No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels #3)(97)

He met her blue eyes. Saw the understanding in them. “Where did you go?”

“The only place I could think to go.” He stopped, knowing that this was the part of the story that most mattered. Considering his words.

He did not have to hide from her. She was already there. “To Knight’s.”

“I gambled for days. Straight. No sleep. I went from the tables on the floor of the hell to the beds above—tried to lose myself in gaming and women.” He paused, hating the story. The boy he’d been. “I swore not to look back.”

“Orpheus,” she said.

One side of his mouth kicked up. “You’re too smart for your own good.”

She smiled. “It helps when I’m with you.”

The words reminded him of how much he liked this woman. Of how much he shouldn’t. “Orpheus in reverse. From Earth into Hell. Full of pain and sin and every kind of vice. I should not be alive now to tell the tale.”

“But you are.”

He nodded. “I am alive, and Baine isn’t; I am well, and Lavinia suffers.”

“It’s not your fault.” She came into his arms again, wrapping her arms about him and repeating the words to his chest. “It’s not your fault.”

He wanted to believe her so badly. But it wasn’t true.

“But it is.” He held her to him and confessed his sins to her beautiful cornsilk hair. “I killed my brother. That is the cross I bear.”

She heard it . . . stilled. Looked up at him. And his brilliant Pippa understood. “The cross you bear.” His lips twisted in a wry smile. “That’s why you took the name. Cross.”

“To remember whence I came. To recall sins past.”

“I hate it.”

He released her. “You shan’t be around it much longer, love.”

Her beautiful blue eyes grew wide and sad at the words, and it was he who hated . . . hated this night and their situation and himself. He swore, the word harsh in the candlelight. “I couldn’t save them,” he confessed before vowing. “But, goddammit . . . I can save you.”

She jerked back. “Save me?”

“Knight knows who you are. He will ruin you if I don’t stop him.”

“Stop him how?” He met her gaze, and she knew. He could hear it in her voice. “Stop him how?”

“I marry his daughter, he keeps your secrets.”

She stiffened in his arms, brows snapping together. “I don’t care a fig if he tells the world my secrets.”

She would care, of course. She would care when Knight planted the seed of their time together in the ear of the aristocracy. In Castleton’s ear. She would care when it ruined her marriage and her future and her sisters’ happiness. She would care when her parents could no longer look her in the eye. “You should care. You have a life to live. You have a family to think of. You have an earl to marry. I won’t have your ruination on my head. I won’t have it alongside all the rest.”

She pulled herself up to her full height, caring not a bit that she was half-dressed and could likely not see very well. It didn’t matter, of course. She was a queen. “I am not in need of saving. I am perfectly well without it. For a scandalous, wicked man, you are all too willing to assume the mantle of responsibility.”

“You are my responsibility.” Did she not see that? “You became my responsibility the moment you entered my office.”

She’d been his from the start.

Her gaze narrowed. “I was not looking for a keeper.”

Irritation flared. He took her shoulders in hand and made his promise. “Well, you haven’t a choice. I have spent years atoning for my sins, desperate to keep from wreaking more destruction than I already have. I will not have you near it. I will not have you touched by it.” The words came on a flood of desperation . . . panic that he could not deny. “Dammit, Pippa, I have to do this. Don’t you see?”

“I don’t.” There was panic in her voice as well, in the way her fingers gripped his arms tight. “What of me? What of my responsibility? You think I will not feel the heavy weight of your marrying a woman you don’t know out of some false sense of honor?”

“There is nothing false about this,” he said. “This is what I can give you.” He reached for her, pulled her close. Wished it was forever. “Don’t you see, love? Saving you . . . it’s my purpose. I have tried so hard . . .” He trailed off.

“To what?” When he did not immediately answer, she added, “Jasper?”

Perhaps it was his name on her lips that made him tell the truth . . . perhaps it was the soft question—and something he was too afraid to name—in her blue eyes . . . perhaps it was simply her presence.

But he told her. “To atone. If not for me . . . Baine would be alive, and Lavinia would be well.”

“Lavinia has chosen her life,” Pippa argued. “She’s a husband and children . . .”

“A husband in debt to Knight. Children who must grow in the shadow of their useless father. A marriage born of my own father’s fear that he’d never rid himself of his crippled daughter.”

She shook her head. “That’s not your sin.”

“Of course it is!” he burst out, spinning away from her. “It’s all mine. I’ve spent the last six years trying to rewrite it, but that is my past. It’s my legacy. I am the contact for the girls at the Angel . . . I choose to be. I try to keep them safe. The second they want out . . . the moment they choose another life for themselves, I help them. They come to me; I get them out. I’ve helped dozens of them . . . found places for them, work that can be done on their feet instead of their back. Country estates where they can be safe . . . every one of them a placeholder for her.”