The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides #1)(73)

After years of being expected to answer and account for her every action and movement, and the stifling oppressiveness of that, she boiled over. Her patience snapped. “Go to hell, Robert,” she spat. Ryker, Robert, her other de facto brothers, they thought they were all deserving of explanations, as though she were a child. “You ask questions and demand answers.” She raked her gaze over his elegant, flawless person. From the top of his thick gold hair and his unblemished olive-hued skin to the tips of his shiny boots. “Do you know why I’m here?” She didn’t allow him to reply. “I’m here because this is my home.” She rested her palms on her knees and leaned across the space between them. “My brothers own the club.”

Surprise flashed in his eyes.

The fight drained through her tautly coiled body, seeping through her feet, and she sank back in her seat. “I am their bookkeeper, Robert. This morning I was visiting their liquor supplier.” Bitterness twisted her lips. Or she had been the bookkeeper until they’d decided it easy enough to cut her from the fabric of the club. She braced for the shock or condescension over that revelation. After all, ladies didn’t oversee businesses.

Part of her wished for him to sneer at her revelation, for it would make it easy to despise him for his judgment. “I resulted in your loss of that position,” he said quietly.

Helena remained close-lipped.

“Why are you here?”

Because I need to be. Because the longer I remain in your world, the more I lose pieces of my soul, so that nothing will remain but a weak woman like my mother . . .

She stiffened as he touched his knuckles to her jaw, gently bringing her gaze to his.

“You were leaving.” Shock underscored those three words that were more statement than anything else.

Looking into his eyes, the flash of pain did not speak of a man indifferent to her.

And she didn’t know what to do with that emotion.

He dragged his hand over his face.

“They sent me away,” she said softly, and he dropped his arm to his side to look at her. She needed him to understand why she was here, and why she could never be part of his world.

Not that he asked you to even be part of it . . .

Helena glanced out that small crack in the ripped curtains. “It mattered not that I’m their sister. It mattered not that I’ve overseen the books since they opened the club.” Her throat bobbed. “You give so much of yourself, and what do you receive for that loyalty?” She looked slowly back at him, a small, sad smile on her lips. A man just a step below royalty commanded that sentiment just by sheer birthright alone. In her world, it was earned and, often, all that mattered. “Though, I expect you know nothing of that.”

“Because lords and ladies do not know hurt or betrayal?” He winged another eyebrow up.

She wrinkled her brow. She’d wager he’d never known the pain of a gnawing, growling belly or a fist being driven into your face.

Robert hooked his ankle over his knee, and rested his hand on the edge of his boot. “Do you believe members of your station hold dominion over those sentiments, Helena?”

She shifted, and her cheeks warmed. When he put that query to her in that manner, it made her sound self-important. “Do you?” she shot back. “Have you been betrayed by your family?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

His admission sucked the energy from the carriage. Of all the responses she’d expected, it had not been that gruff one-word utterance. Questions spilled to the tip of her tongue, but she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from probing. It was not her place to know. There was no need to know . . .

I want to, anyway . . .

“My grandfather,” he explained. He grimaced. “And my fiancée.”

His words sucked the air from her lungs. “You were betrothed,” she said, her breath faint. Of course he’d been. He’d just said as much.

When he gave a curt nod of affirmation, a vise squeezed about her middle. He’d been betrothed. To a flawless English lady, and by the tension at the corners of his mouth, mourned the loss of her still. In Helena’s end of London one didn’t probe a person about their past, present, or future. Particularly when futures were often bleak and doubtful. “What happened?”

He flicked a hand. “She was my sister’s nursemaid.”

“A nursemaid,” she exclaimed. Future dukes did not marry nursemaids . . . they didn’t marry any maids. Just as they didn’t wed scarred by-blows who’d lived in the streets.

“It hardly mattered to me if she was a maid.”

Oh, God. He’d loved her. So hopelessly that he would have defied Society’s expectations for it. This was so much worse. A vicious, biting envy ate slowly away at her, threatening to consume her.

Robert held her gaze. “It mattered that she did not see my title.” His eyes took on a distant quality and he was looking back into a world where she’d never been . . . but only that nursemaid who’d won his heart. “I loved her for her kindness and her ability to laugh. I loved that she was not a spoiled Society miss, and that she took pride in her work.”

All this, when nobles failed to see those servants and people in the streets. Only . . . that wasn’t really true. She’d only believed it to be so. This man had seen more. In another woman. “What happened to her?” Her whispered question floated between them.