Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (Scandalous Seasons #4)(59)

Something raw, something violent roared to life inside him, as a burning hatred for the man who’d nearly made her his wife, filled every corner of his being. On the heel of it, came the darkest niggling possibility. “Are you betrothed?” The question slid past tight lips. Because if she was, it would destroy him.

“Betrothed?” A mirthless laugh escaped her. “No, he would not wed me.”

Odd, he should all at once be relieved, and yet ache with hurt for the clear pain in her words.

Juliet stepped out of his arms and he followed her movements as she wandered over to the edge of the water. She continued to hold her arms wrapped about her.

“What happened?”

“You are acquainted with Albert. He is a wastrel. An insolent fool who sat down to a losing hand of cards,” her voice broke ever so slightly, and she averted her eyes, as though embarrassed to show hurt for the circumstances to befall her. She cleared her throat. “Just as he lost Rosecliff Cottage to you, he lost even more to this friend.”

His breath slipped past his teeth on a hiss, her meaning clear. The gentleman had wanted to make her his mistress. Fury blinded his vision, and he blinked it back. What manner of man would offer her a temporary place in his bed when he could possess her forever? What—?

Jonathan recoiled, feeling as though he’d been dealt a swift jab to his midsection. He’d made the same indecent offer to Juliet. He had offered her the role of his mistress; having pledged jewels and baubles, which he now realized would mean nothing to an honorable woman such as her. Jonathan stretched a hand out, but with her back to him she could not note his silent plea of forgiveness. He let his hand fall to his side.

“I’m so sorry, Juliet.” He didn’t refer solely to the nameless bastard who’d sought to destroy her reputation. Instead, he craved absolution for his own crimes against her.

Her delicate shoulders, which bore the weight of more than any one person deserved, lifted in a slight shrug.

He crossed over to her, until they stood side by side, their thighs brushing, and he stared out at the water. At last the question he’d carried, how a refined young lady came to be outside of the Hell and Sin Club. “It is why you became a governess.” Because she’d had too much honor and pride to make herself the whore to a bored gentleman. “My offer was the more palatable of your options.” And then he’d gone and asked the same thing of her as that bastard.

The late afternoon sun threw their shadows upon the crystalline surface of the rippling water, and he detected her nod on the river. “I lost everything,” she said quietly. “My home, my father, my opportunity to make a respectable match. My virtue was—is—all I have left. That, and my pride.” She looked to him. “And, when your sisters’ instruction is complete, I will have Rosecliff Cottage, too.”

Jonathan tried to imagine her as a young lady who’d just lost her father, with a brother who’d squandered all their wealth, and the crushing fear she’d surely known. He balled his hands into tight fists at his side. Juliet had displayed courage and honor in the tragedy that had befallen her, whereas he had spent too many years living in a state of self-indulgence, gaming and drinking. He’d never been more humbled than this very moment. He scrubbed a hand over his face trying to drive back the memory of their first meeting.

He’d been a smug, self-serving bastard who’d seen in the beautiful stranger a mistress for himself and a governess for his sisters. She had seen him as nothing more than a self-indulgent scoundrel who toyed with her life and her girlhood home.

Just then he detested himself.

“I learned one day,” she continued, jerking him from his tortured musings, “the absolute precariousness of my situation.”

Jonathan glanced down at her. She worried the flesh of her lower lip with her teeth. With his teasing words, and his talk of kisses, in her mind, she’d surely seen him as no different than the gentleman who would have forced himself upon her.

She deserved to be cloaked in diamonds and sapphires, and draped in the finest French silk, not as some gentleman’s mistress but as an honorable gentleman’s wife.

Staring at her, studying the smattering of freckles, her bow-shaped lips, he acknowledged the truth—a rogue such as him could never be worthy of Juliet.





Juliet attempted to decipher the inscrutable expression worn by Jonathan but his face may as well have been carved of stone.

She looked to him, needing there to be truth between them. “You asked what I’m hiding from. I’m hiding from the gentleman who made me that indecent offer. Not because he made it,” she said on a rush. Baron Williams had deserved her well-placed knee in his groin for such a scandalous proposition, but that had not been what caused her to clout him over the head with a candelabra. “I nearly killed him.” The damning whisper circled around them, and chilled, even in spite of the warm afternoon sun.

Jonathan stood silent, as though he knew there was more to her admission, and unwilling to find her guilty. It gave her the courage to continue.

“He…” She took a deep breath and pressed on. “He nearly raped me. He grabbed me here,” she touched a hand to her breast and then warmed with embarrassment for what had befallen her that day. “He ripped my gown. He kissed me here.” She touched a finger to her neck, and her breath quickened in panicked remembrance of the moment he’d raised her skirts. “And, I hit him over the head. I just reached for the nearest item. I didn’t intend to kill him, just to stop him. I didn’t think anything beyond stopping him from…from touching me.” Her jumbled words ran together, nearly incoherent, but she could not stop them from coming, feeling at last freed by the admission.