Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (29 page)

The knife twisted again in his stomach. Then, that was the kind of woman Juliet Marshville happened to be. Selfless, fearless, and uncowed by any man.

“I don’t, in all my years, remember you this way,” Mother said.

“And what way is that, Mother?” he asked tiredly.

“Broken.”

A humorless chuckle escaped him. Broken seemed a rather apt way to describe a shell of a man with a broken heart and a broken conscience and—

“You need to go to her, Jonathan,” Patrina’s interruption cut into his musings.

He dragged the back of his hand over his eyes. “I can’t. She’s gone. I don’t deserve her.” He would never stop loving her. She would forever occupy every last corner of his useless heart. Jonathan raised his glass to his lips, but his mother strode over, and snatched it from his fingers. She set it down on the nearest table so hard it sent liquid drops spraying onto the Aubusson carpet.

“Then you don’t love her,” she snapped.

“Don’t,” he cried and then took a calming breath. “Don’t. I…” He glanced at his sisters and then back to his mother careful with his words. “I have not been honorable where Juliet is concerned.” That was the safest admission he could make in front of four young ladies.

Poppy sighed and flung herself into a nearby leather-winged back chair. “I don’t like Jonathan. I preferred Sin. Why, Sin who would simply go and take back his Miss Marshville because he loved her and couldn’t live without her and didn’t care…”

Mother glowered at her.

“What?” she grumbled. “I do. This Jonathan fellow is stodgy and proper and will suffer a broken heart for it.”

He blinked. By God, he must be going mad, or perhaps he already was, but Poppy’s words penetrated the agonized stupor he’d lived in for nearly three months and actually made sense.

She was right.

He might have wronged Juliet and set her free out of love for her, but he needed to see her, needed the decision to be hers and not one he made for her.

And if she chose to send him on his way then…

Jonathan shoved aside the thought. He’d not let himself think of any other possibility but one that involved her becoming the Countess of Sinclair.

He smiled.

“You’re going for her,” his mother said with a nod of approval.

“I’m going for her.

Chapter 21

Juliet knelt in the soft earth and snipped back the overgrown pink rose bush. She brushed back her wide straw bonnet. A bead of moisture dotted her brow and she dashed it away.

Once upon a lifetime ago, Jonathan Tidemore, the Earl of Sinclair had spoken to her of warm summer days in her gardens of Rosecliff Cottage. He’d tantalized her with forbidden thoughts of making love under the glittering stars. He’d teased her with the promise of what-ifs. In her heart, she’d wanted him to be her gentleman under the stars.

She touched a purplish-pink rose and palmed the satiny smooth bloom. Now, she could never gaze upon another night sky without thoughts of him.

With a sigh Juliet looked around at the overgrown garden. Her poor cottage had been woefully neglected. Then, when there was no prideful owner in residence, disrepair tended to occur. The opened sketchpad on the ground snagged her attention.

The grinning gentleman stared back up at her—he, the true owner of this cottage she’d commandeered without his knowing…or perhaps without his caring.

A gentleman of his vast wealth would have little need for a modest dwelling such as Rosecliff Cottage.

Juliet gave her head a shake and returned her attention to a branch covered in tear-shaped green leaves. Then, she had hoped if he’d not come for his cottage that he mayhap had come to care enough to come for her.

She snipped off the excess greenery.

In the three months since she’d been escorted to Rosecliff Cottage by Lord Drake and bartered her every happiness for the protection of Patrina’s name, not a day had passed that she’d not thought of Jonathan.

On her better days, she had wondered whether he missed her. On her worst days, she railed at him for not having loved her as she loved him. On her very worst days, she sobbed bitter angry tears that he’d either not known or cared to know where she’d taken herself off to.

Yet, she had always prided herself on being logical.

Logic had told her since the moment she’d met the Earl of Sinclair that nothing could ever exist between them. There was the history between Jonathan and her brother, the loss of Rosecliff Cottage, and then ultimately his offer to make her first his governess, then his mistress.

Such thoughts had compelled her to take that which was owed her—Rosecliff Cottage. The beloved brick-front home had always mattered more to her than Albert, and certainly more than it did to Jonathan who’d never even bothered to visit the modest property he’d won in a game of faro. Pain lanced her heart.

