Unveiled (Turner #1)(58)

“You left because your sister died, Ash.” Margaret looked at him, tapping her lips with one finger. “Would you really risk your brothers’ lives for the sake of their friendship?”

“No.” Damn it. “Never.”

She inclined her head, and he accepted that as a simple judgment. You made your choice. Now stop whining about it.

Too true. There had been enough of this indulgent claptrap. “Younger brothers make me mawkish,” he said by way of halfhearted apology. “They’re like little repositories of sentiment. One looks at them and remembers how helpless they once were.”

But Margaret was shaking her head. “I think you give yourself too little credit. Maybe you cannot speak to your brothers about books. But you can talk to them. I doubt they despise you.”

“But they’re educated.”

She turned her head to one side and looked at him. “I can talk to Mark, and I never went to Oxford.”

“But that’s different. You at least—”

She looked at him.

“You,” he said quietly, “can read.” And then he glanced away, so that he would not have to see his own shame reflected in her eyes.

She didn’t say anything. He’d wanted her to protest, to tell him it wasn’t true, that he could bridge that gap. But then, she wouldn’t lie to him. He was uneducated. And illiterate. And while it made not a bit of difference in the world of business, she must see how impassable a barrier it posed with his brothers. He squeezed her hand, where it was still trapped in his. He wasn’t letting her go—not even now, when she must see what he truly was.

She ran her thumb down his fingers. A tiny caress, but a caress nonetheless.

“When I met you,” she said quietly, “I’d lost the ability to glance in a looking glass and believe I was worth something.”

She repeated that touch a second time, and his eyes fluttered shut.

“And then you looked at me and you told me I mattered. You didn’t need theories or arguments to make me believe it. You just…looked. And you believed.”

They’d touched before—in affection, in lust, even in comfort. But her hand, stroking his, returning the strong grip he gave her—this was something different.

“There is…there is something I came here to tell you, Ash. There’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But right now, I want you to know one thing.”

Her hand whispered up behind him, finding the nape of his neck. She drew his head down to rest against hers.

“You matter,” she whispered to him. “You are important. And you are the single most magnificent man I have ever had the honor of meeting.”

His breath shivered out and he put his free arm around her, pulling her close. He could feel her chest rise and fall. Her breath mingled with his.

“I don’t ever want you to think otherwise. Not for an instant.”

There was a fierce note in her voice as she spoke. So it hadn’t been the premonition of mere lust he’d sensed, that day he’d first seen her. It had been a tiny taste of this—this intimacy that went so far beyond mere desire. It had wound itself between them, interlacing his own emotions. He could untangle their intertwined fingers, but he couldn’t unravel this.

He inhaled her breath, and he believed. He leaned down and tasted her lips. There was no prelude to the kiss—no light tentative touches, to be sure of his reception. It was a full, hot-blooded exchange the instant their mouths touched, carnal and wanting. Desperate. His body reacted to the feel of her in his arms—her soft roundedness, the slim curve of her waist. But it wasn’t just lust that made him pull her close.

He kissed her because she made him feel strong where he’d felt vulnerable and weak. Because she saw him—all of him—and didn’t wince and glance away. Because she knew what he was like when he was stripped of defenses, and she reached for him anyway.

This was what he wanted—her. Margaret. No. Them.

When he lifted his head to draw breath, she looked at him.

“Remember,” she said softly. “When—when you know everything. Remember. You are important. And…and I mean that.”

And then, before he could ask her what she meant, she pulled away from him and left.

MARGARET HAD SEEN Ash cheerfully powerful, as talkative as a jaybird. She’d seen him silently powerful while he was listening to those around her. She didn’t like seeing him vulnerable. It made her feel odd inside—hotly angry on his behalf, and enraged that someone had made him feel that way.

Rather hypocritical; in a short space of time, when the truth came out, she would be the one to introduce doubt into his life.

She shook her head and walked down the gallery towards her father’s room. The duke’s chambers lay past the end of the wide hall, down another long hallway. For months, the length of that hall had been enshrouded in silence as she traversed it. The servants tasked with airing the rooms that abutted his sickroom had walked on tiptoe, for fear the slightest noise would bring on the duke’s ire.

But as she walked down the hall today, she heard the deep rumble of masculine laughter. A door was ajar; as she passed by, a thin slit of daylight made a jaunty angle across the dark carpet.

Mrs. Benedict must have put Ash’s brothers in the upper parlor. Margaret stopped, and another ring of laughter traveled out to greet her. Mark’s chuckle she already knew. His brother, the middle Mr. Turner with the dreadful name—he must have been the one with the baritone.