Page 76 of A Deal with the Broken Duke
“Yes, and I’ve always hated it.”
“But you never told me that. I thought it was a joke we shared.”
“How could I tell you? You were so much older than I was. I was a child, Harry. I thought I was being ridiculous taking offence at it. And then, when I was older, I just thought you wouldn’t care. I thought you would laugh at me if I told you how it bothered me.”
“I would never have laughed at you for that. But I wish I had known you didn’t like it.” He tried to close the distance between the two of them.
Juliet stepped away. “I don’t know how you could imagine that I would like it.” She huffed. “I knew what it meant, Harry. You were mocking the way my cheeks puffed out when I was younger. You were calling me ugly.”
“I was never calling you ugly!”
“Well, you were calling me chubby, which may as well be the same thing to a young girl!”
“I wasn’t,” he insisted. “I mean… All right, yes, I was talking about the shape of your face, but it was just… I thought you were cute, Juliet. I thought you were an adorable little girl. I didn’t realize that I was focusing on something you felt insecure about. I didn’t know that.”
“How could you not have known that?”
“Well, why would I? It wasn’t as if I looked at you and thought you were too chubby. I just thought your face had an appealing shape to it.”
This was hard to believe. “What about all the times since we’ve been back in each other’s lives that you’ve told me how much I’ve changed and how pretty I am now?”
“You are pretty,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“You were saying it as a comparison. You were saying that I was ugly when I was younger.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Then, what did you mean?”
“You really don’t know?”
Juliet folded her arms across her chest and frowned, giving no reply.
He sighed. “Juliet… the way I feel when I look at you now… of course I didn’t see you this way when we were children. How could I have? You were a little girl. I didn’t think of you as someone I could have feelings for. It never occurred to me that I might until I saw you as a lady for the first time. When I say you’ve changed, what I mean isn’t that you’ve gone from being ugly to being beautiful. What I mean is that you’ve gone from being a child to being a lady. I mean that I see you completely differently now. How could I not?”
Juliet didn’t know what to say.
She wanted very much to believe his words, to let herself think that he meant exactly what he said. She wanted him to genuinely think she was beautiful.
But how could she let go of the past so easily?
“You don’t know what it was like,” she murmured. “Being a child and hearing you say those things about me. Calling me that name.”
“What was it like?”
“I hated the sight of you,” she grumbled. “Every time you came around our house, I wanted to run and hide because I knew you were likely to say something that would embarrass me or cause me pain. You always did. And nobody ever stopped you. Nobody ever told you not to speak to me like that. I was so humiliated. I thought I was just a joke to you.”
“I never knew.”
“Maybe it’s easier to tell you now.”
“Why? Why is it easier?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe because I know something about you now too.”
“The curse.”
“I still don’t believe in it,” she maintained. “I still think it’s a story you’re telling yourself. I think you want to feel like you’re in control. You want to feel like as long as you follow a set of rules you’ve made for yourself, nothing else bad can happen to you.”
