“Why America?” she asked instead.
“Because it is far. Because a man may reinvent himself far more easily across the oceans.”
“And what shall you reinvent yourself as?”
The question seemed to find him unguarded. “I suppose… a man who does not spend his life lying by omission.”
Jasper looked away towards the window. The late afternoon light lay grey upon his face, sharpening the line of his cheek and making him look almost tired. No—not almost. He was very tired indeed, as though the effort of being Jasper Deverell had become, for once, too heavy to wear attractively. “There is something you ought to know,” he said.
“About America?”
“About me.”
She waited, wondering what on earth his horrid secret might be.
“I have had lovers,” he said.
“I assumed as much.”
“Not only women, Charlotte.”
Lottie was not surprised in the least, but she kept her silence, for she felt he had much more to say.
“I have desired men,” he continued. “Loved, perhaps, though not in the manner poets would make noble. Wanted, certainly. Enough that if the wrong person knew of it, my name, my future, perhaps even my life, might be made rather less secure than it presently appears.”
At her silence, he gave a small, bitter smile. “You see? I know something of cages.”
Lottie reached out to take his hand, feeling rather foolish.
All this time, she had envied his freedom, for he was male and noble and wealthy, and every door was not only opened but built for him. And perhaps freer than she, but not entirely. No one was ever entirely free.
“Oh, Jasper.”
His fingers tightened around hers at once, as though he had expected many things from her—wit, shock, curiosity, perhaps even disgust—but not tenderness. “You do not mind?”
She almost laughed. “Mind? That you have a heart capable of wandering into inconvenient places? Of wanting and loving more than this world allows? I should be the world’s most astonishing hypocrite.”
She looked down at their joined hands. His were larger, warmer, beautifully made, and faintly marked from the morning’s mud and bridle leather. Hands that had touched her wickedly, and hands now placed, quite without performance, inside her keeping.
“You do care for me, then?” she asked, and hated how small the question sounded. “A friend, you said? A companion?”
His expression changed. “Charlotte.”
She lifted her chin. “Well?”
“I care for you terribly.”
Oh. Lottie forgot, for one suspended moment, how to breathe.
“The ultimatum,” he continued, “was the cruellest thing I have heard in my life.”
“That you must marry me?”
“No.” His voice sharpened. “That I might never see you again. Marriage I could imagine, too easily, perhaps. But never seeing you again? No, there my imagination failed me entirely.”
Lottie’s mouth felt quite dry at this admission.
All her life, she had understood wanting as something dangerous. Men wanted and took. Families wanted and arranged. Society wanted and judged. Even love, when ladies spoke of it in shining tones, so often seemed merely another set of hands reaching for the lock. But Jasper’s wanting did not feel like a lock.
