Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (Scandalous Seasons #4)(42)

How very empty, how very lonely her life had been these years. She’d not fully realized it until she’d been surrounded by his lively sisters’ chattering and giggling. And him. She’d not realized it until him.

Jonathan rested his hands upon her shoulders, the firm pressure, solid and reassuring in its warmth. “You miss it then,” he whispered close to her ear.

A giggle escaped her as his breath fanned the sensitive place where her neck and ear met. “I do.” Not nearly as much as she had before him and his family. Now, the prospect of leaving him, and going off to live her solitary life in Rosecliff Cottage filled her with the most unexpected pangs of sadness. She turned in his arms and met his heated gaze.

“Do you think you’d be happy in your cottage, alone Juliet?” he pressed, relentlessly as though he’d detected the weakness in her thoughts.

“That is what I want,” she whispered, gesturing toward the window. “You offered to make me your mistress, but I don’t require vast wealth. Or jewels. Or fine gowns. But, Rosecliff Cottage,” she cleared her throat as the remembered importance of her girlhood home came back to her with a swift familiarity. “It is a refuge so beautiful and pure. There is none of the London fog and noise. It is a place so peaceful and…safe.” She quietly finished, lost in thought. Yes, that was what the feeling she had here. Feelings which she’d not known since Papa’s death. A sense of safety. A sense of belonging. The safety provided by Jonathan, however, would one day be nothing more than a far distant memory, and she’d be left to wonder if it had ever been real or merely an illusion.

Jonathan turned her hand over, and proceeded to study those intersecting lines over her palm. “Do you know what I believe, Juliet?”

She swallowed. “What is that?”

He raised her hand to his nose and inhaled the scent of her skin as though he sought to commit her to the memory that would live only in his mind. “You do not want to live alone in your perfect cottage. You desire a man who will love you as you deserve to be loved.” Oh God. “A man who will lay you down on the warmest summer day and make sweet love to you in the gardens of your Rosecliff Cottage with twinkling stars overhead as your only voyeurs.” Her breath quickened. Jonathan moved one hand to her waist; he trailed his fingers down her hip. “And do you know, Juliet, I abhor that nameless man in your gardens. I detest him with every fiber of my being.”

Because the man he spoke of in her gardens, could never be him—and he knew it. Just as she knew it.

Sadness pulled at her heart, and she drew in a shuddery breath. Desperate to move away from this suddenly too-real, too-painful exchange, Juliet said, “Can you see the future then, my lord?”

That devilish grin she’d come to expect of him, turned his lips up at the corner, and the heavy pall of reality lifted. “I can in fact, my lady.” He touched his finger to her palm, and she jumped.

A breathless giggle escaped her and she squeezed her hand shut around his. “That tickles.”’

He gave her a stern frown, which was belied by the teasing tenor of his words. “Be still. Now, relax your hand,” he whispered, gently guiding her fingers open like one coaxing a fresh rose to bloom. Her breath caught at the intimacy of his sinfully decadent touch. Jonathan picked his gaze up a moment, and her heart pounded hard at the unveiled passion radiating from within his eyes. She wet her lips, and his eyes fell to her mouth, following the distracted movement of her tongue. When he again looked at her, his eyes had clouded with some nameless emotion. “Would you have me stop?”

Somehow she suspected they spoke now of something more than the mere game of his telling her future. And she wanted him. All of him. She wanted Jonathan’s roguish smile and teasing words. She wanted her name on his lips and his heart in her hands. She suspected the thought of that should terrify her…and yet, strangely, it did not. Juliet tilted her chin up. “No. I do not want you to stop.”

Their gazes locked. “Then allow me to tell your future, sweet Juliet.”

“Very well, Jonathan. What do the lines foretell?”

His grin deepened, and he looked down. She studied the thick, lush crop of loose black curls bent over her head. Her fingers fairly itched with a desire to run a path through the tousled silken waves. He touched his finger to a line on her palm. “I see a home.”

Juliet pointed her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, I gather that is Rosecliff Cottage you see.”

He ignored her blatant attempt at sarcasm. Instead, he began to once again stroke the inner portion of her wrist in a way that sent tingles to her stomach, all the way down to her toes, and throughout her entire body. “And a husband,” he said, picking his gaze up a moment.

Her throat worked reflexively. As reality reared its ugly head in her world of make-believe. She would not have a husband. There would be no honorable gentleman to take her to wife. That dream had died beside her brother’s betrayal, Lord Williams’ indecent offer, and Jonathan’s offer of employment. “Will I?” she asked softly. “You seem so sure, my lord.” When I know the impossibility of such a wish.

“Jonathan,” he corrected, “and I am sure.”

She ticked her chin up another notch. “And what of happiness? Do you see a life filled with happiness?” Could there be happiness after Jonathan Tidemore, Earl of Sinclair?