He’d never come.

She had been so very certain that he would, not necessarily to visit the property but because he would surely have known she’d come here.

These past months now, she’d managed to tilt her chin back up and live as she had before Jonathan; confidently, boldly, and when she could…happily. She stared blankly down at the smiling visage upon the opened sketchpad.

Well, mayhap not happily.

Juliet sat back on her haunches amidst the cluster of rose bushes and pink peonies and dragged over the sketchpad. She touched her fingers to the sun-warmed sketch of Jonathan.

Had he wed his Lady Beatrice? Was he in fact kissing the lovely young lady with those sinfully knowing lips?

A spasm of grief ripped through her body and she tossed the book to the ground. “Enough,” she whispered.

A shadow fell over her, and she glanced up at the cloudless summer blue sky with a frown.

“Hullo, Juliet.”

Juliet shrieked and pitched forward. She landed in a tangled heap amidst her rose bush. Jagged thorns bit painfully into the soft flesh of her palm. She shoved herself upright and turned.

Jonathan!

Oh God. You are here? Where have you been?

He beat his riding crop against his thigh, looking impossibly handsome with his tousled, too-long black locks. Her fingers twitched with a sudden need to brush them back from his forehead. She swallowed hard. “Jonathan.”

Their gazes locked and held. A shiver coursed through her body at the desire in his sapphire blue eyes. Then he glanced away, looking at a point beyond her shoulder.

“This is my Rosecliff Cottage?” he said, more to himself.

She wet her lips. “This is
my
Rosecliff Cottage,” she corrected.

The claim so very reminiscent to that long ago night outside the Hell and Sin Club.

He stood before her looking impossibly handsome, and still elegant in his simple buckskin breeches and black tailcoat. Oh God, how she’d missed him.

She curled her toes inside her serviceable boots at the contrast she presented sweated, in her mud-splattered fuchsia skirts.

He tossed his riding crop down beside her sketchpad and held his hand out.

She eyed his outstretched fingers a moment, and then placed her fingertips in his palm. It was like coming home. More a home than this lonely cottage ever had been.

Wordlessly he wiped away the trickle of blood left by the thorn and raised her fingers to his lips.

“I should have come for you. I wanted to.”

“Did you?” She couldn’t call back the bitterness of that reply. “And what of Patrina? How is she?” She rushed before he could speak.

“She is fine,” he assured her.

How could she be fine? Albert had absconded with the young lady and taken her to Rosecliff, and well, young ladies didn’t survive such a scandal.

“No one has discovered the truth, Juliet,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

“B-but…” They would. Society always discovered the secret shame carried by its members.

“Your brother will say nothing. I’ve spoken to him.” The flinty edge to that pronouncement gave her pause. She tried to read his guarded expression, unsuccessful in her attempt.

Jonathan reached into the front of his jacket and pulled out a thick packet. He pressed it into her palm.

Juliet stared a moment. She used the tip of her finger to loosen the ribbon that bound the velum together. She opened the packet and read. Her heart paused.

She looked up at him and found him solemn.

“It is yours, Juliet. It has always belonged to you. I just didn’t realize it.”

All the hope she didn’t realize she’d held since he’d reappeared in her life, died.

The deed to Rosecliff Cottage. This is what he’d give her. Her home. The beautiful sanctuary she’d loved since she’d been a girl, and fought so desperately for the return of. He would give her this. But where was the elation? The sense of victory? Of gratitude? “Oh,” she managed to squeeze past dry lips. In this, the kindest, most generous gesture, he would give her Rosecliff Cottage, but selfishly Juliet wanted more.

He spoke haltingly. “Do you no longer want it?”

She wanted
him
. Juliet turned the packet over in her hands and lied. “Of course.” “Thank you,” she said stiffly.

“I owe you an apology.” His words, harsh and guttural, jerked her attention upwards.

She furrowed her brow. “For…?”

His tautly held shoulders indicated the thin thread he had on his control. “I offered to make you my mistress. I foolishly spoke to you about baubles and trinkets, and promised it all to you, if you’d take me as your lover.”

What had once so appalled her, now enticed. Juliet loved him so desperately she was almost tempted to throw away her virtue for the pleasure of his embrace. Almost. She suspected, if it wouldn’t kill her the day he decided he no longer wanted that place in her bed, she might more seriously consider his offer.

