Something about the wrinkle between her brows, the way her lips pursed in thought, unsettled him. He hoped she wasn’t going to do something awkward, like confess some girlish notion of feelings. He smoothed a strand of hair from her eyes, tucked it behind one ear. Reminded himself that keeping her happy was not only his role as her husband, it was necessary for this plan to work.
“Tell me,” he told her. “Whatever has you tied up, I will listen.” And the sooner she purged whatever was bothering her, the faster he could divest her of her clothes.
Her chin lifted. “I do not believe you murdered your brother.”
Patrick exhaled slowly. Not a confession of love, then. He felt strangely deflated. Or perhaps not so strangely. She wanted to discuss their past, not their future. Not precisely a conversation conducive to bedding one’s wife. He supposed he really ought to put his trousers back on if this was where they were heading tonight.
“Given that I did not, in fact, murder my brother, that seems a solid conclusion to reach.” He didn’t like revisiting this memory, even in private, but going there with Julianne seemed a sharper kind of pain. His gaze pulled to the dark crescent smudges below her eyes that suggested recent sleepless nights. “You’ve spent the past three days bending my ear about the opera, the scandal sheets, the latest fashions from Paris as we rattled our way from Moraig to Leeds. Not once did you bring up the events of Eric’s death. Which begs the question . . . why are we having this conversation now?”
She owl-blinked up at him. “We’ve not had a private moment before now. I did not want you to think I would do . . . this . . . with someone I believed capable of murder.” She sagged back against the wall, her hands pressed behind her. “We’ve been pretending this piece of it doesn’t matter, when it feels as though it taints everything we touch. How can you kiss me in this way, when by rights you ought to hate me for what I have done to your family?”
His mind wanted to wrap around her words like a greedy vine. Once, he would have given up his soul to hear her say such a thing—preferably in front of a magistrate. But given her timing, the confession seemed more of an irritation than a balm. She was such a contradiction in his head that it hurt to sort out which pieces he liked and which he didn’t.
He certainly liked the taste of her. The feel of her in his arms. He even liked their banter, the wickedly cunning heat of her words.
Their history he could do without.
But that history wasn’t something either of them could escape, particularly not if she was going to dredge it up now.
He took a step away from her, the most sensible thing he’d done yet tonight. He dragged two hands through his hair. The gesture did little to ease the ache she caused inside him, but he doubted running his hands through her hair was going to serve, not when she was searching his eyes, waiting for an answer he did not know how to give.
“I do not hate you, Julianne.” He realized with a small start of surprise it was the truth. “I’ll allow I ought to. But you have a habit of working your way into one’s head.”
Three days of traveling beside her had shifted his perceptions. If this was a journey to hell, hell was a far different place than he had once imagined. He’d just endured three days of torture, constantly confronted with her scent, her laughter, the curve of her lips. His head was slowly becoming desensitized to the shock of her, even as his body sharpened around the promise of having her again. He could not escape her.
And he was discovering—much to his annoyance—that somewhere along the way he had ceased wanting to.
She drew a ragged breath. “Why did you marry me, Patrick?”
An easy enough question to answer. A harder question to answer truthfully.
“I married you to save your reputation,” he told her, sticking to the original plan.
“I’ve been thinking about this for three days, and I cannot make sense of it. I cannot believe my reputation was so endangered. Nothing happened, after all. We had options other than marriage that might have ensured some respectability. Mr. MacKenzie’s wife could have come with us to Summersby, for example.”
“She is expecting, Julianne. I would not have asked such travel of her.”
“Oh.” She flushed violently. “I had thought . . .” Her voice went hushed, a trickle of a whisper he had to strain to hear above the background noise of the inn. “I had thought that meant you must have wanted to marry me.”
Comprehension was a cold bed partner in this train of logic. What was she after here? Hers were not the words of the infamous London beauty who conjured gossip simply to suit her moods, or kissed one gentleman just to spark jealousy in another. He well knew Julianne was a woman prone to theatrics—didn’t she time every bloody entrance for maximum effect? Apparently, she was prone to fanciful thinking too.
Because she had imagined his insistence on marrying her meant he felt something for her, something more potent than lack of hate.
Good sense told him to simply reassure her, whisper something appropriately sentimental. Shout, if necessary, to be heard above the din of noise still wafting up from the crowd downstairs. There was a plan to follow, laid out by James MacKenzie across the Blue Gander’s table, fueled by whisky and good intentions.
No, he didn’t hate this woman.
But that leap in logic was not the same as admitting he cared for her.
“Why does it matter?” he asked, willing himself to see the situation through her eyes. “No matter the reasons why, it is done. I married you in spite of our history. Isn’t that enough?”
She shook her head, fiercely enough to dislodge several loosely pinned curls. “I married you because of our history, and there are parts of it you do not know.” She exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that turned him cold, for all he knew there was heat in her lips. “I was not entirely truthful to the authorities, Patrick. I did not see you kill your brother. I didn’t see much of anything that happened that day.”
Chapter 11
Barely a flicker of emotion crossed his face.
