Page 31 of A Deal with the Rebellious Marquess
There was a flare of alarm in her eyes; she was rearing back even as he was reaching forward. ‘You should not want that,’ she warned. ‘I lose everyone I love.’
Did she love him?
He knew she meant it as a caution, but his heart sang at the implication. He would not press her on it. She would only retreat, only throw up her guard. He would instead quietly treasure the near-admission and the knowing that he was not in this struggle alone. But her next words tore at his heart. ‘I sometimes wonder if I deserve the right to love again. I bungled it so badly with Adam, with my aunt and uncle.’
Anger sparked in him on her behalf. ‘Why ever would you think that?’
She sat up and he sat up, too, ready to reach for her, to comfort her. ‘My aunt and uncle gave me everything, every advantage, treated me as their own, and I disappointed them by marrying down, by not advancing the family.’
He took her hand. ‘Love doesn’t work that way. If there is any fault it is theirs. Love is not conditional. If it were, I would have stopped loving Orion a long time ago. He was a difficult brother and I failed him, too. I wasn’t ready to be a father and brother to a teenage boy. But we’ve forgiven each other for our shortcomings.’ He paused. Adam was a different matter. ‘It is all right your marriage wasn’t perfect. How could it have been when people aren’t perfect?’
‘I was selfish. I wanted more than he could give,and I was not content with that.’
He would not let her get up from this blanket believing that. Jasper pushed a strand of loose hair behind her ear and tipped her face towards his. He wanted her to look at him when he told her the truth he saw. ‘He could give less and so you gave more.’ Jasper called on everything she’d told him about her years with Adam Griffiths. ‘He wanted to work and so you worked alongside him. He went to the paper daily and so did you. You wanted to be a collector of stories, but you made yourself into a reporter to fit his world. You gave up your lifestyle, your ambitions, your family, your dreams for him. That is not selfish.’
If anyone had been selfish it had been Adam Griffiths. The man had either been selfish and arrogant or he’d been entirely oblivious to his wife’s sacrifices. ‘Worst of all, Fleur, you’restilldoing it. You’re running a newspaper syndicate, wearing yourself to a nub trying to overcome his debt. Where is your life in that? What, my darling, do you want? When do you reach out your hands and take it?’
For the second time since they’d arrived at Rosefields, Fleur Griffiths was crying. He had her in his arms, consoling her, but he did not regret sharing the hard truths in an attempt to reshape the narrative she carried in her head. When she told her story he wanted her to tell it right—with herself as the strong, resilient, selfless woman at its core. And he wanted to be there in that story beside her.
‘You mustn’t say such things, Jasper. I hurt the people I love and I will hurt you, too—you know it’s true.’ There it was again, that implication that she loved him.
‘No, I don’t know that,’ he argued fiercely. ‘You haven’t hurt me yet, nothing unrecoverable at least. I have a new set of tumblers on order,’ he tried to joke. But he knew what they faced. The trials to date were nothing compared to the last trial that loomed before them. Still, they had a good record of overcoming differences. Just maybe, they’d overcome this one, too. And they were stronger now—surely that worked in their favour as well.
‘I don’t want this to be over,’ she whispered against his shirt.
‘Then it won’t be.’ He hugged her close. He would find a way to prove to her that she deserved a second chance at love, that they deserved each other even as their personal Armageddon loomed.
She drew a shaky breath. ‘We can’t get over it if we don’t go through it.’ By ‘it’ she meant the bank, Orion’s records. So the time had come. Their Rubicon called.
He nodded, his grip about her tightening. ‘We’ll go tomorrow.’ Then they’d be on the other side of it. They’d know what their future looked like. He’d not come out on this picnic imagining it to be their last before...the bank. Perhaps it was better this way, to have the decision made without planning and posturing, without argument and formal consideration but instead here in the quiet of the afternoon, after picking strawberries and talking of childhood. The biggest moments of one’s life didn’t always come with a blare of trumpets but on the whisper of suggestion.
