Page 39 of Strict Confidence (Rochester Trilogy 2)
The worry has sunk so deep in my bones that anger takes hold easily. It lances over my knuckles. First Joe Causey being an asshole over at the house, and now Marjorie, wanting to keep things from me.
Secrets are deadly. She should know that.
“You don’t want to say what?”
“I don’t know anything about the woman who called.” She squares her shoulders. Lifts her chin. “The only person I know about in this situation is you.”
“What do you know about me?” Nothing, except that I’m Rhys’s brother. Nothing, except for what the rest of the town already knows. In a place like this, it’s impossible to keep the past under wraps. I know what Marjorie’s going to say before she says it.
“That you break hearts.” How the hell has this conversation gotten to this place? “Not just that woman’s, but Emily’s too.” The corners of her mouth turn down, and her gaze slips to the floor for a brief instant. “She loved you, and you left. If you had stayed, she never would have married your brother.” Marjorie takes a deep breath as she reaches her inevitable point. “If you had stayed, she would still be alive.”
“I’m not the one who killed her. Blame her husband who took her out on the boat. Blame the ocean.” I keep my tone level, but she’s right. If I had stayed, Emily would still be here. I would never have had to seek out a nanny agency. I would never have met Jane. “I came for details about a disturbing message you wrote down. Not accusations.”
I’ve made those same accusations to myself enough times. I’ve bought into the stories in the tabloids enough times. I don’t need to hear them now, when everything that matters to me in the world is in danger from an enemy who doesn’t want to show her face.
Or his face. Joe Causey is the one who keeps showing up, time after time. To ask me about the house. To ask me about Jane.
Marjorie looks like she wants to say more. She doesn’t. She presses her lips together, gives me a curt nod, and leaves the room. I’m across it in two long strides, opening up the cupboard above the sink. Scotch. A glass. The shift in the air happens as I pour the scotch. It makes my shoulder blades go tight.
“How much did you hear?” I ask the empty room.
The kitchen’s empty, but not the hall outside. I knew it as soon as Marjorie left. Jane steps into the doorway, her arms clasped around her belly. “Enough.”
I down the scotch. “Enough for what?”
“Enough to know why you keep pushing me away.” I could listen to her voice, calm and low, for the rest of my life. Except when I want her to moan for me. Except when I want her to make those breathy little noises that make my cock twitch. Except for then.
“Because you’re so many years younger than me?”
“Besides that.”
I put my glass down on the countertop. I’ll wash the damn thing out again as soon as I’m finished with this conversation. And I hope this conversation never ends. “Because you’re employed by me, and I’m probably breaking a hundred laws just thinking about what I want to do to you right now?”
“Besides that.”
“Do we need another reason?”
She comes to me, and in her dark eyes I see a sweet compassion that a man like me will never deserve. Not if I spent a hundred years making things up to her. “You’re afraid I’m going to get hurt,” Jane says softly. “I wouldn’t leave in the fire, but it’s more than that. You feel responsible for what happened to her.”
I turn my back on her and the truth. Can’t look at her for another second. It’s too heavy a responsibility alongside everything else, and it hurts. It feels like she’s pushed a knife through my ribs. I can feel the point digging into my heart. Next I’ll hear her footsteps, retreating out of the room. Jane will go back upstairs. We won’t have to talk about this. We won’t talk about the way I’m trying to shut her out again. The kitchen furniture—a single table and four matching wooden chairs—feel like an audience. I want fifty locked doors between me and Jane and the rest of the world.
Her body meets mine instead. Jane wraps both her arms around me from behind. It makes me shudder. It’s clean, pure desire, shot directly into my veins. I wish I could lift a car or climb a mountain. Something, anything to do with this lust. Anything but fuck Jane on the pristine countertop of this inn. It would be nothing to lift her up and angle her the way I want to. It would be nothing to push her thighs apart and stroke across her center so I could feel how she’s still wet from when I made her come. She would be. She is now. I know it.
