The Belle of Belgrave Square (Belles of London #2)(115)

“I can come to no other conclusion.”

Jasper was silent for a moment, as if calculating his response. “Would it be a crime?”

Julia’s lips curled in disgust. That he even had to ask! “To take advantage of a man who died serving under you? A man you treated abominably?”

“He was treated abominably,” Jasper said.

“By you,” Julia snapped back. “You’re the one who mistreated him. You said you regretted the past. That you were making amends for it. But you haven’t changed at all, have you? If you had, you’d never have stolen his work.”

“I’ve stolen nothing from him.”

“You’ve already confessed that you have. That the books were written by him. Now you’re passing them off as your own—and collecting his royalties, too! Have you no thought for his family?”

“Marshland had no family,” Jasper said. “He had no one on this earth.”

“Everybody has someone.”

“He didn’t. As for his royalties . . . there’s little enough to speak of. Hardly worth the grand deception you’re accusing me of.”

“It is a deception.”

“If it is, it harms no one.”

Julia could no longer keep her countenance. “It harms me! Can’t you see that? I’m the one you’ve deceived.” She trembled with hurt and anger. “What else have you lied to me about?”

Jasper didn’t answer. He only looked at her, his brows drawn in a brooding frown.

She averted her face, very much afraid there were tears in her eyes. “That’s how it is, then? I must wait for the truth to be revealed to me as it comes? Never knowing what evil surprise might lurk around the next corner and the next?”

Jasper moved Quintus closer to Cossack. “Julia—”

“Another mistress, perhaps? More children? Some additional cruelty you perpetrated against a soldier who couldn’t defend himself?”

“Good God. Is that what you’re afraid of? I don’t have any other mistresses or children. And I was never—” He broke off with a muttered oath. “Damnation, Julia, don’t make me have this conversation with you. You won’t like how it ends.”

Julia continued to stare out over the moors, refusing to look at him. Her throat was tight. She dashed her gloved hand over her cheek, brushing away a rogue tear.

Jasper made a husky sound of anguish. “Please don’t cry.”

She hardened her heart. She had to protect herself from being hurt.

Feeling Quintus edging closer, she was possessed by the urge to give Cossack a kick. To gallop away as fast as she could. She wasn’t crying, not yet, but if Jasper dared touch her, she feared the dam of her emotions would burst and she’d lose what little was left of her dignity.

He must have sensed her intention. In one decisive movement, he caught hold of Cossack’s reins.

She turned on him, lips parted in outrage. “How dare you—”

“You’re not going to run away from me,” he said gruffly. “Not here.” He dismounted from Quintus in one fluid movement and, catching her round the waist, lifted her from her sidesaddle. “Your horse would trip and you’d dash your head on the stones, then where would I be?” He set her feet down on the uneven ground, gripping her hard. “Don’t you know by now that I can’t live without you?”

Tears filled her eyes. “I wouldn’t fall off. I’m an excellent rider.”

“So am I,” he said gravely, his hands tight at her waist. “An excellent writer, that is.”

She stared at him.

He looked steadily back at her. He was white about the mouth. “You wanted the truth. There it is. J. Marshland isn’t my pen name. It’s my real name.”

She blinked. “What?”

“It was Captain Blunt who died at the fall of Sebastopol,” he said. “Captain Blunt who perished from a rifle shot to the face. I was the sole survivor of the skirmish—the man who routed the patrol of Russians. I had no one waiting for me at home. No one in this world. Neither had Blunt, or so he said. But he had something else. He had an estate. A remote property in Yorkshire he’d inherited, where he meant to retire after the war. A refuge, he called it.”

Julia shook her head in disbelief. It couldn’t be true.

Jasper went on relentlessly. “I told you when we married that I’d been selfish once before. It was the day I decided to take Blunt’s estate as my own. We were of a similar height and build, both of us with black hair and light eyes and great big Crimean beards. When I woke up in Scutari Hospital, they believed I was him. They spent the first weeks addressing me by his name. And I thought . . . why not? There was no one to stop me. No one who would be harmed. If Blunt died, the estate would revert to the Crown. So after I recovered and was fit enough to make the journey, I came back to England, I traveled here to Yorkshire, and I claimed Goldfinch Hall as my own.”

Her legs sagged beneath her.

He maneuvered her to one of the standing stones. It was the approximate height of a chair.

Julia sank down on it numbly. Her thoughts were in chaos. She had the vague notion that she had fallen. That she’d suffered a blow to the head.

Jasper briefly stepped away from her to secure the horses to a nearby tree. “I convinced myself I deserved it,” he said as he tied off their reins. “That it was the least Blunt owed to me for all the violence and misery I’d endured at his hands.”