‘It will be all right, Fleur. We will find a way to survive it.’ He breathed the words into her hair as thunder rumbled in the distance, presaging a summer storm as if the weather understood just how momentous tomorrow would be.
Chapter Seventeen
How would she survive the coming days without losing everything? Without losing herself, without compromising her sense of justice, her task, the newspaper, but most of all, without losing Jasper? And always the answer kept creating the same equation. To save Jasper, she would lose herself, sacrifice justice and perhaps the papers along with it. To keep all she held dear, Jasper would have to be surrendered. There was simply no way to have it all. The realisation of that created a most impossible dilemma, one that had not existed a month ago.
Fleur looked up from her writing at the library table to sneak a glance at him at his desk, wire-rimmed glasses and all, his own gaze intent on his own letter writing. He’d rolled his sleeves up a while ago to spare them from errant ink blots and his forearms with their sprinkling of dark hair were on masculine display. She’d never found rolled-up shirtsleeves and exposed forearms particularly sexy before, but on Jasper they were proving to be quite the aphrodisiac and quite the impediment to the last of her evening work.
She could not give in and set aside her work for another day. She must finish this article tonight. There was no guarantee that tomorrow she’d be back here at Rosefields enjoying its hospitality. In fact, chances of returning here seemed slim regardless of tomorrow’s outcome. Tomorrow morning they would go to the bank and call for Lord Orion’s accounts. Tomorrow they would know what they’d come to find out. Tomorrow, their affair would end.
Jasper glanced up, catching her staring. ‘Is there something you want?’ he drawled. Indeed there was. She wanted him. She wanted this damned quest to be over. She wanted for there to be a way between them that wouldn’t cost her everything and he the same. She wanted more of this, of days spent side by side, of evenings in the garden talking of everything from politics to the personal, of nights spent in bed making love. Did he want that, too? Wasn’t he worried at all about tomorrow?
Fleur set aside her pen and walked towards the desk. ‘There is something I want.’ She gave a wicked smile and came around to his side. This might be her last chance. She’d spent the afternoon since they’d returned from the picnic thinking of every ‘last’: last luncheon in the countryside, last supper, last walk in the garden. Had he spent the time that way, too? She hiked her skirts up to her thighs and straddled his lap.
‘What are you doing, Minx?’ He was startled, but pleasantly so. She could see the flames of intrigue lighting in his eyes. She’d come to know those eyes so well in the past weeks: how they glowed in interest, darkened with desire, narrowed with disapproval, how they became coals when he was angry, a deep amber when aroused. It would be easy for someone to mistake one for the other.
She wriggled closer. ‘It would be cliché to say I’ve wanted to do this since I first saw you...’ she reached for his glasses, removing them gently ‘...so we’ll say I’ve wanted to do this for a while.’
He slid down slightly in the chair to better accommodate her. ‘What is that, exactly?’
‘To take off your incredibly sexy glasses and run my fingers through your hair while sitting on your lap.’ She moved against him, feeling him rouse beneath her hips.
‘Since the first day we met? Really?’ Teasing lights glimmered in his eyes. He rested his hands at her hips. ‘I thought you didn’t like me.’
‘I thought you were over-confident. It didn’t mean I wasn’t interested.’ She pressed a kiss to his lips. How was it possible to fall so fast and not realise it? She’d fallen fast before, with Adam. She thought she would have recognised the signs. Or perhaps shehadrecognised the signs—the heat between them, the mental and physical chemistry of being together on her part as well as his—and explained them away as something else—an antidote for loneliness, nothing more, because for themtobe more was a frightening prospect that brought risk and uncertainty at an already uncertain time.
Was this what it had been like for Emma and Antonia? Only they had happy endings to their stories. She wouldn’t be so lucky. There was no happy ending for her. She knew. She’d run the numbers on this. One of them would be right and the other would be very wrong. That would be a chasm too wide for a relationship to overcome even if they managed to survive it on a professional level.
