Page 69 of A Scandalous Kind of Duke

“I never said you weren’t good enough for me,” he ground out.

She waved an arm, loose and uncontrolled. “Of course you neversaidit. You’re too well-mannered for that. But oh, ‘my family, my duty, my honor’—it amounts to the same thing, when you speak to someone low-born like me. Tossing me aside as unworthy of a duke’s heir, making it clear you’ve no place for me in your life.”

His blood iced.

His throat tightened.

No. Dear heaven, no. All these years she believed he spurned her because she wasn’tgood enough? Juno Bell, the most wonderful person he had ever met?

Realization slammed into him like a fist. He had been so young, trying to do the right thing, and instead he had broken even more than he knew.

Not once had it occurred to him that she might have believed he thought of her as inferior. He’d been too busy battling with himself, torn between his family and his duty on the one hand, and his feelings for Juno on the other. Cursing himself for his weakness in meeting her each morning when he had known he must not.

Too late the pieces fell together. Her flinty refusal to even think of her parents, because they had rejected her; ofcourseshe had dealt the same to him. She had been young and hurt; she had coped the only way she knew how. And he had been young and selfish, and so wrapped up in his own struggle he had never dreamed she might have experienced their conversation so very differently to him.

Now, ten years later…

I do not aspire to be a duchess.

I can love you without wanting to marry you.

Finally he understood how his reaction in the meadow had hurt her, but it was too late.

Ten years too late.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “I never thought you less than me. Never. I was trying to do the right thing by everyone, but then I…” He sighed. “You must believe me.”

He could not bear to tell her the full story, this sensitive secret he had nursed so long.

But neither could he bear her thinking that she had earned the poor opinion of anyone on this Earth. He especially could not bear her thinking that of him.

She pulled the sheet up to her shoulders. “Why should I believe you?”

“It’s the truth.”

She scoffed. “You try to be kind, but this is—”

“The truth,” he repeated. “I came to Vienna to ask you to marry me.”

* * *

“No.”

The denial came instantly, thoughtlessly, to Juno’s lips. The world shifted, as if the bed were on a ship and she was far out at sea.

She stared at his back, the muscles flexing under his shirt as he sat on the bed, but her mind was in another place and time. She could picture him still, Leo at twenty-one, walking with her among the autumn trees in Vienna, while she hastened to assure him she no longer loved him and thought of him as only a friend.

How had he looked when she said that? She did not remember; she did not know.

“No,” she repeated. “You… You were touring. The Grand Tour. You were visiting your mother’s relatives, all your royal cousins in Prussia.”

He raked a hand through his hair. “That was only an excuse to travel. I left England the day I turned twenty-one. Old enough to marry without anyone’s permission.”

“But you…” She gripped the sheet, as if it was all that kept her from flying away. “In the meadow, you said we had no future. We could not be together in any way.”

Rueful laughter huffed out of him. “I was trying to do the right thing. I argued with myself for months after that. Then I argued with my father and my mother. They both insisted I had been right to turn you down, as I should never encourage affections from an unsuitable lady. But I decided they were wrong, we were all wrong, the whole world was wrong. By then, you’d already left England. I waited until I reached my majority to ensure the marriage was legal, as my parents would most certainly not agree.”

“You…” She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. “I never knew.” Her eyes flew open. “You never wrote.”

---