She stopped. The thick clouds drifted past the moon, opening a stream of light that bathed a stone rendering at the far back corner of the garden in a pale glow. That massive stone statue of a woman and man twined in one another’s arms beckoned, urging her forward.
Lowering her arms to her sides, she strolled over to the now-barren cherry tree. Even in stone, the sculptor had masterfully crafted the unadulterated love coming from the man’s eyes. With her back presented to anyone observing, the woman carved of stone fairly begged for the private intimacy of the moment with such a raw realness that Justina took a step away.
But something called her back. She peered at the couple. That motionless hero; both adoring and protective of the woman cradled in his arms. Justina wandered back to the statue, her breath catching. With his head bent toward his lover, there was something so gloriously breathtaking in his devotion, forever frozen for all to see, but somehow still shared between only them. It was madness to see the statue and imagine anything more. She stretched her hand out, brushing her fingertips down the rippled biceps of his arm, remembering another with arms that may as well have been carved of the same marble.
“We meet again.”
She shrieked and, with her heart racing, spun about toward that deep baritone that had dogged her dreams and waking thoughts. Nick stood at the entrance of the garden, staring down the length of the brick, walled-in space. She followed his gaze to where her hand still rested on the statue. Cheeks warming, she quickly dropped her arm. “Your Grace, I was just…” How to admit to a stranger that she’d been envying the statue of a woman, who in this suspended moment, possessed everything her own heart desperately yearned for?
“Nick,” he reminded, stalking forward with that sleek, elegant languor that drove her heart into a frenzy. The gravel crunched under his black boots, marking his path toward her. The moon’s glow cast a ray of light upon his chiseled face, bathing his rugged jaw and hard lips in soft light. “Most ladies sneaking off during any ball do so with scandalous intentions,” he whispered temptingly, coming closer.
Her heart quickened at his nearness. “Can a lady not just wish to escape the crush of a ballroom?” And the advances of improper suitors?
“Most would only escape with an eager suitor trailing,” he countered.
A muscle jumped at the corner of his jaw and Justina widened her eyes. Why…he was jealous. Surely that meant he felt something for her. Butterflies danced in her belly. “I am not most ladies, Nick.”
“No.” His lips tugged at the corner and the tension went out of his broad shoulders. “You are not.” Casting his gaze briefly up at the sky, he rocked back on his heels before returning his focus to her, robbing her of breath and thought. “Once more, we find ourselves together. Then, what did Virgil say? ‘Fate will find a way’,” he murmured, echoing those famous words of The Aeneid.
Who was this man who knew Evelina and read the poets and recited Virgil?
“I choose to believe our chance meetings,” he murmured, “are merely the fates at play, Justina.”
Butterflies danced wildly in her belly. How was it possible for a man to take nothing more than a name and wrap it in a husky whisper so that it felt like a lover’s endearment? She closed her eyes. His breath, a delicious blend of brandy and chocolate, whispered upon her skin. Her body burned at his nearness. His words ran through her with the like harmony of their thoughts.
“Beautiful,” he said softly. He let his arm fall to his side and she opened her eyes, bereft at the loss of him. Her gaze wandered to the stone masterpiece that now commanded his notice.
Regret pulled at her and she managed a nod. “It is,” she concurred softly.
Nick ran his palm down the lady’s curls and Justina took in that caress. How was it possible to so envy an inanimate piece of stone? Yet, he brushed his large, gloved palm over her with a tender regard she would have traded both her index fingers for. “What do you think the two lovers were thinking?” His hushed murmur brought her gaze away from that gentle touch and up to his face.
Justina wetted her lips, and glanced over her shoulder at the doorway. It was folly to be out here alone with this man. With any man. To be discovered with him would mean her ruin. Clenching and unclenching her fists, she looked to Nick once more.
He clasped his hands behind his back and retreated a step; his meaning clear. If she wished to leave, he’d not stop her.
And yet, if she did leave, she’d never forgive herself. All her life she’d dreamed of a romantic moment under the stars. Now, with the ugliness that her father held forth as her future, she’d steal her happiness when and where she could. In that decision, she’d own it and revel in that control, when her father was so determined to wrest it away.
