Page 104 of A Night of Forever
A muscle in his jaw tightened, and he shook his head. “You could never guess. An innocent could not begin to imagine the games she enjoyed. They made even me ill.”
More than sorry she was ever born,Isobel thought. “I only care because she hurt you.”
“God.” His eyes glittered. “I love you.”
He blinked, lifted his chin, and drew in a breath. “In the end, once I realized that she had no intention of helping me, I decided to leave. Jonathan needed a partner to go to Brazil with him. He had a crazy idea of searching for diamonds. He’d been told of an area to the south where they could be found on the ground. I thought his scheme far-fetched, but I was desperate to leave Paris.”
Dear heaven. No wonder he felt so guilty about Jonathan’s death. Jonathan had helped him escape.
“Juliette—her name was Juliette—discovered I planned to leave her. You once asked me what the scar on my buttock was. It’s not a scar. It’s a brand. She heated a gold franc and burned the image onto my skin so I would never forget what I had become. Her slave.”
Tears filled Isobel’s eyes. Tears of compassion. Of helpless fury for a young man in the talons of such a woman. “I’m so sorry she did that to you. It must have hurt dreadfully. But you beat her—you survived.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Did I? Sometimes I wonder. The pain of the wound faded, but the disgrace of being her plaything stays with me. The brand is a constant reminder of the type of man I am.”
“No.” Of this she was absolutely certain. “The type of man you are does not have to be dictated by a brand or decreed by the mistakes you made in your youth. You are a man formed by the obstacles you have overcome, by the quality of those who truly love you, the ones who stand with you, and the ones who would give their lives for you.”
She was getting through to him. She sensed it. Saw it in the set of his shoulders, the crease forming between his brows. “Your fellow Libertine Scholars see what I see—a man who is good, kind, loyal, and totally worthy of being loved.”
Now his eyes didn’t glitter with unshed tears. He let them form, let them fall. “Thank you for saying that.”
“I say it,” she said gently, “because I mean it.”
They sat in silence as he fought with his emotions. When Isobel thought he had mastered himself, she asked the obvious question.
“How did you escape her?”
Arend did not hesitate. “Jonathan staked out her house. Then he showed me where to climb out an attic window and escape over the roof. Of course it wasn’t straightforward. She and a gang of her thugs came after me as I made my way to the boat. The only reason I escaped was that another powerful man—one she’d cheated out of a great deal of money—used that opportunity to attack her.”
Isobel could not be sorry. “She was killed?”
Arend nodded. “I tried to get to her, to stop her attacker, but one of her own men knocked me down. I was only partially conscious, but I saw her die. The man slit her throat. Luckily Jonathan arrived and dragged me away. We made the boat. The rest is history. Her death was my fault.”
Isobel didn’t understand. “Why on earth was her death your fault?”
He let go of her hand and rose to stand at the window. For a few moments he gazed through the glass and down into the street.
“Because,” he said finally, “if I hadn’t tried to leave that night, she would not have been near the docks. Her enemy would not have been able to ambush her.”
“What utter rubbish,” Isobel snapped. “Even I know that no one deals in the seedy underworld without expecting a knife between the ribs at some point. If Juliette hadn’t died at her enemy’s hand that night, it would have been on another.”
“I know that.” He swung to face her. “It’s not really her death that eats at me. It’s the fact that I let her use me for so long. The things I did. The things I allowed her to do to me. Victoria was right. I let Juliette make me her slave. I’m soiled, dirty.”
“No, Victoria was wrong.” She crooked her finger at him and patted the spot next to her. He came to her and carefully eased onto the bed beside her.
“We all make mistakes—that’s how we learn right from wrong. Making mistakes and overcoming obstacles are how we learn what is important to us, and what sort of people we want to become.” And she would overcome the obstacle of his self-loathing because it was important to her. To both of them.
“I don’t think you’ve ever made a mistake in your life,” he murmured.
He was definitely wrong there. “Oh, I made the biggest one of all. I expected you to trust me when you didn’t know me. I now understand that trust is earned. It’s not a right. I should have simply loved you with no conditions.”
He huffed out a half laugh. “I didn’t make it easy for you to love me. I kept you at arm’s length.”
“You did trust me, though. And by believing in my innocence, you saved both my father and me.”
Those beautiful eyes went sober. “I did have a moment of doubt. But that’s only because, once again, I was afraid of being made to look a fool. Pride is definitely a sin of mine.”
“Only one of many,” she teased. “I do love it when you sin with me.”
