Ranelaw emptied his tankard and wondered how the hell to get rid of Benton. “The one what? God? King? Pope? The fucking Archbishop of Canterbury?”
Benton didn’t react to the angry sarcasm. “The one woman. The girl who owns your heart forever. True love. Soul mates. You know, the one.”
“No,” Ranelaw said shortly.
He was trapped in hell. Was he hungry enough to make staying worthwhile?
“I do, damn it all.” Benton drained his glass in a single swallow and filled it again with more finesse.
“I take it congratulations are due.” Although if the bugger contemplated marriage, he didn’t seem particularly jolly at the prospect.
“Bloody hell.” Benton’s hand clenched around the glass before he flung it into the grate. The crash made heads turn with unwelcome curiosity.
Ranelaw gritted his teeth. Much more of this and he’d tell the numbskull to sod off. It was the kind of flamboyant gesture that had made Ranelaw despise Johnny Benton when they were younger. For all that, he couldn’t mistake that under the flashy dramatics, the man was genuinely distraught.
“Wouldn’t she have you?” Benton’s seething despair demanded some response, even from a heartless bastard like Ranelaw.
Benton focused burning eyes upon him. “She’s dead.”
Good God.
Ranelaw wasn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t been a chum of Benton’s. But it seemed cruel to abandon the man to his sorrow. “I’m sorry,” Ranelaw said, knowing his words were inadequate.
Benton’s eyes swam with tears, which damned well embarrassed Ranelaw even if they didn’t embarrass him. “She’s the one I’ll never forget. She’s written her name in my heart. Has that ever happened to you?”
“Hell, no,” Ranelaw said with sincere horror, while that inconvenient voice reminded him of his astonishingly profound emotions when he’d thrust inside Antonia. He gave the taunting voice the cut direct.
“Then I feel sorry for you.” Benton filled his glass again but didn’t lift it.
Ranelaw bit back a heated retort. How dare a broken-down wreck like Benton pity the magnificent marquess? He took a vicious swipe at his sirloin and heartily wished he’d ridden on to London.
Benton addressed his glass. “Through ten years of exile, I couldn’t forget her. I did wrong by her and now I’m back to remedy my evil. I prayed she was still free, that she’d marry me, in spite of what I’d done.”
Ranelaw refrained from asking what Benton had done. Frankly he didn’t much care. The story sounded banal in the extreme. All this lachrymose emotion put him off his dinner. With a grunt, he shoved his half-full plate away.
The fribble still maundered on. “I rode up to that gloomy pile in Northumberland and asked for her. Her brother saw me. More than I deserved. Her father would have chased me off with a shotgun. When I stated my honorable intentions, he informed me the lady died shortly after our last meeting.”
He looked up with such misery, Ranelaw, who grew increasingly impatient, couldn’t bring himself to up and leave. Much as he wanted to. He struggled to think of something to stem the man’s torrent of confidences, but weariness and turmoil over his own chaotic love life kept him mute.
Benton went on, his voice raw with desperation. “How can my heart’s darling be dead a decade without me knowing? How can I make peace with her after wronging her so egregiously?”
Ranelaw winced at the word egregiously, even when slurred with drink. Couldn’t the scoundrel talk like a real person? “Buck up, old man.”
Benton’s mouth quivered and he stared down at the table. Ranelaw had no doubt the fellow fought more tears.
“You don’t understand. Only someone who has loved as I have would understand.”
“I’m sure.”
Benton was too upset to notice his audience’s lack of enthusiastic support. “Gresham, if you could have seen her. She was seventeen when we met and there’s never been a woman to match her. Tall, hair a perfect silver blond, eyes the blue of the sky at dawn, skin like a white rose, lips like soft pink petals, a form Venus herself would envy. A low, sweet voice like the music of a cello. Clever and wise and witty. A brave, proud spirit. Rode a horse like an Amazon. And she loved me, she risked everything for me, for all that I deceived her.”
It couldn’t be . . .
Shock rocketed through Ranelaw, settled like a lead weight in his empty belly. This description sounded nauseatingly familiar.
He must be mistaken. He was obsessed with Antonia Smith. Benton couldn’t be talking about her. That was too much of a coincidence.
Anyway, the chit Benton sniveled over was dead. Had been dead ten years.