To Love a Lord (15 page)

Then two of her words registered, driving back the musing.
Used to
. Some hard, indefinable emotion twisted in his stomach. “At what point did you cease believing in the dream of love?” She was entirely too young to also have given up on happiness.

She clasped her hands in front of her. “It is not that I do not believe in love, my lord.” Ah, it was to be
my lord
, again, was it? So the lady was uncomfortable discussing matters of the heart with him. “I do believe in love. I’ve witnessed the power of that emotion.” Witnessed. But not experienced? Her lips turned up in a wry smile. “I’ve no desire to turn myself over to its hold.”

He passed his gaze over Jane’s heart-shaped face. Gabriel did not speak on matters of intimacy with anyone. Not his kin and not his lone friend in the world. However, he suspected the end of Chloe’s naiveté had come very early on at the brutal hands of their sire. But what of Jane? The bitter young woman who’d only known a mother? She shifted under his focus. “When did you stop believing in fairytales?” Again, a terribly bold question given life by too many spirits and the early morn hours.

“When I realized—” Jane closed her lips tight, ending whatever that revealing piece of herself she kept close. She jumped to her feet. “I should seek my chambers,” she confessed, eying him as though he were the wolf mingling with the unsuspecting sheep.

“Yes,” he concurred. He remained frozen, with his stillness conveying her safety.

Jane lingered. She met his gaze with her own. “You needn’t worry that I will encourage flights of fancy in your sister. I will not fill her head with fairytales and romantic hopes.”

“Because you do not believe in them?” he shot back.

“Because I am practical and logical enough to know the perils in entrusting one’s heart to someone unworthy of that precious gift.”

She’d had her heart broken. Why did a wave of jealousy roll through him at that revelation? In their earlier discussions, he’d surmised that Mr. Munroe had been nothing more than a fictional figure. Now, he was presented with the ugly possibility of some bounder who’d forced Jane to adopt a false married title. Gabriel swiped his empty snifter from the side table. With glass in hand, he rose in one fluid motion and carried it over to the sideboard. He poured himself another drink and turning back, held it up in salute. “For all we’ve disagreed on, Jane, we are of a remarkably like opinion in this regard.” After years of protecting himself, there was nothing left of his heart to give anyone.

“Yes,” she said softly. “It does appear that way.” She took a step toward him. “I venture someone has hurt you, Gabriel.” There had been. The someone who sired him.

Something passed between them. A bond unwittingly forged by two people who’d both learned at some point to be wary of love and leery of all sentiments that involved in anyway caring.

He recoiled as panic, potent and powerful clamored in his chest. This unfamiliar connection he had with no one. Not his brother who’d despised him through the years. Not his sister, Philippa, who was polite and soft spoken to all, not Chloe who saw him as more bother than brother. Jane took another step toward him and his feet twitched in an involuntary need to take flight. He did not want a connection to Jane or anyone. Those bonds only brought responsibility. Responsibility brought disappointment and that disappointment brought pain. His heart pounded hard as he tried to reclaim control from the stranger who’d stolen into his sanity. He schooled his features into a hard mask. “Jane?” he said quietly when she continued her advance.

She came to a slow stop. “Yes?”

Jane Munroe was dangerous to his ordered world. “Regardless of your beliefs on love, hope, and happiness, I still wish for my sister to aspire to more. As such, I’ll ask that you do not impress your own cynical thoughts upon my sister.” And he could not afford to be weak. Not again.

Jane stiffened. “My lord?”

How was it possible to both mourn and embrace the shattered bond between them? “Chloe requires a husband and I’ll not have you fill her head with your own bitterness.” Inwardly, he flinched at that charge he’d stolen from his meeting with Waterson at White’s.

If looks could burn, he’d be a pile of charred ash at her feet. “With my bitterness?” she gritted out between clenched teeth. In this barely suppressed rage she bore no hint to the cowering young woman who’d first stood before him. Jane closed the space between them and in an entirely un-companion-like manner, jabbed him in the chest, hard with her finger. “I am not bitter. I am realistic.” As was he. They made a sorry, dreary pair, the two of them. “Furthermore,” he winced at another sharp jab. “I’ll have you know you do your sister a disservice if you believe I, you, or the king himself could control, manipulate, or override her opinions.” With a toss of her head, she marched from the room.

