by Darcy Burke
Her aunt and uncle stood side by side, Malcolm’s hand on Aunt Jenny’s shoulder. Her uncle’s stony, closed expression unnerved her, but the brilliant twinkle in her aunt’s eyes told Sophie everything she needed to know. What the others saw. What they’d assume.
William Allsop, twin flags of red on his wide, milky-white cheeks, clenched his hands into fists.
“Something the matter, Frogger?” Julian taunted.
William bit his lip.
“Go on.” Julian oozed arrogance. “Croak.”
“Have you no pride?” William snarled.
Pride? Sophie wondered, confused. She’d traded that in a while ago—for self-sufficiency and hard labor.
And then Julian’s triumphant, toothy smile provided the missing cue: William had not been addressing her. He’d spoken to Julian, who’d just made a spectacle of himself with the girl who jilted him.
“Where Miss Roe is concerned?” Julian shook his head. “I find that I do not.”
One of the onlookers—was it Laura Tidmarsh?—breathed, “Oh,” meltingly into the silence. A few of the matrons tittered.
The contented approval all around the room goaded William. “You have everything,” he accused, his voice rising in volume and pitch. “Why isn’t it enough? Why must you covet what others have? You would steal her affections, just to prove that you can—”
Julian interrupted. “You had ten years to take Miss Roe to wife. Why the delay, Old Frogger?”
“The time wasn’t right—”
“But it is now? I wonder… what… changed.”
William smacked his lips together in that amphibian way that Sophie always blamed herself for loathing, but he had no reply. He couldn’t answer honestly. Sweeping her gaze across the assembled audience, Sophie saw that they all knew the truth.
Of course they did.
Only one thing had changed in Sophie’s life—her finances. And if a woman wasn’t worth more at the altar than the purse she brought with her, well, that only made it harder to hear the truth spoken aloud.
“Julian.” Sophie spoke under her breath, pinched his arm. “Don’t do this.”
Julian held her tighter, keeping her still. “I think you had your chance,” he said to William. “I think you know when it was, and how badly you failed her.”
“You’re humiliating me,” Sophie whispered furiously.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” protested William, though the high whine of panic in his voice suggested the opposite.
“I’m talking about ten years ago,” Julian continued, his tone calm, conversational. “Miss Roe was injured. Bleeding. You found her after I did, didn’t you?”
“I did not.” Once again, the wavery note in William’s voice signaled a lie.
“I’d left to seek help for her,” Julian continued. “What did you do?”
William’s eyes darted left and right, calculating and desperate. He licked his lips with a quick dart of his wide tongue. “I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you calling me a liar?”
Julian didn’t need to. Any man who’d reached the point of asking, “Are you calling me a liar?” had fallen back on his last and final defense against discovery. A mere fig leaf, inadequate to cover his shame.
The truth opened itself to her like a trap-door. Not before her, beneath her, a dizzying, delirious drop into a world that looked like the one she’d inhabited previously, but was not the same.
“You pushed my face into the desk?” Sophie spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. No sense in pretending this was a private conversation. Julian had staged it, from beginning to end. “You found me weeping, blind with tears, and…?”
“I would never hurt you.” William held out his hands with palms outstretched. Making a spectacle of himself, as aware of their audience as Sophie.
“But you did hurt me.” Oh, God, the list of hurts: if she started, she’d be standing alone in an empty room before she finished. Her entire life had forked around this one act of senseless spite. Sophie touched her scar. “And you have hurt me every day since.”
“It wasn’t fair!” William scanned the onlookers, searching for a sympathetic face. Sophie followed his gaze. She saw Aunt Jenny biting her palm, Bettina with her little fist clenched, Peter’s hair standing practically on end. “Our marriage was all but settled until he stepped in. You forgot about me!”
“And you couldn’t stand that, could you?” Julian asked silkily. “You set out to make her hate me—and then, when you succeeded, you abandoned her.”
William folded his arms over his chest, hitching his shoulders up. “We can’t all afford to marry penniless girls.”
Silence swept the room. Sophie let it settle, not just in the onlookers but deep in her heart.
“I would have said that the least of us could manage a little pity,” she said. “But you are lower than that, aren’t you?”
The faces in the crowd, painted orange by torchlight, seemed to waver and blur. A trick of the light, or her disordered mind.
Sophie shuddered. She had to leave now, while her legs would still hold her upright. She turned to the door, walked swiftly. The roaring in her ears drowned out the murmuring that sprang up in her wake.
She had never felt lonelier in her life.
Chapter 14
She had no destination in mind, other than to find a place where she could be alone with her hurt.
It wasn’t that she’d thought so very highly of William. She hadn’t. But she’d thought she understood him. From the beginning—before her scar—she’d decided William was a certain sort of person. Uninspiring but steady, dull but reliable, weak but basically decent.
She’d felt safe with him. Not flattered or happy or excited or any of the things that she felt with Julian. Safe.
She had never been safe with William Allsop.
But she couldn’t blame him for her poor judgment. Like a man who builds his home on quicksand instead of solid stone, she had made wrong choices. Fear, forgotten during the dance, crept back to scratch at her ribs.
