“That my mam was right. She told me that folk like her and me, we didn’t have lucky stars above us. She said that if I wanted to survive, I would have to find my way in the dark.”
“As a boy, wasn’t that frightening to hear?” Pippa asked with a shiver.
Given the other terrors he’d encountered in the stew’s dark alleyways, not really.
He shrugged. “She wasn’t wrong. I’ve found success in the shadows, and the dark is where I belong. But you, sweeting…you belong in the light. When you wed Longmere, I told myself it was for the best.”
Even though it had hurt like hell, and he’d drunk himself into a stupor for days afterward.
“It wasn’t for the best,” she said.
At the sudden lost look in her eyes, steel bands tightened around Cull’s chest. What he resented about his fate wasn’t his own travails. It was his failure to protect the people he cared about.
“If I had known how he would treat you—the pain he would ultimately cause—I would have stepped in,” Cull said in a low voice. “Done something.”
“What could you have done?” Pippa blinked at him, her gaze becoming focused and hard. “No one could have stopped me from following what I thought was my heart’s desire: not my family, not you. I had to learn the lesson the hard way.”
“What lesson?”
“The difference between love and infatuation.”
Cull went still, remembering what she’d said about crying for herself, not her husband. He had thought she meant that she was moving through her grief. But had she meant something else?
She drew a breath and carried on. “I’m beginning to see that I was in love with theimageof Longmere—of the passionate, romantic artist—and not the man he actually was. How foolish is that?”
“Sunshine.” Cupping her jaw, Cull felt her trembling tension. “You’re not foolish. You were young, and Longmere…let’s face it. He was popular with the ladies for a reason.”
“He mostly talked about himself.” The words left her in a rush. “He wanted everything his way. In our daily life, in…our bedchamber. Whenever I tried to initiate anything, especially of a marital nature, he found it unbecoming. I bent over backward to please him, and it was never enough.”
The bleeding popinjay is lucky he’s dead.
Yet Cull knew his fury wouldn’t help her; she had enough of that aimed at herself already.
“Well,” he said after a pause. “Maybe you were abitfoolish.”
She laughed, just as he hoped she would.
“That is what I like about you, Cull.” The beguiling sparkle was back in her eyes. “You listen to me, and you’re honest. When I’m with you, I feel like I’m…enough.”
God, her vulnerability wrecked him. Made his chest melt and his cock rear to attention. Only Pippa had ever stirred these contradictory needs in him: he wanted to comfort her and screw her senseless at the same time.
“You’re more thanenough,” he murmured. “You’re everything a man could want.”
“Even you?” The corners of her lips tipped up in invitation.
“Especially me.” As he leaned in to take what she offered, she brushed her fingertips over his mask.
“I’ve laid myself bare,” she whispered. “Don’t you think you ought to do the same?”
Resistance gripped him, and he hated it. Hated his vanity. Hated that facing an army of cutthroats was less intimidating than exposing his ugliness, even though she’d already seen his scars. But that had been in a dark carriage. Here, the lanterns cast a bright glow, and even the heavens seemed to be mocking him: the fog had melted away to a sky of stars, raining their light down through the glass.
Blasted stars would choose now to show up.
“Now who is being foolish?” Her dare was sweetly playful.
Exhaling, he untied the mask and threw it aside. He tried to keep his expression nonchalant even though his chest pounded as if he’d run for miles. He studied her for any sign of disgust…but she only smiled.
“There you are, Timothy Cullen,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”
