Page 87 of A Devilish Element
She gave a disbelieving tut, then shushed him with the raising of her hand. He supposed this was hardly the moment for a declaration, while standing vigil at his former lover’s side. At best it would make him seem guilty… Not to mention heartless, fickle, and insincere. “I didn’t set out to deceive you. It was already over between us—Linfield and I—leastways on my part.”
“Was it, Jem? Was it truly? So, I didn’t watch him lick your spendings from his fingers, and you weren’t set for his bedchamber this evening… or rather his wife’s?”
He heartily wished he could answer in the negative. “It’s complicated.” Although this hardly seemed the moment to get into the wherewithal of how he’d been cajoled into compliance. “You have to understand what he was like, Eliza. Possessive, spiteful… entitled. Lord, so damned entitled. There was never a damn thing he wanted he didn’t get.”
“Yet, you loved him.”
Is that what she believed?
Jem vigorously shook his head. “Love? Lord, no. We made merry with one another for a time, but I was never in love with him. It was just… physical between us. Lust, I suppose. Foolishness. It ought never to have lasted more than a few…” Shags, was the word he refrained from saying aloud. “But he had his ways. He could be very charming, very persuasive.” His shoulders slumped, feeling the sudden weight of all the promises of funding he’d put faith in, but had yet to materialise. “I wanted no part of the business with his wife. If you believe nothing else, please believe that. I was eager to be free of him.”
“Free?” she echoed.
“Aye.” The realisation how his words might be understood dawned. “But not like… you can’t think,” —he glanced at the body— “that I did this or even desired it. I didn’t want him dead. I just no longer wanted the level of intimacy between us that formerly existed. This…This is…”
He hadn’t the words to express the magnitude of his horror. It roiled within his belly and bile wormed its way up his throat and filled his mouth with a sickly acidic tang.
“’Tis a nightmare,” she concluded for him. Her hand curled around his forearm, bringing a sensation of warmth even through the layers of his clothing. The knots in his innards loosened. They stayed posed thus for a long while, until Eliza broke the contact, and moved to the opposite side of the table on which Linfield was laid out.
“You are too shocked by this for me to believe you did away with him, Jem, but you are not the man I supposed you to be, so perhaps my judgement is suspect.” He could see the shivers of anxiety racing through her limbs now, making her quake. She met his gaze for the briefest of moments, digging her teeth into her plump lower lip. “I ought to know better than to put my faith in a man. You’d think I’d have learned by now. Men can only be relied on to do the wrong thing. Always. That is always the outcome. My father and brother have both proved that a thousand times over. Why the devil I imagined you’d be different, I don’t know. While you may not be a murderer, Jem Whistler, I can’t see there’s any future for us. I thought I could trust you, but you’ve been lying and misleading me from the start. I thought there was… Well, I believed…” Her limbs trembled with what he interpreted as barely contained rage. “It’s of no matter. Our arrangement is done. Pray forget it ever occurred.”
Forget that she had ever been in his arms, that he had tasted her, loved her. He could not. All he wanted was to be able to worship her, be with her. He had only ever hidden the truth from her so as not to drive her away, and he could not even say now that had been the wrong thing to do, given that it was his poxy relationship with Linfield that was stealing her from him now.
He ought to have admitted the truth of how he’d felt instead of agreeing to a grand passion and then concealing how vehemently he loved her. Had a man ever been so folious?
If he’d pursued her following their first meeting, instead of crawling away like a snivelling worm, then he’d never have fallen under Linfield’s spell, and at least he’d have given her some agency over the matter. Instead, he’d shuttered his heart away in a box, and salved his wounds with the sort of sins that got men hanged.
“Why could you not have been honest with me, Jem?” she demanded, throwing up her hands in frustration. “If you’d admitted your attachment to Linfield, and your preferences—”
“My preferences!” He laughed, voice creaking with the strain. “Eliza, if I have any preferences, they are for you. I love you. What existed between Linfield and me was… It was… about physical pleasure, not genuine affection, and I have found it difficult enough to explain how I feel about you as it is, so that other conversation would have been nigh on impossible.”
Addressing it now was every bit as traumatic as he’d ever envisaged it, but he refused to let her concoct an idyllic picture of boundless love between him and Linfield. There had never been anything even remotely romantic about it.
“You could have tried.”
“Could I? And what should I have said? That it so happens that sometimes I whore myself to other men. That they ask me to fuck them, and I oblige, or horror upon horror, they fuck me. And, by the way, my current beau is none other than your dear friend’s husband. But don’t worry about it, I don’t much care for him, and eventually he’ll tire of me. It’s you I want, really. Would that have made anything better? Of course, it would not. You would just have despised and been revolted by me sooner.”
Tears burned his eyes by the culmination of his speech, so he snapped them closed and bowed his head. Twin rivulets escaped, nonetheless. He wiped them away hastily.
“It would have been honest.”
“Shit!” he swore, nerves so wrought he couldn’t help but give in to further vulgarities.
Then, “I’m not revolted by you, Jem.”
That would be why her hands were curled into tight fists, and her lips into a grimace.
“I’m revolted by me,” he spat, and marched himself off to the darkest corner of the room.
“What I am is hurt, and perplexed as to why you never trusted me, nor gave any hint that you felt—”
Given no hint! Good God, he had made love to her, did she imagine his passion for her faked?
Irritably, he stared at the wisps of tattered cobwebs, and the corpses of spiders shrivelled down to husks caught among those threads. Damp had lifted the paint off the walls in patches, leaving behind concentric rings of feathery flakes. Jem clawed at the front of his hair; he’d do anything to be outside of his own skin at present.
“Eliza, if you want the truth from me, then I will tell you it.” Why conceal it anymore. He’d already ruined even the infinitesimal chance he’d had with her. “I’ve loved you from the moment we were made acquainted at Stag’s Fell, but I knew there was no chance that I could win you. I thought for sure that Joshua Rushdale would, and what am I compared to the brother-in-law of a Marquis?”
“He’s just a man the same as any other.”
