Summer Is for Lovers (22 page)

Chapter 26

D
AVID STARED DOWN
at the woman frozen in his arms, his chest thundering with turbulent emotions. Caroline’s eyes were wide with hurt and her feet had stopped moving.

At this moment, he would have given anything for a whispered “one,” much less the obligatory “two, three.”

Escape from the dance floor and the summer crowd’s prying eyes emerged as the most pressing immediate concern. Anyone watching them would know they were arguing. And he would be very, very surprised if everyone in the room wasn’t watching them, given how the sparks practically rose in the air above them.

David pulled her from the dance floor even as the couples went on twirling around them, an inexcusable display of manners that was sure to cause more gossip than any mere argument would. He jerked her behind the nearest refuge, a potted palm with fronds the size of a park bench.

And then he faced his reckoning.

“I should not have called you a burden,” he admitted, though what he should have called her was still a point of debate. Obsession seemed a bit harsh of a term, but there was a glint of that hidden beneath his churning thoughts. “I care for you. I would not have you thinking I do not value our friendship.”

Caroline’s eyes shone almost green under the chandeliers. “This is more than simple friendship, and you do us both a disservice to gloss it over in such terms. Do you remember that day when we first met?”

“Aye,” David acknowledged. And he needed to remember it better, if he was to have the courage to carry this through. Every memory, every regret, bade him to let her go and just keep going. But she deserved more than the rose-tinted history he had given her two nights ago.

She deserved the entire truth.

“I never forgot you,” she said. “Not once, in those eleven long years. I thought of you nearly every day. Wondered who you were, where you were from.
You
are the man I think of when I close my eyes at night. So do not stand before me and tell me I still need to find my perfect match!”

Her confession burrowed beneath David’s skin, a pulsing knot demanding excision. “You are describing a girlhood infatuation,” he said, though the sentiment sounded meager to his own ears. “Life is still an open possibility for you. You know not what you say.”

“I am not a child,” she snapped. “Is that how you see me? As some silly chit, pouring out her secret yearnings?”

“No.” David expelled a frustrated breath. That too had not been fair of him. There was nothing childlike in the stormy set of her jaw, or the punishing way her hand tightened in his. She deserved the truth, and he would not lie about this.

He had ceased to think of her as a little girl the moment he saw her again on the beach, after so long an absence from Brighton. But thinking of her as a woman, and giving her the hope that he might think of her as
his
woman, were two different things.

His instincts told him to gather her up in his arms. But for her own good, he needed to shove her off this cliff instead.

“I am not the man you imagine me to be.” He shook his head. “You are infatuated with a falsehood.”

“This is not an infatuation.” Her face flushed red. “I know what I want, and whom I want. I want
you
.”

“I explained why I could not—”

“You explained about your past. About Elizabeth, and the tragedy of her death. That you are leaving soon, to return to Scotland. I understand all of that, David, truly I do. But none of that explains why you refuse to consider a future with someone.”

“I cannot, Caroline. There are things you do not know.”

“I know that you are a man worth loving. I can help you, if you would but let me. You need to stop living in the past, tied up by a love that no longer makes sense.”

Escape beckoned but a few feet away. It would be an easy matter to slip out of the room and not look back. But the challenge in Caroline’s eyes kept his boots anchored in place. She looked stern and powerful and, yes, even knowing.

But she did not know. Not the whole of it.

“You know nothing about me, or what I have done. You cannot want me,” he told her. “Not because of what you think happened eleven years ago, but because of what actually did.”

She blinked, confusion crowding in. “How can you say that? That day was one of the most important in all my life. I was a child on the brink of womanhood, not knowing who I was. My father had just died, but because of you, I found hope. Because of you and your encouragement, I continued to swim.”

Christ.
She didn’t understand. This wasn’t about swimming. How old was she now, twenty-two? Twenty-three? Older than he had been at the time.

But far more innocent.