Why did he feel all the worse with her gone?

T
he following morning, bleary eyed with exhaustion, her mind dulled with fatigue, Jane sat in contemplation of her meeting with Gabriel. How could she have been so very foolish as to believe there was anything warm, good, or kind about Gabriel, the Marquess of Waverly? The memory of that blasted kiss had thrown her logic into disarray. It had forced her to see past the curt, condescending lord to the
man
. In that, she’d seen warmth and pain and a gentleman who would not force his attentions upon her—a man who saw her as a person that mattered, regardless of her station.

What a fool.

And yet for the restored order of her thoughts about him, why could she only focus on one particular truth of that meeting in the early morn hours? He’d had his heart broken. There was no other explanation for his cynical grin and his emotionally flat words on the matter of love. Jane plucked at the pages of her book—the same poor, forgotten volume she’d muddled her way unsuccessfully through the prior evening. Lords and ladies didn’t know broken hearts and pained regrets. Their station protected them from hurts and uncertainties. Only, that is what she’d naively and foolishly believed.

Seeing Gabriel as he’d been last evening, a man haunted by his past and demons he’d likely never share with anyone, had torn asunder that erroneously drawn conclusion. It had also shaken her enough to see his icy indifference as a façade to protect himself. As one who adopted a disguise every day of her life, she easily detected it in another. In this case, it was Gabriel. Even as she wanted to hate him and consign him into the same detested category as every other lord. She could not.

“You are quiet, Jane.”

Jane glanced up and flushed. Gabriel’s sister occupied the chair opposite her. The young lady peered at her over the top of the book in her hands. “Forgive me. I was r—” She ended the lie. The closed volume on her lap was testament to that.

Chloe gave her a gentle look. A kind warmth filled the young woman’s eyes and all but begged Jane to share that which troubled her. To do so, however, would be both folly and scandalous. There was no place for Jane to know anything more about Gabriel, the Marquess of Waverly, her employer. Soon, her time here would be at an end. Perhaps sooner should her deception be uncovered. Her belly twisted in knots.

“What is it?” Chloe rested her book on her lap and leaned closer. The young woman was nothing if not persistent. Then her lips tightened on a moue of displeasure. “Is it my brother? Has he been rude to you? He’s ever so stodgy and commanding.”

“No.” The denial burst from her lips. Her cheeks warmed at that emphatic reply. “No. Your brother has been nothing but polite and proper.” The memory of his kiss burned across her mind.

Chloe snorted. “That is an apt description of my eldest brother.”

Jane shifted her gaze to the closed parlor door and then back to Chloe. She’d not inquired about the marquess. Why, Gabriel’s sister herself had ventured forth details about the powerful nobleman. Surely, there was no harm in politely asking a question about the young lady’s question? “Has he always been so very—?”

“Dull?” Could anyone truly find the powerful young lord to be dull or stodgy as alleged by his sister?

“No.” She opened her mouth, but Chloe cut in, once again.

“Inflexible.”

A grin formed on her lips. Yes, a man who’d gauge her suitability in her role based on one meeting alone would certainly be at the very least considered, inflexible. “Serious,” she supplied instead, recalling him as he’d been with the brandy in hands and dark thoughts in his eyes. “Has he always been so very serious?” Some of the light dimmed from Chloe’s eyes and Jane bit the inside of her cheek at the shame in pressing the young woman for information about the marquess. “Forgive me,” she said hurriedly. “It was not my place to—”

“He has.” Chloe’s quiet words interrupted her apology. “Gabriel has long been the serious one. Alex, my other brother,” she said by way of explanation, “has always been the carefree, charming one.” A twinkle lit her eyes, driving back the earlier solemnity. “The papers purported he was a rogue.”

“Is he?” She’d too many times found herself the recipient of those carefree, charming rogues. She vastly preferred Gabriel’s dry humor and more reserved self.

“Alex is wed now,” Chloe said with a smile. “And quite reformed.” Jane doubted that. Once a rogue, always a rogue. “He wedded my dearest friend, Imogen.” Her grin dipped. “Which is why I find myself alone and unattached.” Some of her earlier cheer restored. “Though, I must admit, I expected this to be a lonely Season, Jane. I never expected I should find a companion who both reads philosophical books and would become a friend.”