She should have known.
And how would she ever learn, if she didn’t have memories to sift through, if she couldn’t look back to find the signs she’d missed?
Sophie ceased her blind wandering and returned to the little office where her Uncle Malcolm and Clive—plain Mr. Swann then—had first told her that her dowry had vanished.
She had no memory of that night. None at all. When she thought back, all she saw in her mind’s eye were the words she’d written in her diary—wobbly from laudanum that the doctor had prescribed in the wake of her injury, the paper tear-stained and crinkled. She’d read and reread her own account of events so many times that it had fixed in her mind as truth.
In retrospect, she understood that Clive and her uncle must have known what was happening for some time. They’d waited until the last possible moment to tell her—hoping for a reversal of fortunes, she supposed. Her engagement had forced their hands. They’d broken the news because they had no other choice.
Her uncle had drawn her aside, separated her from the other guests. Clive had been waiting in the office, wearing his spectacles—a sign that he was acting in his professional capacity as a solicitor. Malcolm directed her to sit, Clive delivered the explanation: restrictive terms to the will, unfavorable economic conditions, nothing they could do.
In sum: she was poor.
She’d cried, so they had given her sherry to drink, and then she’d cried harder, which led to even more sherry. They’d asked her to calm down. Julian loved her, they’d soothed. He’d marry her no matter the circumstances; they’d been sure of that. She had no cause for despair, not before he’d had a chance to prove himself.
Everything would work out for the best, they’d insisted.
They didn’t understand.
Julian had been penniless. Well liked, well connected, but with pockets to let. While she, unpopular and unconventional, had been rich. S
he’d accepted his proposal of marriage with the understanding that she had something he needed, because only her fortune could make them equals.
She hadn’t doubted that Julian would marry her without a dowry. Not for a minute. He would have. Nor had she doubted that she’d go through with the wedding herself. She’d looked into the future and known what would come: hardship, resentment, her own cringing subservience to a man who outshone her in every way. But she’d loved him too much to walk away.
Malcolm and Clive had left her alone. Probably they’d gone to fetch Aunt Jenny or some other female better equipped to cope with tears. She’d flopped her arms onto the desk, intending to sob into her sleeves for a while. Instead, bleary-eyed and clumsy, she’d knocked over an open pot of ink.
Sophie advanced on the desk, trailed her fingers across the smooth surface. Still stained. At the time, that spill had felt like the final indignity. The last possible thing that could go wrong.
In retrospect, the situation hadn’t been so bad. Not then, not yet. It was what she’d done next that ruined everything. She’d picked up the empty glass inkwell and she’d thrown it at the wall. The glass had shattered. Shards had flown. Her cheek had stung, then burned. She had started to bleed.
The doorknob rattled, followed by a light slap of hard leather against wood.
“It was for the best,” said Julian from behind her. He didn’t mean her scar, obviously—so William then. His public confession.
Sophie shook her head.
“He never loved you, Sophie. You know that.”
“I never asked him to.”
Julian was silent for a moment. Then: “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t need him to love me,” Sophie replied. “I needed him to be good.”
“William Allsop is not good,” snarled Julian.
“No,” Sophie agreed, turning to face him. “It turns out that he’s not.”
Julian had a noticeable ridge along his browline. Full lips. A long face, with long, lean cheeks. The sort of face that lent itself to expressions of deep concern, like the one bent on her at just that moment. Nothing is more important than you, that look said. He could probably make a hairbrush feel like the center of the world, if he stared at it hard enough.
“And you?” Sophie asked. “Are you good?”
“No.” Julian took a step toward her. “Rarely, if ever. But I love you.”
The words were so unexpected, Sophie didn’t hear them at first. She stood dumbly, uncomprehending, waiting for the rest of his sentence. When it finally sank in that he’d stopped speaking, that she was meant to process the words I love you directed at her, she didn’t know how to react.
She felt… barren. As though her heart were a garden, and she’d spent ten years sowing salt into the only soil he could occupy there. His words had nowhere to take root.
So she let them die, unheeded.
“You always hated William.”
Julian nodded, calm, unperturbed, just as though he hadn’t said anything of note, and took another step toward her.
“Why didn’t I?” Sophie asked.
“The only things you liked about him were his faults,” Julian answered, reaching out to hook one finger over her bodice. “He never surprised you. He never frightened you. You never had to worry about falling short.”
Shame flooded her, hot and acid. “You’re wrong.”
Julian pulled with his crooked finger, dragging Sophie forward. “What you must think of me,” he murmured, lowering his head to rub his cheek against hers, smooth heated skin in one direction, the light rasp of stubble in the other. He smelled like lemons. “To prefer a man who has nothing to offer but his missing parts.”
He gripped her waist, squeezing rhythmically, and when he raised his head to meet her eyes she saw the pain in them. She felt it, the echo of a canker that had festered inside him for years. She could have pointed to the spot on his chest and said: there, I see where you hurt, right there.
She didn’t want to feel his pain. She had more than enough of her own to deal with.
