Constantine was afraid to even face the question, so instead she glanced beyond her friends to the window beyond into the drizzly afternoon. “I don’t think there is any denying that he is honorable with what he has done bringing Peter and White back to London with him. I know that much.” She watched the rain fall, as her mind turned. “And he showed a fierce protectiveness of me with Ross, and with his rule that he did not want me to put myself in danger. And he showed extreme possessiveness,” she added, unable to stop the grin that tugged at her lips, “when I told him I’d have to find someone else to service me if he would not.”
Her thoughts felt as if they were tumbling one after the other, and she continued, half realizing she wasn’t giving her friends a chance to even comment but she could not help herself. “It seemed to me that Callum showed the sort of possessiveness a man would show if he cared for a woman, though I vow he tried to hide his reaction. And my goodness!” she exclaimed, finally looking to her friends to find them all gazing intently at her. “If the way he kissed me this afternoon doesn’t mean he desires me, then I honestly don’t know what would indicate a man’s desire for a woman. The kiss… Well, the kiss—”
“Curled your toes?” Frederica asked on a sigh.
Constantine gazed at her friend. “It curled everything I possess,” she said, and they all burst out laughing.
“It seems to me that you have reaffirmed some things you once knew about Kilgore, and you have learned some new things,” Guinevere said, tucking a lock of her chestnut hair behind her ear and setting a hand to her stomach, which was rounding with child. A dismaying pang of jealousy shot through Constantine as she looked between Guinevere and Lilias, who were both expecting—Guinevere her second child and Lilias her first.
“And,” Guinevere went on, “that you are afraid to risk your heart once more, and rightly so given your past with him.”
That was all true, so Constantine nodded.
“If you will permit me now, I’ll tell you what I know of Kilgore that I previously tried to share with you,” Guinevere said. “I think it will shed even more light on him for you.”
“Yes,” Constantine said. “Please do. I feel like such a coward that I refused to hear the story before.”
Guinevere’s gaze met Constantine’s. “No, darling. You were doing the best you could, trying to survive the heartbreak of his loss.”
The words struck at the truth Constantine had skirted for so long. “I loved him the day I made the offer of marriage.” Tears blurred her vision, and her stomach tied into knots. She’d loved him, but she’d done her best to convince herself she no longer did, that she had come to hate him and that the offer had been fueled by pity for him and her own desire for a child. What drivel! She had wanted a childwith him, wanted to be wedto him, because she had never, despite everything that had transpired, stopped loving him completely.
Guinevere took a deep breath and then said, “Of course you did. The rogue stole your heart. And once a heart is truly good and stolen, it’s been my experience that it is impossible to get back.”
“My experience, as well,” Lilias echoed.
“I want to experience that,” Frederica said, to which they all smiled.
“After Asher and I were wed,” Guinevere said, “I managed to pry a secret from his honorable lips, one that Kilgore had inadvertently admitted.”
“Which was?” Constantine asked, her heart hammering.
“Which was, darling, that he threw you over the first time you two first became entangled because he’d discovered that if you wed, you would not receive your inheritance.”
“Oh…” She hated how deflated and disappointed she felt, hated that after all this time, she still cared. Telling herself she did not had been a grand delusion to make herself feel better. “I see.”
“No.” Guinevere gave her a pointed look. “You do not. Kilgore admitted that the reason he ended what was growing between the two of you, the reason he let you think he was truly a rogue who’d only pursued you because of the nasty wager, was because he himself was in financially dire straits and refused to drag you down into the muck beside him. In other words, he did all of that toprotectyou. He did not want you to live the life of a penniless wife, and he was unsure if he could turn his financial situation around.”
The hope that rose in her chest was so powerful it frightened her.
Guinevere cleared her throat as she studied Constantine. “To put it bluntly, I daresay there were any number of wealthy women who would have been more than pleased to wed Kilgore. When he first returned to London after his father died, I heard talk that he’d had several affairs, and I personally know one very wealthy widow who made it plain to Kilgore that she wished for him to ask for her hand. And she was fully aware of his finances…”
If the blasted hope swelled any further, Constantine would pop.
“And,” Guinevere added, “when I was going through that horrible time at Lilias’s house party, when I tried to make Asher think I was having an affair with Kilgore after Asher had hurt me, Kilgore hinted in our conversations that the things he had done had been purposely to protect a woman. When I suggested it was you, he did not deny it.”
Constantine bit her lip to try to stop the happy grin that wanted to come, but it was no use. Her lips spread wide.
“I think,” Guinevere said, “when you went to Kilgore’s home last year and you made your proposition—along with the revelation that you would not lose your inheritance if you wed—it was the opportunity for a second chance with you that Kilgore had never expected to have, but that he desperately wanted. I think he fell in love with you when he was to be seducing you. I know from Asher that Kilgore did all he could to try to get Talbot to take the wager off the books at White’s, and the things he did to break up Asher and me, which were at Talbot’s insistence, he only did to protect you from Talbot destroying your reputation even more than the rumors of the blasted wager already had.”
“I’d like to tell you what I know of the real Kilgore as well,” Lilias said. “The man he shows no one, for some reason known only to him.”
“Tell me,” Constantine said, a bit breathless with hope and fear.
“When I was in the throes of my romance with Nash and I wanted to distract myself by completing one of the SLAR missions, I fairlytoldKilgore he had to come with me late one night to St. Giles rookery.”
A dangerous place, indeed.
“He didn’t hesitate,” Lilias continued. “And I discovered on the way there that Kilgore had helped a lady of the night escape the very man, the evil one, from whom I was trying to retrieve a scandalous confession manuscript. Kilgore had learned the man beat the woman regularly, and Kilgore put himself in jeopardy and made a dangerous enemy to help a woman he hardly knew.”
