Page 46 of The Rebellious Countess
He couldn’t stop the rumble of laughter building in his chest. “You are not fine. Your stomach sounds like it wants to eat you from the inside out.”
She let out a puff of air that pressed her breasts against his hand holding the reins. She was going to kill him. He was going to hell, and she would put him there.
“What I meant to say was, yes, I am hungry, but I’m fine. I’ve gone without food before.”
Her confession made him pause, the humor of their conversation gone.
“You’ve gone without food? When?”
The serene smile on her face became brittle. Silence coated her like a coffin sealing the dead, her body saying what her lips would not.
Two minutes ago, he would not have expected her to be stiff from her calves to the tilt of her head. As a man, he wanted to engulf her and protect her from whatever haunted her so. As her husband he wanted to make her forget, ease the tension from her body, but he wasn’t really her husband, was he?
He approached the topic with the caution of a man approaching a wounded animal—not a man comforting his bride. “A rough winter in the country?”
She shook her head once, her movement just as succinct and stilted as it had been when he yelled at her on board theMaribelle. She obviously wasn’t going to share, unless he did as well. He took a deep breath and exhaled before telling her about the worst night of his childhood.
“When I was fifteen, my best friend and I had too much to drink one night. I’d just lost my virginity to one of the barmaids, and I was bragging about my prowess with the ladies.” He felt his lips turn up with the memory.
Not that he remembered what the barmaid looked like or what her name had been, but he did recall how he had finished before she achieved herpetite mortand she had slapped his face for his error. It was a lesson well-learned. He’d given none of his partners since a reason to complain. It felt much better to leave a woman exhausted from multiples tiny deaths than to leave her hopping mad while he tried to pull on his britches and get out of her reach before she beat him to death. Still, like most young men, he’d felt indestructible.
Until soldiers appeared.
“We were sitting under this tree drinking and laughing, not paying attention to anything but our stories, and then suddenly we were surrounded by the fiercest soldiers I’d ever seen in my life. Before then we’d seen soldiers and sailors in Le Conquet. Even privateers were known to eat at The Happy Hag. We’d been in a few scrapes even, and had come out with little to no injury to our pride.
“But…”
She waited patiently for him to continue. If he wanted her to trust him, he must do the same with her.
“But those soldiers were the fiercest men we had ever encountered, and their leader was an imposing man. Tall and broad, he cut a fine figure in his uniform, yet he had the coldest eyes I had ever seen. Even now, I can’t say as I’ve ever faced a more malevolent man. I had no doubt he would cut down anyone who got in his way. He was much different than the man who taught me to fish.”
“Wait.” She leaned to the side, and he felt her eyes searching his face for the answer to her unspoken question. “The man who taught you to fish?” she asked. “You knew the soldier you speak of?”
He nodded in response, still unable to look her in the eyes, but her compassion touched him even if her hands did not.
“He wasmon grand-père.”
“Your grandfather?” The incredulity in her voice matched his at fifteen.
There was no way the man on that giant horse had laughed and ruffled his hair. “I’d only met my mother’s father a couple of times before that, but he wasn’t the type of man you could soon forget.”
“Why? What was so different about him?”
“For one, he’s a general in Napoleon’s army.”
She shifted in the saddle so she could look at him more comfortably, but if he was going to make this confession, he needed to talk without establishing eye contact. Even now, the events that occurred after that meeting were difficult to fathom.
“And he was a bastard through and through. If he were still alive, I would kill him.” The venom in his voice was unmistakable. He despised his grandfather with every fiber of his being.
Her next question was filled with caution. “I would like to know why…that is, if you would like to tell me. What did your grandfather do to cause such hatred?”
Telling the story, however, would only make it fester in his gut, but he’d gotten this far, he had to finish the story. If she didn’t open up with her own painful memory after this, she never would.
“My grandfather didn’t recognize me. I had grown two feet since the last time he’d laid eyes on me, and my body had filled out from the scraggly kid he’d tossed up in the air. I tried to tell him who I was, but he refused to listen. Instead, he backhanded me for my insubordination. We were boys of fifteen, playing at being men, and he felt we should be serving our country. He conscripted us on the spot.”
She swallowed audibly but remained silent.
“Claude, my friend, resisted at first and received a rifle butt to the head. He lost consciousness and I wondered if he was dead. I changed into the uniform I was given, and when Claude came to, I helped him dress as well. I have never felt so helpless in all of my life. We were to walk behind them, but I argued that Claude could not walk, said that if they had not been so stupid and hit him, he could have. For my insubordination I was once again beaten, only this timemon grand-pèrecouldn’t be bothered with the act of knocking me into submission. He left that to his captain-of-arms, who proceeded to beat the hell outof me. That’s when my father came out of nowhere. He beat the man and two others until three more joined the fight.”