“Did you think that if an injury made you a grain less beautiful, I’d want you less? That you’d surpassed my requirements by such a thin measure that a slight imperfection would diminish my love for you?” Julian snorted, his lip curling. “Or perhaps that I’d proposed to you because—what—I’d decided to make do?”
She’d thought all of those things.
“Over the last ten years, I’ve made love to women so beautiful you would weep to see them. To clever women, soulful women, sensual women.” He narrowed his eyes at her, spoke in cool, mellow tones, but Sophie could feel the anger beneath his composure. It was enormous. “I’ve lain in the bed of a courtesan who can bring a man to completion with the sound of her voice alone. And all the while, all I ever wanted was to be here again, with you.”
He took a deep breath; when he spoke again, a feral snarl roughened the silk of his voice. “I return to find you mooning over the same unworthy swine you never much liked to begin with—and yet I’m the one who doesn’t know his mind? I’m the one whose judgment can’t be trusted?”
Sophie flinched and Julian echoed the gesture, recoiling slightly before his features smoothed and brightened.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “Sorry that I blamed you for the scar. That I wouldn’t see you, or hear your explanation. I was wrong.”
“Sophie, you never need to apologize to me.” Julian brushed feather-light touches over her arms with his gloved hands, swiped at the tip her nose with the tip of his, sweet and playful. “But a kiss? You won’t deny me a kiss.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth before she could reply, circling her with his arms and massaging her back. He surrounded her with good feelings, so many small pleasures that she forgot to worry when he nibbled softly at the seam of her lips, and sighed into his embrace when he sealed their mouths together and matched the strokes of his tongue to a cascade of soothing caresses.
Sophie let her head loll back. She felt warm, drowsy, at once content and needy. Julian shifted her backward, until she bumped into the desk and half leaned, half sat atop it, and she watched with idle, detached curiosity as he tugged at her bodice. Cool air hit her breasts, freed from constriction, but she only had eyes for Julian as his face went slack with awe. Awe. Plain as day.
He removed his kid gloves, gestures neat and precise. Laid one glove on top of the other, smoothed both with one stroke of his palm, and placed the pair on the desk behind her. He glanced up at her, a little wry, but his hands trembled when he lifted them.
He cupped her breasts, palms soft and damp, flicked the tips of her nipples with his thumbs. Sophie gasped.
Julian’s lips parted, but no words came out. Instead, he took hold of her waist and lowered his head to suckle. Sophie made a small noise of pleasure. In response Julian set to work with his hands again—he squeezed the nipple of the breast neglected by his mouth, massaged the nape of her neck, nudged her slippers off her feet.
She threaded her fingers through his spun gold hair. Crisp and cool, it tickled the skin between her fingers, the hollow of her palm.
Julian paused in his ministrations. “Keep doing that.”
In response, she urged him toward her other breast. She’d missed this. So much.
“Hold this,” he instructed, and she looked down groggily to see that he’d folded her skirt up to her waist in neat little pleats, exposing her silk stockings and red garters, the white skin of her thighs. She stared, startled out of her stupor by the sight of her own nakedness, while Julian dropped to his knees.
“Julian?”
“I want to.” He stroked her inner thighs, tangling his fingers in the curls at their apex. He regarded her sex with the same worshipful awe that had so stunned her a minute before. His expression was open, unselfconscious, utterly absorbed. A gift, all on its own. “I want to.”
Sophie didn’t reply. Julian took that as acquiescence, nestling his head between h
er thighs. He knew just what to do, letting long strokes of his tongue give way to concentrated licking and sucking.
Her first peak came quickly—too quickly to enjoy, almost. He didn’t even pause, urging her on again, and this time she had to bite her palm to stifle the keening, desperate noises that rose up from her belly. She writhed, bucking against his grip while he held her down.
And as the second climax seized her, as she shuddered and her muscles went rigid, she almost hated it.
She lay flat on her back, sprawled across the desktop, limp and exhausted. She touched herself in solitude, but she couldn’t do what he did. She couldn’t push herself to a peak so high the sensations were almost unendurable, couldn’t hold herself there when her fingers stiffened and fumbled. She couldn’t bring oblivion to herself.
Oh, she wanted to wallow and soak in the afterglow, happy and content forever. She hardly knew where she was until Julian brushed the hair out of her face and smiled down at her. He could have been a ministering angel, lit by an inner glow that poured out of him and into her, an eternal spring, giving, replenishing.
“Do you want me…?”
“Shh.” He pressed a finger over her lips, silencing her. “I don’t want anything.”
Sophie smiled groggily, raising a clumsy hand to touch Julian’s cheek. “This can’t be real.”
“It could be.” Julian covered her hand with his own, holding it tight against his skin. “It could be like this between us, always.”
Sophie’s smile drained away; awareness replaced the drowsy contentment that had made her limbs so deliciously heavy and lax.
“Shh,” he said again, shaking her skirts loose and helping her to sit. He righted her bodice, tidied her hair, while Sophie stared blankly into the dimmest corner of the room.
“Did you just propose to me?”
“Yes.” Julian dropped to a squat in front of her, forearms resting casually on his knees. “But I don’t want an answer yet.”
Sophie shook her head, trying to clear it. “You accused me of murder.”