He hesitated, knowing there was no easy way to say it, knowing there was no going back once he had. But for the first time in eleven years, he wanted to give voice to his terrible past, to admit his mistakes.

Because if he didn’t, Caroline would never understand why he was the most inappropriate man in all of Britain to set her sights on.

David felt as close to shattering as he had that day, when the posted letter had arrived at Preston Barracks bearing the news of Elizabeth’s death. “That day, eleven years ago, I had just received a letter informing me that Elizabeth had died.” His voice might have belonged to a different man, so gruff and coarse did the words sound. “
That
is why I was in the water.”

He could see her start to reshape the events of that day in her mind then, twist it from the fantasy she had been nurturing into the far more adult understanding it required. “I . . . I thought you had been drinking.”

“I
had
been drinking. That is the usual way of things when you cannot face the world through sober eyes. You see, I didn’t just lose Elizabeth that day. She was carrying my child when she died.”

“Oh my God.” Caroline went still, her face drained of the color that had just been flying high only moments before.

David stared down, seeing Caroline again as she had been that day. A twelve-year-old innocent chastising him for circumstances she did not have the power to understand. Even now, she
still
didn’t appear to fully comprehend what he was saying.

Then again, how could she? He wasn’t sure
he
understood. Eleven years had passed since he had turned himself over to these memories, and he found himself struggling to wrap his mind around the enigma that had been Elizabeth Ramsey. He could still taste the swirl of emotions that had come with his first taste of love.

God, he had been such an idiot.

“Her father was the town rector. Hell, brimstone, damnation. But that did not stop my desperation to have her.” David hovered on the edge of his confession, trying to remember. His very soul objected to dredging up the messy business, but he owed Caroline a more complete explanation than he had previously provided at the pavilion, given that she seemed to have imprudently decided his was a soul worth redeeming.

“I was brash, bound for the army. It took scarcely a kiss to coax Elizabeth to send me off in style. I offered for her, after. Not that a mere offer could make it right. But it was a conversation we should have had before we tumbled into bed, because Elizabeth had no intention of becoming a military wife.”

Caroline studied him, her eyes needle-sharp. “It sounds as though it was her choice, if she declined your offer. Why do you blame yourself?”

“Because I failed her.” He recalled the pain Elizabeth’s rejection had wrought, as acute as the slash of a saber, but it had been tinged with the slightest bit of relief too. That, even more than her senseless death, was what had tormented him all these years. There had been no reckoning for him to face, no choice to make. He had not been required to abandon his dream of joining the army, even though in his heart he had known it was the right thing to do.

Elizabeth had made the decision for him. He had been too selfish to insist.

And he had lived with that guilt now for eleven long years.

He drew in a deep breath. “I killed her.”

That, finally, brought a bloodless gasp from her lips. “Surely you jest.”

David shook his head. “This is not a joke, Caroline. I left Elizabeth in Moraig when I bought my commission, even though I knew the possible outcome of the choices we had made. I killed her through my neglect, as surely as if I had strangled her with my own hands. I told her to write to me if she found herself in difficulty, and I would come. But I did not understand that letters from home were held by the commanding officers until our initial six weeks of training was completed. I received Elizabeth’s letter telling me she was with child, and the letter from my mother informing me she had taken her own life, on the same day.”

Beyond her shoulder, David could see that Branson had spied them. The man was even now threading his way toward them around the edge of the ballroom. David plowed on, knowing he had but seconds to finish this. “I am no saint, no gentleman, lass. You may think you see honor in me, but I assure you there is far more to fear than to admire. I came very close to killing myself that day, but I did not even possess enough decency to manage
that
. Living with the knowledge of what I had done, of what I had lost, proved a more fitting penance in the end.”

Branson rounded the potted palm, a hopeful smile strung on his face. David extracted his hand from Caroline’s. He hadn’t even realized she had still been gripping it. “So now you know why I cannot love you. Even if I tried, I would destroy what is beautiful in you, the same way I destroyed it in Elizabeth.
That
is why I am not the right man for you.”

