His arms dropped to his sides. “I know you don’t have any reason to, but do you think… Is there any way you can trust me? Please, Charlotte. I won’t hurt you again.”
Charlotte stared at him, puzzled. He didn’t understand. Hewouldhurt her again, and he didn’t need a weapon to do it. Hewasthe weapon, and his task was to punish her. “But you will. It’s what you’re meant to do.”
His brows drew together. “I’m meant to hurt you? I don’t understand.”
No, he didn’t, did he? But how strange. If he didn’t understand, then why had he come at all? “Why are you here, Captain?”
He spread his arms wide, a helpless gesture, unlike him. He seemed not to know what to do with his limbs. “To bring you to Bellwood.”
“I’m sorry you came all this way, Captain, only to have to turn back again.”
He shook his head, his anxious gaze steady on her face. “No. I won’t turn back, Charlotte. I won’t leave you here alone.”
“Not leave? But of course you’ll leave, Captain. You can’t stay here with me. It’s not proper, and in any case I’m meant to stay here alone.” She frowned a little as she considered this. “Yes, I feel sure that’s right. It’s not a proper punishment if I have someone here with me.”
Julian’s face went grayer with every word she spoke. “Is that what this is about? Punishment? Are you trying to punish me for what I said, what I did? Do it. I deserve it. But don’t do this to yourself, Charlotte. You haven’t done anything wrong. Don’t punish yourself because I was cruel to you.”
Punishhim?Again, how odd. Why should he think so? “No, you still don’t understand, Captain. Don’t you see? You pretended to care for me, and I pretended, too. I pretended I could learn to love Hadley. I didn’t realize it was a lie at the time, but it hardly matters. I lied to him, and then you lied to me. A liar is punished with a lie. It’s all just as it should be.”
She’d taken pains to speak politely, but for some reason her words made him cringe. He took a step toward her. “You think this is your fault.”
Oh. Now she began to see the problem. He believed it was his fault she’d come to Hadley House, because he’d said all those cruel things to her in the garden. Well, it couldn’t have been pleasant for him to have to be the one to deliver those truths, but someone had to do it. “And you think it’s yours, but it isn’t. Try and see it this way, Captain. My family struggled for months to get me to leave London, and they all failed. You succeeded because you told me the one truth I couldn’t ignore.”
He went paler still and… Oh dear, was thatfearon his face? Whatever ailed him?
“The one truth.” He cleared his throat, but his next words were strained, hoarse. “What truth is that?”
Didn’t he remember? She remembered everything about that moment as if it had just happened. His face, and his tone when he’d said it. So much contempt. At the time she’d shrunk from him, from the disgust in his eyes, but that was before she understood it was all for her own good. “You said nothing but heartache can come—”
An odd catch in her throat suddenly stopped her words. It made no sense her heart should choose this moment to swell as if bruised, to rush into her throat and silence her. She wasn’t saddened by what he’d said. Oh, she’d been devastated at the time, of course, but she wasn’t…anything now. Not anymore. So much easier that way. “You said nothing but heartache can come from wanting a woman like me.”
Julian went rigid for a heartbeat, but then his entire body slumped, his shoulders hunching into his chest. He covered his eyes with his hands as if it pained him to look at her, and when he let them fall, his face was slack, ashen. “I should never have said such a thing, not only because it’s cruel, but because it’s a lie. Please, Charlotte. I would do anything not to have said it.”
Charlotte felt a slight shift in her chest, a vague twinge of sympathy. “But you had to say it, and it’s not a lie at all. You, Hadley, Devon. It’s rather an incriminating trail of disappointment, heartbreak, and death. Don’t you agree?”
“No,” he whispered. “But I can understand why you might think so, after—” He broke off, and for a moment he seemed not to know what to say, then, “You didn’t make those things happen, Charlotte. Those things—they happenedtoyou, notbecauseof you.”
Dear God, he was naïve. “You mean to say they were simply bad luck.”
A glimmer of hope lit his eyes. “Bad luck, yes.”
She gave him a pitying smile. “There’s no such thing as luck, Captain. Only justice.”
The glimmer died. “Do you really believe that?”
“Don’t you?”
A strange look passed over his face then, one she couldn’t decipher. He didn’t answer the question, but asked instead, “Do you remember the night we first met, Charlotte? Before things went wrong. Before Hadley.”
“Yes.” She remembered, but she wished she didn’t, because she didn’t want to think on it.
Now he was looking into her eyes. “I lied to you then. I swore I didn’t seduce you in the garden that night to aid Cam’s scheme to blackmail Ellie into marriage. Do you remember?”
“I remember. What of it?”
“My lie set in motion this entire nightmare—our estrangement, your marriage to Hadley, his death, and every heartbreak that followed. If anyone should be punished it’s me, not you. That would be justice.”
But you have been punished, in the most terrible way a person can be punished. You simply don’t know it.