Justina strolled over to the statue and ran her palm over the man’s sculpted bicep; hard and unyielding under her hand. Her fingers twitched, recalling Nick’s arm as he’d taken her body protectively under his. Not unlike that couple carved in stone. “If people were to look quickly, I expect they would see only lovers, wrapped in one another’s arms.” Her skin burned with the feel of his intense gaze on her every movement. “A couple in the throes of an embrace.” She should be scandalized by the words tumbling from her lips and, yet, there was something freeing in speaking without recrimination with a person who truly wished to hear her opinion. With a person who didn’t see her as a romantic who needed to be protected from herself.
“What do you see?” That hushed inquiry filled the nighttime quiet.
“I see a couple desperately in love.” She lifted her gaze to his. “Two people who want nothing more than to shut the reality of the world out and live with only one another.”
“You are a romantic,” he murmured, drifting over so that her back was brought flush to his chest. He reached around her and her breath caught. But he merely trailed his hand in the same path her own had moved over the statue’s arm.
Justina tipped her head back to search for the condescension that so often came with that admission. Instead, his gaze lingered on her face. Something hard glinted in his eyes that belied the gentle smile on his lips. There was something dark there. Something she could not identify or name. How could a man, so affable and charming, possess that fierce glitter? She rubbed her arms to ward off a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the night. “Yes,” she conceded. Unnerved by the piercing intensity of his sapphire stare, she drifted around to the other side of the statue, placing it between them. “You never did say what brought you outside, Nick.”
Not for first time since Nick had met Justina, the lady’s eyes and words revealed a proper wariness. “What if I was to say it was you, Justina?” he murmured, strolling slowly around the tangled lovers. “What if I tell you that the moment you entered the ballroom, my gaze went to you, and followed you while those swains courted your favor, and then watched as you slipped away?” His words were the truest ones he had, or ever would give her. Until their marriage.
Her hands came to her chest, drawing his focus to the twin mounds that threatened her décolletage. “I would ask, why,” she countered with a surprising boldness that raised the lady in his estimation.
For his first opinion that Justina Barrett could never see past her own dreams of grandeur to the truth of the ugly world before her, she now peppered him with questions of her own. “You do yourself a disservice if you fail to see why you’ve captivated me.” Her eyes softened as his pretty profession restored her to innocent debutante. Why did he feel like the worst cad in the kingdom? “Was it Tennyson?” he asked unexpectedly.
She cocked her head.
“The gentleman you evaded at The Circulating Library all those months ago?” Why did he ask such a question when it hardly mattered what Tennyson’s goals were for her? Ultimately, this game of revenge would end with Justina as his bride.
Justina wetted her lips, and then gave a hesitant nod.
That confirmation sent a red bloodlust raging through him. “I despise Tenn
yson,” he said with a quiet vehemence that rang from a place of peculiar truth.
“You know the marquess, then?” she asked, cautiously.
“I know he is a profligate gambler,” he said, his every word deepening the adoration in her eyes. He hated himself as much as he abhorred Tennyson. Each word he uttered was an artful move on the path to wooing the lady before him and marked him more like that duplicitous rake than different. Both men with dishonorable intentions. “I know he’s a man who makes his fortune on another man’s misfortune and you deserve more than such a man as a suitor.” Just as she deserved more than him. Far more. Shame needled at his suddenly, damnably alert conscience.
“You do not even know me,” she said softly.
He came around the statue and cupped her face in his palm. “I know you have a clever mind that makes a person think. I know he would shut you away, crush your spirit, keep you in a gilded cage as nothing more than a pretty ornament he brought out to impress the ton.” Nick lowered his brow to hers.
Her chest moved with the force of her breathing. “My father…” She grimaced. “Has very clear,” her mouth tightened ever so slightly, “hopes for my future.”
Nick knew as much. He knew the steps and moves the viscount would make, mayhap before the fat reprobate himself did. “Ah,” he said with feigned understanding. “You have a devoted papa, then?”
