“Revenge.” She tested the word, an ideal she’d always abhorred and yearned for at the same time. “And you consider yourself as what, some sort of Count of Monte Cristo?”
He gave a nonchalant shrug. “Not particularly, though the book is a favorite of mine.”
Farah frowned. “I thought you said you couldn’t read.”
That Dorian Blackwell could laugh at a time like this astounded her. But he did. The sound so devoid of true mirth, it caused goose pimples to rise on her skin and her nipples to tighten painfully. It was a dark sound, like the rest of him, and it washed over her with chilling totality. “I don’t see what’s so funny, it was only a question.”
“You must think me a fool,” he said.
“I think you’re a lot of things.”
He stepped closer. A moth’s wing wouldn’t have survived in the space between them, and still he never touched her, though she could feel the sensation of him on every inch of her skin.
“I’ll tell you this,” he began darkly, his eye swirling with all the intensity of last night’s storm. “There are immense differences between the Count of Monte Cristo and the Blackheart of Ben More. Edmond Dantes was given his treasure. He never had to stoop to the things I did in order to take it. In prison, he was only whipped on his anniversary. He was isolated in his own cell, which Alexandre Dumas never imagined would be preferable to what we had to endure. He was never stabbed, raped, publicly flogged, humiliated, beaten within an inch of his life, or taken ill and left for dead.”
With every word, Farah’s eyes widened and she again found herself cringing back, but he didn’t allow her to retreat, bending until his compelling face was mere inches from hers. “And that is just what the gaolers did to me.”
She’d been able to control her tears until that moment, but no longer. They spilled over her lashes and washed down her cheeks, causing her breath to tremble in her chest and rattle through her lips. To no longer be able to abide the comfort of human contact. How did he stand it? No wonder he was so very remote. How could warmth touch your heart when it wasn’t even allowed near your skin?
It could have been regret that softened his features, but it was still impossible for her to tell. “You’re thinking of Mackenzie,” he murmured.
Ashamed that she’d been thinking of Blackwell and not her Dougan, Farah nodded, not trusting herself to make a sound.
For the second time since they’d met, he raised his hand to her face, only to pull it back again. “Is there no pity in your heart for me?”
Farah turned from him then, dashing madly at her cheeks. There was, of course, but she didn’t dare show it to him. “Do you deserve my pity?” she asked, her voice thick with her tears.
“Probably not,” he answered honestly. “But the boy I once was might have.”
The next tear that fell was for him, though she’d die before letting him know it. “Dougan. He was—he was small for his age. So skinny and starving. It would have been easy for anyone to … to prey upon him.”
“It was,” Dorian confirmed. “But he learned quickly.”
The sobs she’d been fighting so valiantly began to burst into tiny explosions in her chest. They cut off her breath unless she let them free in a flood of hot tears and desperate gasps.
“His death was years ago.” Dorian’s voice softened, and she dare not turn to him. “A decade at least. The pain cannot be so fresh as all that.”
She agreed. She’d thought that with time, the stinging grief and the crushing guilt would fade, but it didn’t. It was as though Dougan Mackenzie refused to die, and because of it, she was doomed to relive the blessings and horrors of their time together again and again. “You don’t understand,” she wailed. “It was my fault. My fault all of this befell him. Didn’t he tell you why he was incarcerated in the first place?”
“He killed a priest.”
“For me!” She whirled around, shocked at how close he still stood. “He killed that priest for me. He was subjected to all the suffering and indignities you just described and more because he was only trying to protect me. You don’t understand how much I regret that every day of my life! I think about it all the time. I hate myself for it!”
“He never blamed you.” For the first time since she’d met him, Dorian seemed to be at a loss. Unsure, maybe, of how to handle a distraught woman. But Farah didn’t care, she was purging something so terrible in front of someone who may be an enemy, or might prove an ally.
“You can’t know that!” she insisted. “It was just a few kisses from the priest, a horrid touch or two. If I’d never gone to Dougan that night. If I’d only submitted to a small ignominy … perhaps it would have saved his life. Perhaps we’d still be … together.”
“Never.” Blackwell’s features hardened again, and he looked as though he wanted to shake her. “Dougan would rather have submitted to his thousand tortures than to have you submit to one. He wouldn’t have survived your suffering. He loves you that much.”
“Loved,” she sobbed. “Loved me, and because of it, he didn’t survive! His love for me got him killed.” A smothering nausea overtook her, images of the boy she loved suffering in the graphic ways Blackwell described assaulted her imagination until she wanted to crawl out of her own skin to escape them. She needed to escape this room, to flee the darkness and the man who was shrouded by it. “Forgive me,” she gasped. “I—I must … go.” Her vision blurred by tears, she lurched in the direction of the doors, relieved that he made no move to stop her. Light flared through the windows of the grand entry and blinded her as she was so accustomed to the shadows. She caught the scent of muffins or toast wafting from the hulking figure silently shocked by the sudden opening of the study door.