Emotion suffused her heart. “A friend,” she whispered. In the course of her four and twenty years she’d never had a friend. As she’d said to Gabriel last evening, hers had been a solitary childhood and only all the more lonely the older she became.

“Yes, a friend.” Chloe gave her a look that could only come from another woman who herself had known if not the same, at least a similar solitary existence. She winked. “Even if you are one of Mrs. Belden’s dragons.”

Reality raised its ugly head. The truth of her deception, the lies she’d built her relationship with Gabriel and this young woman upon, shook, shaming her not for the first time with her being here under these false pretenses. She shifted on her seat and dropped her gaze to the book on Chloe’s lap.

A relieved sigh escaped her when Gabriel’s sister moved the conversation to safer topics. She held her copy of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
aloft. “I must confess I’ve been quite devouring your Mrs. Wollstonecraft.”

Jane would bet the whole of the trust coming to her in two months that the Marquess of Waverly would sack her faster than she could utter “scandalous teachings” for introducing Chloe to the philosopher. “Mrs. Belden would not be pleased,” she muttered to herself. After all it had been a sackable offense.

Chloe tossed her blonde head back and laughed. “Yes, I daresay the mother of the dragons would not tolerate such reading material.” Then some of her amusement slipped. “Though, I confess to my disappointment with Mrs. Wollstonecraft.”

“In what way?” Jane prodded when the young woman fell silent.

Chloe shrugged. “She is scandalous in her thoughts and beliefs on women and their role in Society and yet here,” she lifted her book once again. “Here she encourages women to wed.” Disappointment turned her lips down. “She suggests with her words that the only way a woman can contribute to Society is through that wedded state.” She tossed the book down on the table between them and caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Do you agree with that, Jane?”

Jane hesitated, knowing there were many ways in which to answer the question. The one in which she dutifully confirmed her ascent as Gabriel would likely wish. In that lie, she’d guide Chloe as he so wished, toward that estimable state of matrimony to some proper, powerful lord.

Or the truthful one.

She held Chloe’s gaze. “It matters not what I think but rather what you believe, Chloe.”

A wistful smile played on the young lady’s face. “You are the only one of Mrs. Belden’s instructors, my siblings, my mother, of
anyone
to say as much.”

What a confining world they both lived in. Jane lifted her hands up. “Society, your family, they think to protect you—us,” she amended. “They think to guide us to the perfect marital match.” Her first meeting with Gabriel reared in her mind. “Ultimately trusting that we should be cared for and they are wiser to know what we need. All the while they fail to see the truth.”

The young woman stared at her, frozen, hanging on to each word. She shook her head.

“The truth is we know our hearts and, more importantly, our minds. If a dog snaps and snarls at you, you’d not reach out to pet the thing. Even as Society thinks you will, without the proper guidance.”

An unexpected bitterness lined the young woman’s face, chilling in its rawness. It aged her beyond her twenty-one years. “Then, wouldn’t it be wiser to avoid all those creatures to avoid being snapped and snarled at?”

Someone had touched her in violence. A spasm of pain squeezed Jane’s heart and the breath left her on a slow exhale. Of course. It was why for Society’s expectations and her brother’s determination, she disavowed the marital state. The young woman had known pain and by the telling of those handful of words, hers went beyond the emotional hurt Jane herself had known. Instead of replying, she answered Chloe with a question. “When I arrived you’d already formulated an opinion of me. You wanted to turn me out. Did you not?”

“Oh, I—”

Jane waved off the contrite apology in the lady’s eyes. “You looked at my gown,” she looked pointedly down at the skirts unaffectionately termed dragon skirts by the lady. “And you decided I was the same as every other instructor you’d had or known.” The truth was those women were far more honorable. Jane was a mere liar. Guilt knifed through her once more. She gently took Chloe’s hands in hers. “I will not guide you or force you to an opinion on marriage, as your brother and Society wish. I will only gently encourage you to realize that just because one is dressed as a dragon does not make them one.” Jane gave her fingers a slight squeeze.