Page 77 of A Deal with the Broken Duke
He turned away from her and looked out across the grounds.
“But that’s not the way the world works,” she continued. “Bad things can happen to any of us at any time, no matter what we do.”
“You don’t know anything more about the world than I do,” he said.
“I never said I did. But… my mother died too, Harry. I know what it’s like to lose someone and wonder what you did to deserve it. You didn’t do anything to deserve it. It didn’t happen because of you. It was just bad luck. Just a lot of very bad luck, that’s all.”
Harry closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.
“I can’t believe you hated me.”
“It was never you I hated.” She sighed. “I know that now. It was just… the way you made me feel.”
“I never thought the things about you that you’re describing. I never would have come up with that nickname for you if I had known it made you feel bad.”
She nodded slowly. “I suppose you couldn’t have known,” she acquiesced. “It had more to do with the way my mother acted towards me, as if I wasn’t good enough. Pretty enough. As if I needed to change myself so that gentlemen would notice me or care about me. And then you came along and told me that I had changed from the way you remembered me—”
“And you thought I was confirming what your mother had said.” He shook his head. “It was never that way for me. I noticed you now because you’ve grown up. That’s all it is.”
“But you don’t want me.”
He looked at her.
Juliet couldn’t believe she was finally saying all this out loud. She hated herself for doing it. She didn’t want to make herself vulnerable to Harry like this. She’d sworn she wouldn’t give him the power to break her heart. But she couldn’t hold the words back any longer. She felt as if she would choke on them.
“You don’t want me,” she repeated. “I know you don’t, Harry. You only wanted anything to do with this courtship as long as you could tell yourself it wasn’t real. If you ever thought things were becoming serious, you would have run away.”
“That’s not because of you, Juliet.” His voice was full of exasperation. “For God’s sake! Do you still not see how I feel about you?”
The words stopped her heart. “What?”
“I’ve been falling in love with you since we started this,” he said quietly.
“No—no, you haven’t. You can’t have been.”
She had thought the worst thing she could feel was rejection. She had thought there could be nothing worse than confessing her feelings for him and having him tell her that he didn’t return those feelings.
That felt foolishly naive now.
This was worse. This was so much worse.
Because it didn’t matter how he felt. She was under no illusion that was going to change anything. No matter what he felt for her, there was still the curse. He wouldn’t allow anything real to happen between them while the curse stood in the way.
“I love you,” he confessed again. “I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do.”
“Well, stop. We can’t have these feelings for each other, Harry.”
“You have them too, then?”
“It doesn’t matter! You know it doesn’t matter.”
But he was reaching out for her again, and this time, when he took her hand, she didn’t even want him to let her go.
“You’ve always been such fun,” he told her. “So witty. So entertaining. There’s never been anyone like you. And I always thought of you like a sister. But now that I see the young lady you’ve become, I just can’t think of you that way anymore, Juliet. I can’t.”
