Unclaimed (Turner #2)(67)

Mark reached over and pushed his brother’s shoulder. “I know precisely what you mean, Ash. Nobody could hold it against you.”

Mark shuffled through the first pages of summary to find the newspaper clippings that had been so carefully collated. The paper seemed too flimsy to contain anything of so much weight. For the first time in days, his brothers’ presence annoyed him. He’d managed to barely talk about the matter at all. To have someone else talk to his brothers about it…it seemed even more horrible than having all of London know.

Read it when I’m done, he wanted to say. But then he looked up into Ash’s eyes. Ash was looking at that report with something like regret in his eyes. Mark’s brothers had stood by him all these past days. They didn’t deserve to be pushed away now.

“There’s just the one copy,” he said instead. “I suppose…I suppose it’ll go fastest if I read it aloud, yes?”

“If…if you could.” Ash didn’t meet his eyes.

Mark sank into a seat on a settee. His brothers settled to either side of him as he flipped through the sheaf of papers. Jeffreys had included not only the original serializations, but the commentaries thereon. Mark didn’t care what anyone else said. He just wanted to know about…well, about Jessica.

There. This flimsy newsprint was the start of it.

“‘When I first met Sir Mark,’” Mark read, “‘he said he spoke with the tongues of angels.’” Mark had forgotten that. He didn’t glance to either side. He didn’t want to know what his brothers thought of that introduction.

“‘But it took me a week to understand that he spoke not as a saint, nor as an ascetic, but as a man. He was just a very, very good one.’”

If he’d had any doubts that Jessica had written this account, they vanished with those words. He could almost hear her speak them. What he hadn’t imagined was the swell of emotion he felt in response. Not anger. Not betrayal. Just a sensation of recognition—as if he’d jumped into deep, cold water. It felt as if she were telling him something he didn’t want to hear but had known all along.

He read on. “‘I must admit that at first, I wanted to hurt him…’”

It was disconcerting to see himself through someone else’s eyes. For the past days, he had thought she’d been laughing at him. She’d watched him fall in love with an illusion. He had supposed that she had somehow intuited what he most wanted in a woman and had presented it to him. He’d felt trapped and angry, furious that even knowing all that, he still desperately longed for her.

But as he read, her version of the story corresponded with the woman he’d believed she was. Even though she did not voice them, he could hear her doubts. Even though she did not speak of it, he could sense her falling under his spell as surely as he’d fallen under hers. He felt as if he was rediscovering her in those pages. She was still the woman he’d come to know. There was that familiar prickly integrity.

All the hurt he’d nursed this past week…it was beginning to feel a little childishly resentful. Because if she had told the truth, she’d been seduced. She’d been thrown out of her home. She’d lost her dearest friend, had no family to speak of. He glanced at his brothers to either side of him.

In truth, she’d had no wealth at all. Not of any kind.

He read on and on, unable to stop. He didn’t stop hurting; the pain just began to alter. She left off all accounts of their physical intimacy—the touches, the kisses, everything except the moments when he’d looked in her eyes and found himself unable to look away—but still he could sense their echo. She kept his secrets through every installment. The narrative went through to his ill-fated proposal.

And then Mark scanned the last words she’d written and set the page down before he read them aloud. He felt as if he’d had the breath knocked out of him.

He couldn’t say those words. Next to him, Smite leaned against him, offering unspoken comfort. Ash’s hand touched his shoulder.

If she could write these words, all alone, he could surely speak them aloud to the people who loved him best. Mark picked up the account again. “‘I left. What else could I do? I hated him for the same reason I loved him: because I could not break him, and because no matter how hard I tried, a woman like me could never have a man like him.’”

I hated him. I loved him. His heart raced. He could almost reach out and touch the loneliness in her words.

I loved him. After the spare, quiet words of her narration, those three words echoed. It might have been a lie. It might have been a dramatization.

It felt like the truth.

He’d held to the notion that she’d lied to him because he’d not wanted to contemplate an alternate possibility. He had imagined her laughing at him. He’d imagined her meeting with George Weston and mocking his tentative adoration. He’d believed all that, because the alternative was that he’d promised her she wasn’t alone, and he’d lied.

I loved him. He felt drunk and uncertain, as if he’d been assailed by a vertigo of the soul.

I loved him. But she’d lied to him. He grasped for the fading shreds of his righteous indignation, but it fled. She’d hurt him. Wasn’t that worth something?

I loved him, but a woman like me could never have a man like him.

He’d been blind. And stupid. And wrong. So focused on his own hurt that he’d not stopped to question. She’d practically begged him not to like her. She’d told him she was ruined and outcast. How was she surviving? If she’d stooped to seducing him, how badly had she needed the money? And what was she doing now?