Page 85 of The Last Duke She'd Marry
He waited for her to pull away, but she returned his frantic grip and stared up at his face. “That’s not possible.”
“But you love me.”
“Yes, I love you,” she said, as though she confessed to a crime. “I can’t help it. I could never help it. Even against my better judgment, I love you.”
He bit back a snarl of protest. “It’s not against your better judgment. I can make you happy. You can rely on me. I’ll never let you down.”
Anguish crimped her lips, and she turned ashen with distress. Damn his eyes, he should be kinder to her. He would, if he wasn’t fighting for his very life.
She made a sound of distress. “But don’t you see? That’s just what a liar would say.”
“I’m not a liar.”
“Then why did you ruin Vanessa Gould?”
Dear God, she tortured him. “I can’t tell you. It isn’t my story to share. Not to mention there’s danger to the people involved.”
The irony didn’t escape him that his only real claim to honor led the woman he adored to deride him as a man without any honor at all. Somewhere a spiteful fate was having a good laugh at his expense.
“Danger?”
His gut clenched in frustration. “I’ve said too much. Don’t ask me.”
Juliet made a half-hearted attempt to pull away. “Then we have nothing more to say to each other.”
His grasp tightened. “No, I won’t accept that.”
“You must.” She sounded weary and sad. But adamant. He came up against the invincible force of her will, just as her father had yesterday.
Evesham released a shuddering exhalation. “I haven’t always been a good man. I haven’t always done the right thing. But I’ve never let down a friend, and I’ve never broken my word. I never have, and I never will. If I did, I wouldn’t be worthy of you. Again, I plead with you to trust me. Trust me, my love. Trust me.”
That uncompromising blue gaze continued to search his face. He prayed with all his might that what she saw convinced her to relent. But when she disengaged her hands from his with a care that broke his heart, he understood that he’d lost. “I can’t.”
He knew he’d lost, and that made him want to rampage and shout and curse. But what good would that do? He tried again, even as he recognized that there was nowhere he could go from here. “You’re consigning us both to endless wretchedness.”
She bit her lip and tangled her hands in her gray skirts. “I know.”
“You won’t give me a chance?”
“I can’t,” she said again. She sounded older than her twenty-six years. “If you’ve committed this terrible sin, you’re not the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
“I’ve told you not to believe everything you’ve heard.”
Even her lips were white now. She suffered. He couldn’t doubt that. But her suffering wouldn’t shift her stubbornness. “And I’ve told you that’s just what a liar would say.”
Unable to bear that probing stare any longer, Evesham swung away to the window. He grabbed the sill and bent his head as he fought for control. “You’re wrong about me, Juliet. You’re wrong about this decision.”
“So you say.” Her response emerged dull with misery.
He sucked in a deep breath and struggled to make sense of what was happening. After all the joy and all the passion, it was over. He had to accept that.
No, no, no, his soul cried out in agony.
But he needed to learn to silence his soul. And his heart. And all his hopes.
Juliet wouldn’t have him, so he must go on without her. If, right now, that sounded worse than a death sentence, so be it.
Blindly he stared out the window, as he struggled to find the will to say the next word, take the next step. Without his beloved, everything seemed so futile. Why bother?
