Page 125 of The Duke Undone

“If it weren’t for you, I might have walked the grounds, stared square into Jephson’s eyes, and come away again, not knowing my own sister was right under my nose.”

She knew she should remain on guard against the intimacy threatening to reestablish itself between them. But there it was. She couldn’t.

He leaned forward and she let him take her hand, twining their fingers together. He’d touched her hand, too, in that marvelous parlor, where she’d sat among the women he loved and felt welcomed into their circle.

Now, as then, her response to his touch was instinctual, intuitive. Her rational self, sounding alarms, stumbled far behind.

“I wish you hadn’t gone alone,” he said. His palm cupped her cheek, so gently she felt it only as warmth against the bruised skin.

“I didn’t go alone.” She exhaled, turning her face away from his hand. “Kate came with me.”

“Of course. Kate. I owe her my thanks as well.” His hand fell and found hers again, gripping her fingers more tightly than before. “I meant something else. I wish—I wish that you had counted on me. That you could count on me.” He laughed ruefully. “What I mean is, I want to be counted on, and to count for something because of that. Christ.”

The light that slid now across his face as he smiled left his dimples black as jet.

“And then?” She leaned back into the bench to counteract the force tugging her forward. This was the conversation that she had intended to avoid in the hopes that they could both escape the drive with their hearts intact. “You’re engaged,” she reminded him.

“I’m breaking my engagement.” The smile was gone. His throat contracted, the shadow bobbing. “I won’t be their puppet, not my father’s, not Yardley’s. Charlotte Road will be safe regardless, Lucy, I guarantee it. Count on me.”

She pressed a fist to the window, realized she had given an imperceptible shake of her head.

“You’d rather I marry Lavinia,” he said flatly. “It’s simpler.” He leaned back on the bench, his muscular body seeming too large, suddenly, for the small compartment. The chilled evening air electrified.

“I’m not going with you to Scotland.”

“Forget Scotland. I was behaving like a spoiled drunkard. You were right. I’d rather cut out my heart than make you watch me drain bottle after bottle in a . . . what did you call it?”

“Hovel,” she said.

“In a hovel,” he continued. “I don’t want the fantasy. I want the reality. With you. Here. Even if it’s harder and more complicated.”

She could slide toward him on the bench, bump her thigh, her hip, against his, fold into him. But she held herself straight and still.

“How will you save Charlotte Road without money to buy the leases?”

The light struck a green spark from his irises. His smile turned ironic, those fine lines fanning out around his eyes. She flushed.

“Don’t worry,” he said, sarcastically. “I wasn’t asking you to accept me penniless.”

“That’s not fair. It’s not your money I’m after, it’s just . . .”

“My money is worth something,” he quoted her, still smiling that ironic smile. “And I, sadly, am not.”

She took her fist from the window, pressed it into her stomach, a wave of the familiar misery she could feel in his company cresting over.

“I want to count on you,” she whispered. “But I’m afraid.”

He leaned toward her, expression softening, and he drew her fist away from her stomach, kissing the knuckles.

“I’m afraid of loving you,” she said, staring out the window as the coach rolled from his side of London to hers. “I’m afraid of my love emptying into you, emptying me out, because you’ve made yourself a bottomless pit. Alcohol can’t fill it. I can’t fill it. But you’ll take and take, and I won’t be able to stop myself from giving. Because I love you. That much. I’m afraid of being destroyed by it. If my father hadn’t died . . .”

She strangled on a sob.

“I wouldn’t have gone to the Royal Academy. I wouldn’t have been willing to leave him. I would have sacrificed everything, like my mother did. I can’t put myself in that position again, ever, Anthony. I can’t.”

He lifted her and held her tight to him, and she spoke into the curve of his jaw, just below his ear, barely sounding the words, shaping them against his skin.

“I’ve wondered if my father was . . . careless . . . on the stairs that night, because he wanted to release me. He wanted to die for me. I need someone who wants to live. With me. Fully. I need . . .”