“Will you not say anything, Juliet?”

She traced the tip of her tongue over the seam of her lips. “What would you have me say?”

Anger sparked in his eyes. “Tell me I’m a bastard.” And she realized the volatile sentiment was directed at himself. “Tell me I never deserved you. Slap me.” He delivered those last two words pleadingly.

She shook her head. “I can’t do that.” She couldn’t say or do any such thing. Juliet took a step toward him. “I don’t know a more nobler—”

He groaned and shook his head in protest.

“More generous man,” she continued. She brushed back that single black lock from his brow.

He closed his eyes. “There is nothing noble about me.” His throat moved up and down.

“There is
everything
noble about you. You love your sisters with a kind of love I only dreamed of from my own brother, my lord.”

His eyes snapped open, filled with fury. “Is that what I am, now? My lord?”

The lord of her life. Her heart. “You were always my lord.” Her voice broke.

Jonathan took her gently by the shoulders. The velum packet slipped from her fingers and joined the sketchpad and riding crop on the ground. “That is not what I always was. I was Jonathan. I was yours, as you were mine.”

She opened her mouth to speak but he pressed two fingers against her lips.

“I spent the past three months telling myself you were better off without me.”

He was wrong. She was nothing without him.

He pushed her bonnet back and ran his gaze over her face. “I convinced myself I was doing the honorable thing, not just because I was being honorable, Juliet. Because I’m not honorable. I’m a selfish, greedy, bastard, and I’ve never been honorable where you are concerned.” He ran the pad of his thumb over her lower lip. “And I thought in staying away from you, and” his gaze moved beyond her shoulder to the stone cottage, and then back to her. “This cottage that I was finally doing the honorable thing where you were concerned, and not because of mere responsibility alone. But because I love you. And when you love someone, you set them free even if it tears you apart from the inside out.”

How wrong he was. A lone tear fell unchecked down her cheek. “You don’t set them free, Jonathan. You fight for them.”

He closed his eyes. “And I didn’t fight for you. Did I? Instead, I fought every day. I fought myself. I fought to turn around each time I marched out the doors of my house and forced myself back inside. I warred with myself. Because you deserve far more than a rogue like me.”

It wasn’t his right to decide what was best for her. Not when she knew in her heart that she would never want or love someone the way she did him.

He lowered his brow to hers. “But I’m still the same selfish, greedy bastard whose carriage you first climbed into because I want you regardless. I want all of you. I want your clever-wit, your cheeky smile. I want your indomintiable spirit. I even want you spitting angry so I can kiss the anger from you.”

I would kiss the proper from you…

Tears clogged her throat and prevented any response. How long she had wanted him.

“Ah, God, don’t look like that. I can’t bear the sight of your tears.”

Except she couldn’t stop them. They fell one by one. Followed by another. And another.

Jonathan dusted the tears from her cheeks, and then when they continued to fall, he lowered his lips and kissed away the remnants of her sadness. “My brave, beautiful Juliet, alone for so long.

He took her face in his palms. He touched his lips to her closed lashes. “But who has helped you, my sweet, fearless Juliet? Who has been there to help you?”

She forced her eyes open and nearly stumbled over the weight of emotion in his eyes.

“Let me be the one, Juliet. Let me be the one to take care of you when you need and love you as you deserve. And in turn, you can care for me as I need and love me even as I’m not deserving.”

Juliet leaned on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. She poured every bit of longing that kept her awake in the midnight hours into the kiss. Their lips brushed against one another in an age-old rhythm, a meeting, and a reawakening. Then she pulled away. “Yes,” she said softly, and brushed back that same tousled lock. “You were always Jonathan. And I lo—”

“No!” he cut in harshly, killing the words on her lips. “Do not. I’d not let you say it. Not when you deserve to hear first how desperately I love you, how hopelessly empty my life is without you. How meaningless everything is when you are not around.” He dropped to his haunches and held up the deed to Rosecliff Cottage. “I came here to give you your cottage, Juliet. This is yours. It has always been yours. I never had a right to this property.” He reached into his front pocket and withdrew a single note. “I would offer you something else.”