The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(79)

This was what she’d wanted.

Reggie folded the petticoat in half.

Her freedom from the Killoran family.

She laid the neatly folded article atop the other crisp, white undergarments and reached for another.

Freedom, however, had come in the unlikeliest way and for the most unwanted reason.

Gus leapt up onto the bed and stalked across the coverlet, his claws sinking into the delicate satin as he went, making a mess of her piles, and then he stopped beside her. He nudged his small, soft head against her arm.

With a sigh, Reggie tossed a chemise aside, forgotten, and scooped up the grey-striped tabby.

Holding him close, she buried her head against his neck. He purred, the slight rumble bringing her a measure of calm.

The life draining out of her limbs, Reggie sank onto the edge of her mattress and simply clung to the cat.

The duke had destroyed her once before, and nearly ten years to the date, he’d done it all over again. This, however, was so very different from the shame of her past. Now her sins had touched the Killorans. And Broderick knew all. Or at least the perverted half truths fed to him by the Duke of Glastonbury. She tried to draw breath through her painfully tight lungs.

Gus squirmed and, tiring of her embrace, scrambled out of her arms and darted across the room.

Reggie resumed packing. Gathering the coarse wool day dress, she folded it.

And the worst of it was, after she’d said her piece and warned him about Lord Glastonbury’s evil, she’d not been able to glean even a hint of what Broderick had been thinking. Or feeling. He’d been an empty palette, emotionless.

A sob squeezed from her throat and tumbled from her lips. What should he feel? He’d come to Mayfair craving respectability and a link to the peerage, and instead Reggie had visited scandal upon his household.

A knock came. The expected one.

Even as she’d anticipated it, however, her heart turned over.

When she drew that panel open, he’d no longer be the friend unaware of her past but a man in possession of her secrets and shame. Reggie came to her feet. On wooden legs, she crossed over and gripped the door handle.

And for one cowardly instant, she shifted her fingers to that lock. Thought of turning it. Thought of maintaining the illusion of the uncomplicated relationship they’d once shared and simply leaving without having to discuss . . . this.

Broderick knocked again. “Regina?”

Regina.

Not “Miss Spark,” because he now knew it for the lie it was. And not “Reggie,” because that had been the casual moniker of a friend.

Biting her lip, she drew the door open.

Broderick ran his gaze over her. “May I come in?”

He’d asked when he had every right to force his way inside and shred her for the threat she’d visited upon them.

And she would have preferred him loud in his anger to this . . . stoicism.

Wordlessly, she stepped aside. He strode forward, in masterful command of his steps, and then stopped, glancing around. Uncertain. At sea. Shattering the myth of infallibility. His gaze went to the pile of belongings still to be tucked into the valise and the sealed trunk at the foot of her bed.

And still he said nothing.

Reggie shut the door quietly behind them and leaned against the panel. She braced for his barrage of questioning and curses. Yet he offered her silence.

Where the duke who’d broken her before had laid command to when she’d speak and how she’d modulate her tones, this man allowed her that small-but-vital piece of control. She loved him all the more for that gift.

“I was ten and seven when we met,” she began softly. A woman by the Dials’ standards but naive in her understanding of good and evil.

Broderick clasped his hands behind him. “He is the reason you didn’t wish to serve as Gertrude’s companion,” he finally said, breaking his silence.

“Yes.” Her voice emerged threadbare, and she swallowed back that weakness.

“He indicated you . . . eloped.” His gaze did another sweep of her belongings.

Look at me. Look at me, she silently screamed. Imploring him. Because this, his inability to so much as meet her eyes, spoke to her dirtiness in his. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. What else had he said? “I was young,” she said lamely, hugging her arms around her middle. Age offered no pardon from one’s sins or crimes. “I trust he shared all the details,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness from seeping in. Every last sordid, shameful secret of her past.

He finally faced her. “I want to hear it all from you.”

Why did it matter? He already knew. She saw the truth in the guarded way in which he now studied her, and she knew by his presence here. “My father inherited a baronetcy.”

“Your father was a baronet.” Surprise lit Broderick’s usually guarded expression.

Oliver had not shared that detail, then. But then, the only hereditary honor outside the peerage would have never made her worthy of Oliver . . . or with his aspirations, Broderick. “By a matter of chance. He was just a commoner.” A musician by trade who’d earned just enough in coin from his compositions to maintain a modest cottage for his three children.

She didn’t want to wander this path. She didn’t want to think about the father and brothers she’d left behind. And how she’d traded a loving family for a heartless cad.