of his point.

“Heathgate asked me if I’d heard what Collins said,” she offered. “I did, but it hardly registered. You seem so… in charge of your own life, not knocking about from one obscure post to another just to hide from your past.”

“Sometimes, we need privacy to get our bearings. We each hid differently, but I was as determined to have my obscurity as you were.”

“Thank goodness for little boys and their games,” Alice said. “They consumed more chocolate in five minutes than I’ve had since leaving Sussex.”