Actually, that was not true. Julianne imagined she saw a reversal of emotion, the shuttering of eyes she now knew could display a remarkable amount of feeling. In an instant, he was wearing that same blank expression he had displayed in his father’s study.
The woman she had been even a week ago would not have cared. She’d viewed the world through her own distorted lens, flitting between petty intrigues with all the consistency of a hummingbird. Even her flight to Scotland had been a self-absorbed impulse, a desire to right the wrongs her impetuousness had caused his devastated family. But the experience of traveling to Scotland, and discovering a man of honor instead of a murderer, had quite clipped her wings.
“You told the magistrate you saw me aim my rifle at my brother.” His voice felt like a blow, delivered as it was in such a precise, low-pitched tone.
“I saw something.” She spread her hands helplessly. “Someone. I just . . . the truth is . . .” Her voice sank into a whisper. “I don’t see well.”
He took a decided step away from her. “Your eyes appear to function well enough when you need them to.”
“I don’t see well at a distance,” she clarified. “Things become blurred and indistinct.”
“Do you wear spectacles then?” His face was still hard, expressionless. But the clip of his words revealed an angry rhythm.
She shook her head quickly. “No.” Never that. She well knew what became of women who wore spectacles. Three London Seasons were good for something beyond husband-hunting.
His eyes narrowed. “So you lied about what you saw that day?”
“I did not divulge the entire truth, but I did not precisely lie. It all became hopelessly twisted when the magistrate interviewed me.” She shrank against the awful memory. “I was initially questioned about why I was out walking at dawn. And I suppose, in my haste to explain away those pointed questions, I led them away from me.”
He muttered a foul oath, something she didn’t ev
en understand, and reached for his trousers on the floor. “Why were you out that morning?”
His question had remarkable aim, and she felt far too clumsy to dodge it. “I was following you. I thought at that hour I might find a chance to speak with you. Privately.”
His face hardened. “Of all the stupid—there was a hunting party out in the fog that morning! You could have been killed.”
Of course she realized that now. But that morning, she had been too focused on finding him and telling him to take any notice of the danger. “I hid in the folly when I heard you arguing with your brother.” She remembered crouching on her knees, her ears trained on the escalating voices.
He yanked on his trousers. “Which folly?”
“The Grecian folly, on the east lawn near the edge of the lake.” She sighed in exasperation. “You’ve already heard all of this, Patrick. I explained all of this to the magistrate, that day in the study.”
“And yet, you’ve just admitted your statement was less than accurate. You’ll forgive me if I seek a recounting of events.” He buttoned the fall of this trousers with an almost feral intensity. “How far can you see clearly?”
“Twenty feet. Possibly less.” Shame plucked at her. She had never confessed this to anyone, not even her father. “I’ve never measured,” she admitted, “but most things become smears of color and movement around that distance.”
“When you stood before the magistrate in my father’s study, you described how you watched me point my hunting rifle at my brother’s heart. How you saw me aim, re-sight, then pull the trigger. It would have been—what, a distance of at least a hundred bloody yards?”
“I saw movement,” she countered. “Someone running away, through the smoke from the rifle. And do not forget, I heard both the argument and two shots, in close succession. It was not as much of a stretch as you might imagine.”
“I assure you, my imagination is stretched to the limit, and still I cannot envision what possessed you to claim you had seen such a thing.”
A perverse part of her welcomed this man’s shift toward righteous anger—anything was better than the frozen silence he’d displayed that day in the study. “Prudence filled in the missing pieces. Your height, the color of your coat. She said she would lose her chance at a permanent position if she was forced to testify, and it was my fault she was out there—”
“Julianne.” His slow, dangerous drawl startled her as much as the question in his voice. “Who, exactly, is Prudence?”
She would have taken a step backward, had the wall of the posting house room not already been pressing against her back. She tried to remember through the fog of confusion, the doubts that had begun to choke her understanding of the events of that day, almost as soon as she’d recounted them to the magistrate. “My usual ladies’ maid is a poor traveler, and my father consented to let me use one of the maids provided by Summersby. Prudence was the maid who had been assigned to me for the week,” Julianne remembered. “She wasn’t a regular servant at Summersby, though she had hopes of being brought on permanently. I believe she had been hired to help with the house party, out of Leeds.”
“There’s another witness?” Patrick’s words seemed edged with flint, sparking dangerously.
The thought occurred to her—belatedly, perhaps—that if he’d thought to ask even a fraction of these same questions that day in his father’s study, they would not be in this position now. “Yes.” She sighed, knowing those sparks were about to come closer to the tinder of the truth. “But Prudence believes you are guilty.”
“Goddamn it!” Patrick’s hand slammed hard against the wall next to his wife’s head, startling even himself.
Blood pounded in his ears, his head, his fists. This could not be happening. He’d laid a plan, followed it through. But MacKenzie’s well-intentioned orders were unraveling like a poorly woven rug, and the pieces were coiling about his feet, thick and ropy and ready to trip him with one misstep. “You led everyone in that room to believe you were the only witness!”