He pushed her toward Branson. Toward a future she might not believe she wanted, but which was undoubtedly better than the one she sought with him.

“That is why I am not the right man for anyone,” he added.

And then he walked away.

D
EAR
G
OD, SHE
was in love with him. Completely, irrevocably, stupidly in love.

And he was in love with a ghost.

Caroline watched him leave through the open doors of the ballroom, and all the air seemed to be sucked from the room with him. Her pulse was still bounding in her throat. She had laid her heart bare, not caring that he was a man of meager means, or that in choosing him she might be letting her family down. She could think of nothing beyond the fact that the man she had loved for eleven long years had just held her in his arms on the dance floor, and made her tremble with a want so sharp it hurt to draw breath.

And then that same man had also just confessed a past so sordid, any sane woman would bolt for safety.

“Is everything all right?” Mr. Branson peered up at her, his brown eyes round with concern.

Caroline tried to smile, though she feared the gesture came out more as a grimace. “I am fine,” she assured him. “Just a minor disagreement with Mr. Cameron.”

“It appeared to be more than a minor disagreement.” Branson’s jaw worked sideways, as if testing the veracity of an idea. “Shall I speak with him? Call him out?”

Caroline smothered a hysterical laugh. “That will not be necessary, thank you.”

She felt no compunction to expand on the nature of the argument. Indeed, she felt protective of David and his terrible secret. How must he be feeling? God knew she felt raw from the encounter. Even Mr. Branson’s confused gaze burned like an open flame. David claimed he had killed the woman he loved.

How did one respond to a confession like that, particularly when she had just ignorantly petitioned to be the
next
woman he might love?

He hadn’t been merely drunk and foolish. He had tried to kill himself, that day in the surf. She could not regret saving him. Never that. But in those moments before he had turned away from her, in the seconds it took to explain why he could never love her, she had glimpsed the stunted and scarred nature of his soul.

She loved him desperately—she could see that now, how the seeds of infatuation had begun to change into something far more adult, almost from the point of seeing him again. She understood how rash mistakes could happen, particularly in areas of the heart. Her body’s own wild response to David’s touch told her there were primitive undercurrents to her soul that might be nigh on impossible to control.

And so she did not blame him, not to the degree he blamed himself. He could claim he lacked all honor, but the fact he had spent eleven years in purgatory showed her the truth. But if he would never permit himself to move beyond the pain of his past, Caroline couldn’t turn that into a future.

In that moment, she hated Elizabeth Ramsey. The girl had rejected David’s offer of marriage and then taken her own life. How peculiar to feel such a knife’s point of jealousy for someone eleven years dead, a woman who had fallen to such tragedy. But there was no doubting the emotion wrapping its green, strangling tendrils around Caroline’s throat. Elizabeth Ramsey might have died young, but she had taken David’s very soul with her to the grave.

“Would you care to dance, then?” Branson asked, treading on her thoughts.

There was no denying she needed a distraction of some sort. And yet tonight, the thought of spinning in Mr. Branson’s arms felt about as appealing as splinters in her stockings. She didn’t want to dance. She wanted to follow David. She wanted to dissect the conversation, to remember how it had felt to dance in his arms when she had still believed he might want her.

But it was clear, in the manner in which he had removed himself and in the way he had pushed her toward Mr. Branson, that David wanted nothing of the sort.

No, dancing was not to be recommended, not with her feet so numb and her stomach tied up in knots. “I believe I might prefer a glass of punch,” she told Mr. Branson, chasing her words with what she hoped was an encouraging smile.

The young man nodded eagerly and offered her his arm. “Shall we, then?”

She placed her fingers lightly against the smart woolen fabric of his evening coat and let him pull her toward the nearby room where the refreshments were being served. It felt wrong to be here, a suitor on her arm. Somewhere in the night, David was mourning the love of his life.