“No.” Her smile withered and died like a twinkling star that forever lost its light. It ushered in a cold. “It is not that.” Justina’s face set in a bitter mask, momentarily freezing him. The absence of her usual spirit and cheer raised gooseflesh on his arms. The day she bears my name and learns the depth of my betrayal, she’ll forever only wear this grim expression. Such a truth did not matter. It could not. The profession ran as a hollow litany inside his head and he found himself more a coward than he ever credited. For he wanted to know those important pieces she offered like fragile gifts, not as a means to further ensnare, but to simply know more about her.
“My father is…” Justina plucked at her puffed sleeve. “Indifferent,” she settled for. Her wry tone was at odds with the unadulterated innocence she’d shown since their first encounter on the cobbled streets of Gipsy Hill. “Most young ladies would, no doubt, be grateful for a father so removed from their lives that they could read as they wish and go where they wanted, when they wanted…”
The viscount was lax. Nick mentally stored that essential piece away. “Yet you did not wish that for yourself?” His was a bid to lull her into a false sense of his caring. To make her believe she mattered. And yet, waiting for her answer, why did it feel as though he lied to himself?
“I did not,” she confirmed, lifting her gaze to his. How free the lady was with her words; unguarded. She didn’t prevaricate or prattle about inanities the way the ladies of the ton did. “I wanted a father who loved me. Or who, at the very least, cared.”
Her words went through him like well-placed arrows. For he had known the love she spoke of. As had Cecily. All gifts crushed with the brutal ruthlessness of one man’s greed and cruelty. He attempted to steel his heart through her telling. To build up the desperately needed barriers, but her words continued coming, shattering all his efforts.
“Ultimately, I would have settled for a sire who saw me as more than a p…” She cleared her throat and looked away.
A pawn. A role she’d been born to as Waters’ daughter and grown into as Rutland’s sister-in-law. A role she’d play as my wife. Regret tasted like vinegar on his tongue, the bitterness of it making words impossible.
“Forgive me,” she said, softly. And there was such a sadness etched on the heart-shaped planes of her cheeks that it drove home another damned dagger. “I’ve said too much.” Yes, she had. So why did he wish to hear more? Because she is the pawn she unwittingly speaks of.
Liar. He ached to drive back that sorrow from her expressive eyes. “Does your father owe the man a debt, then?” he asked gruffly, ending the quizzing game to which he’d already possessed all the answers.
Justina hesitated and then nodded.
“Ah.” He stretched that single, commiserative syllable out. “That is the way of our world, is it not?” he asked, strolling away from her, over to the wrought iron bench surrounded by a cluster of barren rose bushes. He settled his frame into the seat and laid his arms along the back, urging her over with his silent gaze.
Justina glanced again at the doorway. She darted the delicate pink tip of her tongue out and ran it over the seam of her lips with an innocence that was more erotic than any of the darker deeds he’d performed with jaded women. Like a moth to that fatal flame, she floated over to him, and then hesitated. Nick motioned to the seat beside him. Several moments passed and then she slid onto the bench. “I prefer to have a more favorable outlook on the world,” she said, sitting thigh to thigh with him.
Her words held him motionless. “Even knowing your father’s intentions for you and his disregard, you still have that optimism?” It was how, even now, she did not realize she kept company with the Devil.
She nodded, her gaze riveted on the marble lovers. “My father believes I’m an empty-headed girl. Naïve. I see more than he credits.” Far less than she believed. “I’m not blinded to the ugliness that exists in the world. I just focus on the good. Otherwise, what is the alternative? To dwell in darkness?” Her gaze grew distant as she became lost in herself. “I choose not to. I choose the light.”
What the lady failed to know and would soon realize was that, ultimately, darkness selected a person. There was no escaping it. It lived around them in the form of rotten men who’d ruined families and men bent on revenge who’d ruin in return. And for this woman, he would become the figure she came to hate with the same vitriolic intensity that he despised the Marquess of Rutland.
