Gwendolyn had no future. Words she repeated like an incantation but which he never seemed to hear. She wished she could pick them from the air and hand them to him on a platter so he couldread—
She could! She raced toward her trunk and flung it open, finding the crinkled, ruined paper in a flash. She’d show him what she ran from so he would know the threat was not an idle one.
Jackson would have no choice but to admit defeat. He could not make her his wife when the whole world laughed at her, disdained her, likely wanted her gone. In the Marquess of Preston’s case, dead or in his bed, preferably. If she told Jackson everything, showed him the ruined letter, he’d realize a ruin like her, a woman always running despite her bombastic thorns, could never live in the light.
She could prove how right she was by giving him exactly what he’d asked for and what she’d kept from him for so long—the truth.
She stood with the letter, strode for the door, but each step seemed more difficult than the last.
Coward, he’d called her.Coward.
She beat a hand against her belly. “I am no coward.” Why did her feet refuse to move, then, instead of facing Jackson with evidence of her undesirable past? Why did she run from happiness instead of facing the marquess and demanding he leave her be? “Am I a coward?”
Hisss.
She shot a look over her shoulder. The gray tabby sat primly on the middle of her bed.
“How did you get in here?”
The cat stood, circled, then laid down, curling into a ball and closing its eyes.
“Do you think I’m a coward?” she asked because the cat’s hiss had sounded like one of disagreement.
The cat opened on eye and pierced her with it. A challenge?
She looked at the letter in her hands and tried for the thousandth time to read the puddle-ruined writing. But still only those few legible words jumped off the page—death, fall, deceit, something that could besinsand several words of no import such asI, see, andhis. Enough ominous language there to strike the heart with fear. Her worry was not unfounded.
A vibration shook the air.
She looked to the bed, tilted her head. “Are you purring?”
The cat was, and it continued to do so, and Gwendolyn crept onto the bed, sat next to the feline, who did not move a muscle when Gwendolyn joined her, curled up into a ball beside her, and laid a hand on the vibrating body. Soft. Warm. Comforting.
“Running is not cowardice,” she told the cat. “I have done it before, and itsavedme. Brought me to Lord Eaden and Jackson. If I build a new life away from those I love, I hurt no one. The marquess can hurt no one.”
Still the cat purred.
“I suppose it’s not much of a life without…” She shied away from Jackson’s name and the words that it always curled around it—happiness, joy, fulfillment. She stroked two fingers between the cat’s ears, and it lifted its head, butted it against her hand. “You do not understand, I suppose. Look at you. I’ve shown little friendliness toward you, yet here you are, curled up on my bed like you belong. You take what you want, don’t you? You do not shy from it, tell yourself it can never happen, should never happen. Not for you. You know your worth.” And by Jove it made her like the cat. Stubborn, vain thing. It had claimed her whether she’d wanted to be claimed or not.
A bit like Jackson had.
She rolled onto her back, hand still stuffed in the cat’s soft fur. Another lie, that. She had wanted to be claimed. By both cat and man.
Jackson’s kiss still lingered on her lips and deeper. Like a dragon, she hoarded the feel and sounds and scents of it away to survive the loneliness later. When she left.
She’d rather have more kisses. She’d give that memory away in a heartbeat if it meant more kisses, everyday kisses. Those you snuck while waking up and those you lingered over in the afternoon. Those you savored through sips of wine and those that ignited in celebration. She wanted them all.
Why couldn’t she have them? The woman who made herself anew, who stole aboard a ship and took up with strangers, who visited distant lands and created a new life under a new name. That woman would not fear totakethem.
She could. She would.
If she could find the courage to face her past, to accept that bits of it were not dead and never would be, and that though she could run to the ends of the earth for the rest of her days, she would never escape it. Running would soon grow weary. It already had. Her feet begged for a home. Her heart agreed.
But more than that, she trusted Lord Eaden and his wife. She trusted his daughters. One had married a rogue with a scandalous name and the other an impoverished viscount who worked for a living. In acircus, of all places.
Yet the family did not seem worse than before. They seemed better, actually.
Jackson had said she was sacrificing herself, and she was. She could not deny that. She would rather this family be happy than have her past hurt them. But Jackson would not chase her again. No matter what had happened to her in the last six years, she’d always been able to lean on Jackson. If she needed him, he would be there.
