Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (17 page)

Jonathan closed the book, and set it down on the sofa. He cupped her cheek in his broad, strong hand. “Do you know, I wonder as to this sketch.” He ran the pad of his thumb over her trembling lower lip. “Is it with an artist’s eye that you study me and sketch my likeness into your book?” She remained silent, a trill coursing through her at his feather-soft touch, and she struggled to make sense of his words. “Or is there more to this, sweet, Juliet? Do you see a man whose kiss you hunger for?”

Yes!
Her breath caught as he caught her hand and raised it to his lips. His breath caressed her palm, and for the longest, most splendorous moment she believed he would press his lips to the soft skin of her inner wrist. Juliet’s eyelids fluttered closed, and then promptly opened.

Flecks of gold she’d not ever noticed until this moment glittered in the endless depths of his blue eyes. His smile, suggested he’d detected her body’s subtle awareness of him. “Or do you merely see me as the owner of your precious cottage?”

Odd, she’d not thought of Rosecliff Cottage since she’d moved into the Earl of Sinclair’s townhouse.

He proceeded to run the tip of his index finger along the intersecting lines of her palm. She wished she had the flirtatious, witty words he’d surely grown accustomed to in his ladies over the years. All she knew, however, were the delicious shivers radiating out from the point of Jonathan’s touch, traveling up her arm, and through the length of her body. His finger paused its deliberate trail, and he glanced up. “I’d give a shilling to know your very thoughts.”

“Just a shilling?” she managed to squeeze out.

His grin deepened, revealing two even rows of pearl white teeth to rival the stark brightness of the moon’s glow in the library. A black curl tumbled across his brow, giving him an almost boyish look.

She reached out her free hand and brushed the silken strand back. The irises of his eyes darkened. Juliet cleared her throat. “I was just thinking how very much has changed.” A few short days ago, she’d have sooner seen him, this man who’d bested her brother at that game of faro, to the devil rather than let him touch her. “I was merely considering how if Albert had not wagered away Rosecliff Cottage how very different my life would be just now.” She redirected her attention out toward the row of shelving at the opposite end of the room.

How very empty, how very lonely her life had been these years. She’d not fully realized it until she’d been surrounded by his lively sisters’ chattering and giggling. And him. She’d not realized it until him.

Jonathan rested his hands upon her shoulders, the firm pressure, solid and reassuring in its warmth. “You miss it then,” he whispered close to her ear.

A giggle escaped her as his breath fanned the sensitive place where her neck and ear met. “I do.” Not nearly as much as she had before him and his family. Now, the prospect of leaving him, and going off to live her solitary life in Rosecliff Cottage filled her with the most unexpected pangs of sadness. She turned in his arms and met his heated gaze.

“Do you think you’d be happy in your cottage, alone Juliet?” he pressed, relentlessly as though he’d detected the weakness in her thoughts.

“That is what I want,” she whispered, gesturing toward the window. “You offered to make me your mistress, but I don’t require vast wealth. Or jewels. Or fine gowns. But, Rosecliff Cottage,” she cleared her throat as the remembered importance of her girlhood home came back to her with a swift familiarity. “It is a refuge so beautiful and pure. There is none of the London fog and noise. It is a place so peaceful and…safe.” She quietly finished, lost in thought. Yes, that was what the feeling she had here. Feelings which she’d not known since Papa’s death. A sense of safety. A sense of belonging. The safety provided by Jonathan, however, would one day be nothing more than a far distant memory, and she’d be left to wonder if it had ever been real or merely an illusion.

Jonathan turned her hand over, and proceeded to study those intersecting lines over her palm. “Do you know what I believe, Juliet?”

She swallowed. “What is that?”

He raised her hand to his nose and inhaled the scent of her skin as though he sought to commit her to the memory that would live only in his mind. “You do not want to live alone in your perfect cottage. You desire a man who will love you as you deserve to be loved.” Oh God. “A man who will lay you down on the warmest summer day and make sweet love to you in the gardens of your Rosecliff Cottage with twinkling stars overhead as your only voyeurs.” Her breath quickened. Jonathan moved one hand to her waist; he trailed his fingers down her hip. “And do you know, Juliet, I abhor that nameless man in your gardens. I detest him with every fiber of my being.”

