“But you stilldothink about it,” Ellis said, smoothing his thumb across the top of her hand.
She nodded and blinked at the tears that sprung to her eyes. “I do.”
He drew in a long breath. Here he’d been telling himself all night that he needed to separate from this woman. That backing away was his best way to protect her, to protect himself. That was still true. But in this moment, it was also impossible.
“It’s my fault he found you that day,” he said softly. When she sat up straighter and made to argue, he lifted a hand to silence her. “I brought him into your life. You and your family never would have gotten near him but formyactions. My failings. It only seems fair that I hear what you need to say, Juliana. So say it if it would help. I’ll take it.”
She stared at him for a long moment. This woman had been willing to share her body with him, but to share her heart? Her mind? Her past? He could see she was trying to decide if he was good enough to do those things.
And he found himself longing for them even more than he had longed to bury himself in her not so long ago.
At last she let out her breath in a shuddering sigh. “Anne and I were looking for Rook,” she said softly, her voice strained and cracked. “She was desperate to find him. I knew she loved him then, more than she had even admitted. And I feared for her to love a man like that. I didn’t know him at that moment, of course. Just what he seemed to be.”
Ellis flinched. Rook, had been his partner in crime once. They’d run the streets together for years before his bad behavior had pushed his cousin away. He was happy for him now, to be settled with a woman who loved him as fiercely as Anne seemed to do. For him to be out of the life for good. Not many got out alive.
But Rook was the better of the two of them. And if Juliana had hesitated about him, Ellis knew what that meant in the long run when it came to how she felt abouthim.
“Rook had gone looking for me,” Ellis said.
She nodded. “Yes, but we didn’t know that. We came into Harcourt’s study and there was…” Her voice shook and she cleared her throat. “Winston Leonard was there. He was looking for the treasure you and Solomon had stolen. He mistook me for Anne because I was dressed more extravagantly. Because she was dressed simply, he thought her to be Thomasina.”
“The confusion of being triplets,” Ellis said, hoping the interruption would help her. “I would always know you, Juliana.”
She shook her head. “Well, I’m scarred now. It’s a bit of a cheat.”
“I’d know you with your back turned,” he whispered, and it wasn’t a lie.
She blushed, but then gathered herself. “Anne tried to tell him the truth of our identities, but he didn’t believe her. He was determined to take me, thinking it was her, and exact his revenge. When he threatened to kill who he thought was Thomasina, as revenge on Harcourt, I told him Anne was actually…that she was me. After all,JulianaShelley would be too unimportant to anyone to kill. He agreed, and that worked in our favor.”
He jerked his gaze to her at that statement. Was that how she saw herself? As unimportant? How that cut him, even though it shouldn’t have. He hardly knew her, after all, stolen moments at the masquerade aside.
She shivered. “He didn’t kill her so she could deliver his message to Harcourt and Rook, and he took me.”
He pressed his lips together, trying not to think of the part of this story he knew. About him and Rook arriving at Harcourt’s estate to hear that Juliana had been taken. At the stricken looks of her sisters. Of the terror all had felt that she would be killed. At the awful moment when Leonard had slashed her face and she’d looked toward Ellis for help. When he’d held her trembling body and felt the stirrings of something he had no right to feel.
“What did he do?” he asked, forcing himself to consider her needs in that moment, not analyze his own.
Her gaze went unfocused, and for a moment, he saw her relive those terrible moments. She swallowed hard again. “He put me on his horse. He was rough and cruel, he didn’t care if he hurt me. He seemed tolikehurting me.”
Ellis squeezed his eyes shut. The harshness didn’t surprise him, but still put red rage in his vision.
“While we rode to the hill where we were to meet Rook, he talked.” She shook her head and her voice dropped to a whisper. “All he did was talk. He talked about being double crossed by you and Solomon Kincaid. He talked about killing Solomon and how much he enjoyed it. He talked about my sisters and how foolish we were to involve ourselves with such men. And because he thought I was Anne, he talked at great length about how he would kill me in front of Rook to watch him suffer. Or kill him in front of me for the same reason.”
She recited the words, quietly and calmly. But the moment they were said, she bent her head, placed it in her hands and shook with silent sobs. The kind of crying that had been held in for a very long time and now couldn’t be contained.
He couldn’t let her weep without comforting her. It wasn’t his place and it didn’t matter. He slipped to her side of the carriage and cradled her into his body, holding her as she cried it all out, wishing with all his might that he could take that past away.
Knowing he couldn’t. All he could do was make sure those terrible moments weren’t repeated in her future. By destroying Winston Leonard before they could be. And by resisting her so she wouldn’t encounter even more danger by linking herself, even briefly, with a man like Handsome Ellis Maitland.
He pressed a kiss to her temple as her tears slowed and then subsided. She sucked in a long breath. “He tied me up when we arrived and we waited. It felt like a lifetime. He kept going on and on like he had on the ride, but I just kept thinking of the sea. I kept picturing the waves rolling in and out. I refused to listen to him. Refused to hear his cruel pleasure in what he was doing. It kept me calm until…until the end. When he called you and Harcourt from the brush and the struggle began…I knew I would die.”
He caught his breath. “Juliana.”
She shrugged. “Who would protect me? Harcourt was for Thomasina. And Rook would die for Anne. But I had no one. And then you were there, and you put yourself in harm’s way for me.”
“Some good it did,” he whispered, letting himself trace her scar for the first time with his fingertip. She caught her breath at the touch, and perhaps also at how close they were in the dim carriage.
“He would have killed me and I’m alive,” she said, shivering as he dropped his hand away. “You helped me.”