“No one asked if there was someone else,” she exclaimed, lifting her chin. “The poor girl was terrified. I had the privilege of my father’s position to guard me. I thought I was doing her a kindness, and she seemed so sure of what she had seen.”
Patrick’s fingers twitched in want of something to strangle. “Tell me the truth about what happened that day. Not the truth you imagined, but the truth your maid recounted to you.” Given that this maid, this witness, might hold either the key to his hanging or his freedom, he wanted to be clear on every inglorious detail.
“She described . . .” Julianne hesitated, seeming to struggle with the distant memory. Not that he felt sorry for her. The least she could do was apply a little exertion to remembering the bloody truth. “She saw a man wearing a coat of the same color as yours, aiming his rifle at Eric.”
“A brown tweed hunting jacket?”
At her nod, he gave in to the snarl that had been simmering in his throat. “For God’s sake, that describes half the men out on the estate that morning. The maid did not even identify me by name?”
“She was so new she did not know the family well enough to understand who she saw. But I heard you, just before the shot. Arguing with your brother, your voices raised in anger.”
Patrick’s thoughts bounced off his skull for a frustrated, frenetic moment. He remembered that argument all too vividly, and hoped to God she hadn’t heard all of it. It had been the most heated argument he’d ever had with his brother, and they’d come nearly to blows with loaded rifles in their hands.
And it had been about goddamned her.
“I’ll allow I was arguing with my brother. I’ll even allow I was angry. But it was an accident, Julianne. Your maid mistook what she saw. I did not purposefully aim my rifle at my brother!”
“I believe you, Patrick. Truly, I do not think you are capable of such a thing, not now that I know you. But Prudence seemed so sure of what she had seen . . . and with her description, and the pieces of it I saw and heard myself, I felt I had the right of it.” She swallowed. “When I finally saw you up close, you were standing in your father’s study covered in blood. You looked like a killer.”
“At twenty feet, perhaps,” he told her coldly. “But I assure you, the picture would have been much different at three hundred!”
She spread her hands in a silent plea, the same hands that been fisted in his hair a few short minutes ago. It occurred to him that the possibility of returning to that place was impossible now. That, finally, sent him looking for his shirt.
“I am so, so sorry,” he heard her whisper. “I will correct this when we return to Summersby. I will tell the truth during the inquest—”
He jerked up, alarm spreading like a flame through spilled whisky. The thought of Julianne relating these details during the inquest would be a disaster. “And point them straight to the second witness, who could very well tighten the noose about my neck? My God, Julianne. I know you are impetuous, but surely you can see the only way to help me is to stay silent now.”
“But . . . how can I remain silent about this?” She threw up her hands. “If I don’t tell them the truth, you could be found guilty of murder. Because of me.”
The moment slowed down in his mind to a pulsing heartbeat of truth. “Your statement from that day is not admissible because it wasn’t provided under oath. I cannot be convicted on that, not without further testimony.” He paused, searching her eyes even as he hardened his heart. “I came to your aid in Scotland, Julianne, and married you to protect your reputation. Now I need your help. There is another way to make amends, if you really want to undo the damage you have caused.”
Her eyes shone bright with unshed tears. “I’ll do anything,” she told him, her voice close to breaking.
He stepped toward her. This, finally, was why he had married her, wasn’t it? “Perhaps the circumstances of our improper marriage might be good for something beyond protecting your reputation.” He lif
ted his hand to touch her cheek. “You cannot be compelled to testify against me if you choose not to, Julianne. They cannot force it of a wife.”
He did not add it was an expectation he had carried from the start.
For a moment he thought she was going to fit all the pieces of this damnable puzzle together and see him for the bounder he was. But her face remained a canvas of self-loathing, and he knew a moment’s relief in her perpetual self-absorption. She was too focused on her own sins to consider his. “But . . . if I stay silent,” she said, the faintest quaver to her voice, “no matter the outcome, there will always be those who believe you are guilty.”
Patrick’s hand fell away. Time to press this home, while the blade of surprise was still sharp. “Better the judgment of fools than a guaranteed trip to the gallows. I am not asking you to lie. Far from it. Without your testimony, they have no evidence. If you recuse yourself from testimony, I will owe you my life.”
She sagged against the wall, the wall he had almost taken her against not ten minutes before. He could see she was considering it. Applying that bright, whirring mind to the work of the moment. He felt guilty applying this degree of coercion. But was there any other way? She’d proven herself immune to orders. There was nothing left to do but beg.
And so he waited.
Waited to hear the words from her lips, and which direction his future would go.
“Of course.” Her words were a whisper, and then she was straightening her shoulders and nodding. “Of course. Anything. I would save you in any way I could.”
He felt a slamming relief to hear her words, and a disbelief it could be so simple to gain her acquiescence. He breathed in deeply, and the air was laced with her omnipresent scent. It called to him, tempting him to stay and bury this argument with a mindless tup. She was feeling guilty right now. Vulnerable. He could see it in her pinched features, and in the tears she held back. If he chose to resume their interrupted kiss and toss up her skirts, he had no doubt she would let him. But in the end, he knew that would make them both feel worse, not better.
Moonlight on My Mind Page 12