Because the man he spoke of in her gardens, could never be him—and he knew it. Just as she knew it.

Sadness pulled at her heart, and she drew in a shuddery breath. Desperate to move away from this suddenly too-real, too-painful exchange, Juliet said, “Can you see the future then, my lord?”

That devilish grin she’d come to expect of him, turned his lips up at the corner, and the heavy pall of reality lifted. “I can in fact, my lady.” He touched his finger to her palm, and she jumped.

A breathless giggle escaped her and she squeezed her hand shut around his. “That tickles.”’

He gave her a stern frown, which was belied by the teasing tenor of his words. “Be still. Now, relax your hand,” he whispered, gently guiding her fingers open like one coaxing a fresh rose to bloom. Her breath caught at the intimacy of his sinfully decadent touch. Jonathan picked his gaze up a moment, and her heart pounded hard at the unveiled passion radiating from within his eyes. She wet her lips, and his eyes fell to her mouth, following the distracted movement of her tongue. When he again looked at her, his eyes had clouded with some nameless emotion. “Would you have me stop?”

Somehow she suspected they spoke now of something more than the mere game of his telling her future. And she wanted him. All of him. She wanted Jonathan’s roguish smile and teasing words. She wanted her name on his lips and his heart in her hands. She suspected the thought of that should terrify her…and yet, strangely, it did not. Juliet tilted her chin up. “No. I do not want you to stop.”

Their gazes locked. “Then allow me to tell your future, sweet Juliet.”

“Very well, Jonathan. What do the lines foretell?”

His grin deepened, and he looked down. She studied the thick, lush crop of loose black curls bent over her head. Her fingers fairly itched with a desire to run a path through the tousled silken waves. He touched his finger to a line on her palm. “I see a home.”

Juliet pointed her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, I gather that is Rosecliff Cottage you see.”

He ignored her blatant attempt at sarcasm. Instead, he began to once again stroke the inner portion of her wrist in a way that sent tingles to her stomach, all the way down to her toes, and throughout her entire body. “And a husband,” he said, picking his gaze up a moment.

Her throat worked reflexively. As reality reared its ugly head in her world of make-believe. She would not have a husband. There would be no honorable gentleman to take her to wife. That dream had died beside her brother’s betrayal, Lord Williams’ indecent offer, and Jonathan’s offer of employment. “Will I?” she asked softly. “You seem so sure, my lord.”
When I know the impossibility of such a wish.

“Jonathan,” he corrected, “and I am sure.”

She ticked her chin up another notch. “And what of happiness? Do you see a life filled with happiness?” Could there be happiness after Jonathan Tidemore, Earl of Sinclair?

“I do.”

And suddenly the little game they played became all too real. She made to pull her hand free.

“Are you turning coward on me, afraid of learning what the future holds in store for you? Surely you must wonder at the man who’d become your husband.”

She laughed, the sound aching and sad to her own ears. “You are incorrigible, Jonathan.”

He tapped his finger over the bridge of her nose. “Mustn’t have you laughing. I’ll remind you this is very serious business we are about, Miss Marshville.”

“Juliet,” she corrected. In the privacy of the moments they managed to steal for themselves, she’d have him call her nothing but Juliet.

“Juliet, then,” he murmured. He turned a too-serious frown on her. “May I carry on?”

She inclined her head. “My apologies,” she said with false seriousness. “Go on, then. What do you see?”

“I see your cottage, of course, with a garden of flowers and…” he tapped the lines of her palm, “five, six, seven children.” He counted. 

A sharp bark of laughter burst past her lips. “Seven? Well, I say that is rather a lot!”

Jonathan ignored her. Instead, he turned her hand slightly, availing himself to some other crisscrossing lines, and continued counting. “Eight, no nine, children.”

“Oh, splendid. I was concerned when you said I had only seven children. What are—?”

“Five lovely girls, four boys,” he interjected, correctly interpreting her next question.

“I hope they’re not terribly naughty.”