The truth of that pitted in his belly and he hated that even with the lesson handed him on that long-ago night, there was still this weakness inside him.
She lifted her face up to his and the moon’s glow bathed the delicate planes in an ethereal glow that gave her the look of a siren at sea. “I expect I’ve shocked you with my honesty.” There was no apology there. He admired her all the more for her strength. At their first meeting, he’d taken Justina Barrett to be a meek, blushing miss. He’d been wrong on so many scores.
“I’m unaccustomed to ladies who speak so candidly,” he confessed. That admission did not come out as a way to wheedle himself into her graces, but rather from a need to try and make sense of this woman. A woman who reminded him of all those pleasures he’d once found joy in, and through her spirit and love of those same books, she’d sparked a long dormant part of his soul he’d trusted was dead. He recoiled; his palms growing moist in his gloves.
“And do you disapprove?” By the intensity of her direct stare, his answer mattered to her.
“What if I said I did?” he countered, in a bid to right his disordered thoughts. “Would you seek to make yourself into someone other than who you are?” No, I’ll do that all for her. He curled his hands into tight balls.
“I wouldn’t,” Justina confessed. “I know no other way than to hope. My mother says I’ve always been her dreamer. My sister is one, as well.” He stiffened as she yanked him out of this curious need to know more about her and doused him with the cool reminder of the woman whose blood she shared. “She had dreams of traveling to Wales.” A wistful smile hovered on her lips. “And eventually, with Edmund, found her way there.”
“And what of your brother-in-law?” he asked, dragging forth additional words about the man who’d ruined his family as a reminder to himself—he needed to remain dead to everything. Especially Justina Barrett. No good awaited their future together. “The one you spoke so fondly of at the park?” He fought back a sneer.
“Edmund?” Justina laughed. “Society once called him a scoundrel and moved with fear around him.” She gave her head a shake. “No, he will never be a dreamer, but he is an honorable man who loves my siste
r and, for that, I will always love him.”
A seething hatred snapped through him like fire, burning him with the force of his loathing. Obliterating all previous tenderness. How could a woman such as Justina so extol a beast like Rutland? It is because she’s a romantic who cannot see that which is right before her. Wasn’t the ease with which she’d stepped into his trap proof of that? What he’d never anticipated was caring one way or another how Justina Barrett came out at the end of this Devil’s game.
A sharp crack split the quiet and they swung their gazes to the branch that snapped and tumbled from the cherry tree. It fell between the stone lovers, landing like a visible divide between them, caught in their arms.
“I should return,” Justina murmured, climbing to her feet. She lingered and stared at him a moment.
Did she seek a protest on his part? Nick stood and gathered her fingers in his. He raised them to his mouth and placed a lingering kiss atop her gloved hand. “I do not know how to account for these chance meetings, Justina,” he said quietly. “But I am glad for them.” He retained his hold on her a moment. “I would like to call on you. If you are amenable to—?”
“Yes,” she said quickly and then laughed, the clear, innocent tinkling like a bell. “I would like that very much,” she said with such an unfettered smile, he rapidly released her fingers.
Justina dropped a curtsy and then rushed across the graveled path. She froze with her hand on the doorway and then looked back. “I am also glad for them, Nick.” Her husky whisper stretched across the garden. “Our chance meetings.”
Then, she left.
The lady now gone, Nick stared after her. In his quest for revenge, his hatred had fueled him. Edmund Deering, the Marquess of Rutland, had broken down his family. He’d made his mother a widow and his father’s children, motherless. Because of his coward of a father and Rutland’s evil, they’d been thrust into the care of their cruel grandfather who’d delighted in telling them just how worthless they were for the blood of their father that flowed through their veins. As much as Nick had despised his grandfather, he’d acknowledged the accuracy of his ill opinion of his son-in-law. The late baronet had been weak. He’d not had the strength to face his own demons. Unlike Nick, who’d long ago resolved to never be his father. Who’d committed to facing down Lord Rutland, when his pathetic sire hadn’t had the backbone to do so.
A Heart of a Duke Regency Collection : Volume 2--A Regency Bundle Page 126