Page 49 of The Viscount in her Bedroom
“He hid them from you?”
“Oh yes. Several business investments had gone bad, and he was finally out of money.”
Simon inhaled sharply. “You mean he left his family alone to deal with his mistakes?”
“Surely you can see that he was not in his right mind.”
He could see that the man had been a coward, but she didn’t need to hear that.
“My mother was…not herself. She didn’t want their old friends and business acquaintances to know. And she wanted him buried in the church graveyard.”
“So you took the burden of hiding a suicide.” He imagined three young women seeing their father’s body, hearing their mother’s hysteria. They’d become the adults in their family.
“It wasn’t that difficult,” she said distantly. “He’d hanged himself. We didn’t let anyone see the body.”
“My God.” No one had comforted her, and he couldn’t now, though he wanted to take her into his arms.
She took a deep breath. “So forgive me for jumping to conclusions about your mental state.”
“I do. It’s understandable.”
In the dark, in their companionable silence, he felt a closeness to her that had been rare with anyone these many months. It made him sad and uneasy that he’d somehow lost the ability. Had he changed so much? He didn’t want to think so.
“Your situation makes my parents seem quite…normal,” he said.
“You didn’t think so before?”
“They were not exactly selfless. My mother is a very beautiful woman, and I think she was disappointed that Georgie doesn’t look like her. That doesn’t say much for my mother, does it.”
Bitterness crept into his voice, but Louisa said nothing.
“And Leo took up so much of their time—constantly having to be told to study, and rescued from his various schemes.”
“Your brother doesn’t sound much like you.”
“Oh, he’s a charming scoundrel, believe me. He’s very good at making one want to help him. I’ve probably done too much for him myself. For my parents, Georgie was too easy to raise—a hard worker and very dutiful. When my mother neglected to take her under her wing, to teach her of the feminine arts involved in theton, Georgie seemed glad to be free of it all. Her inferior governess tried to seduce me more than teach Georgie.”
“And your mother didn’t do something about her?” Louisa asked in outrage.
“Well I didn’t exactly share that last part,” he said wryly. “And as I said before, my mother—”
“Was more concerned about herself. It’s amazing you—and Georgie, of course—ended up such decent people.”
“You think I’m decent?” he said. “You wouldn’t think that of me if you knew what I was thinking when alone in the dark with you.”
ChapterEleven
Louisa found herself shivering, although she was terribly warm. She was seated close to him, their knees almost touching. Her eyes were constantly drawn to the loose buttons undone at his neck, leaving his skin bare. The moonlight sculpted him, shadowed him, made him remote and yet so touchable. Every time she was with him, her own skin seemed alive with sensation. She reminded herself that he was lonely, and a romance was not the way to help him. He needed a friend more than a lover, and she wanted to be that for him—though a dark part of her longed to be the other.
“You should go, Simon,” she whispered, although she made no move to see him to the door.
She watched his face. Shadows hid his eyes, but she basked in the way he always focused on her. She’d felt so drawn to him that she’d told him about her father, broken vows she’d sworn to her family. What more would she do in the name of this…awareness between them?
And how could she know if sympathy were driving her emotions, and if he were just reacting to that? She sensed that his selfish mother had worked her cruelty on him as well. How would a woman like that tolerate a blind son?
He rose to his feet, and when she did, too, she took his arm. She felt him stiffen, saw the way his head swung to look down at her.
“When you touch me,” he said in a low, tense voice, “it’s hard to remember that you’re only helping a blind man to the door.”
