The Belle of Belgrave Square (Belles of London #2)(69)

“Have you ever seen them?”

“Are you asking me if there are ghosts living at the Hall?”

Her mouth tipped at one corner. “Are there?”

Jasper surprised her with his answer. “Goldfinch Hall is haunted. But not by the kind of ghosts you imagine.”

Her attention was captured as surely as if he’d unveiled a new chapter in a serialized sensation novel. “What do you mean? What kinds of ghosts?”

“Old sins cast long shadows,” he said. “If the atmosphere at the Hall is unsettling, you can attribute it to that, not to any spectral presence.”

Her rapt expression faded. He wasn’t tempting her with a ghost story. His bleak sentiments were all too real. She regarded him with bewilderment. “You make it sound as though you’re unhappy there.”

He looked back at her steadily, his stern countenance belied by a gruff admission: “I’m not unhappy. Not now you’re coming home with me.”

His words settled inside her breast, glowing warm and bright, like a coal fresh from the fire.

Her smile returned slowly. “I do believe you mean that.”

“You can believe it,” he said. “If nothing else.”

“It isn’t only my dowry, then?”

He gave a humorless laugh. “If it were, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Wouldn’t we?” Julia’s smile turned quizzical. “I thought that was the most important quality in your prospective wife—the size of her dowry.”

“The size matters little if your father refuses to grant it to me.”

She stared at him. “My father refused you?”

“I told you he did. We discussed it yesterday.” He scanned her face, frowning with concern. “Don’t you remember?”

“Of course, I remember.” She hadn’t been that ill. “You didn’t say anything about my dowry.”

“I assumed it was obvious. Without your father’s permission, there’s no money at all. ‘Not a farthing,’ I believe is the way he put it.” Jasper grimaced. “Not the most flattering experience of my life. But his meaning was quite clear.”

Julia recalled Jasper’s question to her yesterday as she’d lain propped up in her bed. “What if there were no money?” he’d asked. “What if there was only me?”

She hadn’t taken him seriously. She’d long accepted that she had nothing but her dowry to recommend her. That she wasn’t good enough or worthy enough on her own. It had seemed an incontrovertible fact. In response to it, she’d constructed three failed seasons’ worth of defenses.

The truth finally began to penetrate them.

She didn’t dare believe it. “Do you mean to say that . . . you married me with no hope of receiving my fortune?”

“I did.”

“But what about the house? The children? You need money for repairs and—”

He shrugged. “I shall find another way. It won’t be easy, I know, but . . .” A rueful smile touched his scarred lips. “I had to have you.”

Julia shook her head in disbelief. She was too stunned to speak. Too altogether astonished by the revelation, and all its various implications, to move or even to breathe.

He had truly taken her in her underclothes. Not only undressed, but penniless as well. Her fortune had had nothing to do with it. It was only her. Because he’d wanted her. Because he’d chosen her for herself alone.

A great swell of emotion clogged her throat.

“Oh.” The word emerged in a broken whisper. “Oh, I had no idea. I thought . . . I thought you only wanted my money.”

His brows lowered. “Why the devil would you think that?”

“You said so yourself. That you must needs marry an heiress. I knew once you learned my dowry was greater than Miss Throckmorton’s you would renew your addresses. It’s why I mentioned it when I proposed to you.”

Jasper looked vaguely appalled. And worse. He seemed to have gone a trifle pale.

All at once, he surged up from his seat. The floor of the carriage rocked beneath his booted feet as he crossed the small space to sink down at her side. He caught her gloved hand tight in both of his. “Julia . . .” He stared down at her intently. “Don’t say you thought we were going to be rich.”

“We are rich.”

He brought her hand to his lips, pressing a hard kiss to the leather-clad crease of her thumb. “Yes,” he admitted grudgingly, “I suppose we are. Rich in blessings. And we have our health and—”

“I was talking about the money,” she said. “We’re rich in money.”

Jasper went still as stone, even as his gaze sharpened to a razor’s edge.

“My dowry is one hundred thousand pounds altogether,” she informed him, “but only fifty thousand of that comes from my parents.” Her chin lifted with a hint of pride. “The other fifty thousand belongs to me.”



* * *





?Jasper had had no idea. Not even the smallest suspicion. Not even when he’d noticed the discrepancy between the amount Julia was reported to be worth and the amount she’d claimed to be worth herself.

A fifty-thousand-pound discrepancy.

He felt as though she’d struck a blow straight to his solar plexus. As devastating a hit as when she’d proposed to him. Indeed, for all she was sweet and dainty, his new bride had the lethal repertoire of a bare-knuckle boxer.