Jonathan appeared as if to study her hand for another moment, before clucking his tongue at whatever he’d seen, giving her a pitying look. “I’m afraid to report they appear rather precocious.” He lowered his brow to hers and relinquished her hand. “Enough of the future. Why spend so much time there when the present is so much more ideal?”

Except, she found she preferred the future. For the future wasn’t real. It was nothing more than a pretend world she could dare dream of. The now represented loneliness, and an agony for all the things she’d never know.

The pain of her stark reality pierced at her like a dozen arrows being shot through her person. She and Jonathan belonged to two very different worlds. He saw the now as pleasant, ideal, harmonious. Juliet, however, lived in terror of the now. She held her breath with fear of when her blissful, serenity of employment with his family would end and she’d be off in the world, an unwed woman, alone in her cottage. What had once sounded so very splendorous mere days ago now filled her with an aching sadness. And her employment here would end—because she’d learned more than a year ago that all good things, they ultimately died.

She would leave. And wait. Wait in dreaded anticipation for the day Baron Williams found her and demanded justice for the harm she’d done him in her brother’s parlor.

“What is this, now,” he whispered. Touching his fingers to her chin, he angled her back to face him. “You’ve gone all quiet on me, Juliet.”

She pulled away from him, and slashed the air with her hand, suddenly angry with herself for having grown to care so very much for him. “It is how you see the world, Jonathan. You see it as ideal, uncomplicated. That is not how the world truly is.” She detected the slight stiffening of his broad shoulders, and knew she’d done a deplorable job in concealing the bitterness carried in her heart, and underscoring her words.

“You think I’m a self-absorbed nobleman without any real cares, don’t you?” He didn’t allow her to respond but plowed ahead. “What do you see when you look at me? A gentleman who lives for his own pleasures? One who doesn’t take responsibility all that seriously?”

She shook her head, at the unexpected harshness to his tone. “No…I—”

“The day my father died, I assumed the mantle of responsibility for my family. Poppy and Penelope were just babes, Prudence and Patrina but girls.” Guilt filled her at having passed judgment of him. “I became the one to see to my mother’s security and my sisters’ every happiness. You might see my sisters as indulgent, spoiled—”

“No! I don’t…” She didn’t see the girls that way. How could he believe she did?

“Young girls,” he went on as though she’d not spoken. “But they are my responsibility and I love them as though they’re my own daughters, spoiled though they may be. So do not condescend to me with your eyes, madam, or—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Your mocking words, and erroneous assumption that I see the world as ideal.”

Juliet folded her arms in front of her to ward off the chill in his usually kind, teasing eyes. She sidled over to the sofa and placed the cream embroidered seat between them.

“Are you hiding from me?” The silken whisper, a question, belied by the hard glint in his eyes.

She glanced down at the sofa. Unbeknownst to her, she’d sought purchase from the thick mahogany back of the seat. She let go of the rich fabric. “I do not hide.” She interrupted him as he opened his mouth to speak. “And this was your game, Jonathan.”

He raked a hand through his midnight black waves. “This isn’t about the game, Juliet.”

“Then what is it?” the question exploded from her on a soft cry. She threw her hands up. “I don’t know what you want of me.” But she could not carry on living here if he continued to treat her more like a cherished lover than as the governess he employed to care for his sisters. Not when she knew he’d undoubtedly wed his perfect, English miss while Juliet went off to her cottage.

Or worse, become the governess to his future children. Bile burned like acid in her throat.

Jonathan continued to study her, uncharacteristically silent. “Is that what you want. Do you want me to leave? If you do, say the words.”

There could be no more unlikely pair than Juliet Marshville and Jonathan, the 5
^th
Earl of Sinclair.

And yet…

God help her. She couldn’t call up the proper, ladylike response.

Until this moment, Rosecliff Cottage had represented the one opportunity she would have in life to own something. Now, in Jonathan’s arms, with the promise of his touch, she now realized she could own something more—this splendorous moment. She could lay herself open to his embrace and carry with her, the memory of his touch, his lips, the very essence of him.

She forced herself to take a calming breath. And another. And another. “I ask you to please leave me be.”
Because with your body’s nearness, and the strength of your hand in my own, I risk doing something foolish like losing my post for the pleasure of your touch.