Unveiled (Turner, #1)

“Intimately,” she said again.

He wasn’t displaying any of that vaunted charm now. He dropped her hand and looked away. “I wish to God,” he said passionately, “that I had never gone to India. I wish I had never left them. But I did, little knowing that the gulf my actions would open would be wider than a handful of years and a few thousand miles of ocean. I wish I had not gone.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Pardon?” She’d spoken so matter-of-factly that he could scarcely believe what he had heard.

“You heard me. You don’t wish any of this undone—not your time in India, not your stupendous fortune, nor even the suit in the ecclesiastical courts. Certainly not your place as a duke’s heir. I know you, Ash. Had you stayed in England with your brothers—had you merely accepted your lot in life and sunk into poverty, you wouldn’t be happy. You enjoy your wealth. You live to shower your brothers with presents. You would despise being a poor man.”

He let out a sigh. “It’s a hard woman who won’t even let a man indulge in a little unreasonableness. That seems most unfair.”

“What is unfair is that you want to have the benefits of your voyage to India without paying the price. That’s what makes this world so damnably awful—the choices you must make that cost you what you most desire.”

“It’s more than that, though. When I went to India…it was as if I chose to be an entirely different person. I gave up the chance to be a person like my father. He was a mill owner and a tradesman—but he loved to read. He would be gone on business for weeks, and when he returned, he’d bring back all sorts of books. I used to believe he knew everything. And now, my brothers take after him. I can’t. I’ve tried to figure it out. I’ve tried to become that person. But what you do when you’re young has a way of sticking with you. At fourteen, my brothers were reading. I was making my first five thousand pounds.” He shrugged. “I would trade every penny I had, if it would mean that I could walk down that path with them and talk like that.”

“You left because your sister died, Ash.” Margaret looked at him, tapping her lips with one finger. “Would you really risk your brothers’ lives for the sake of their friendship?”

“No.” Damn it. “Never.”

She inclined her head, and he accepted that as a simple judgment. You made your choice. Now stop whining about it.

Too true. There had been enough of this indulgent claptrap. “Younger brothers make me mawkish,” he said by way of halfhearted apology. “They’re like little repositories of sentiment. One looks at them and remembers how helpless they once were.”

But Margaret was shaking her head. “I think you give yourself too little credit. Maybe you cannot speak to your brothers about books. But you can talk to them. I doubt they despise you.”

“But they’re educated.”

She turned her head to one side and looked at him. “I can talk to Mark, and I never went to Oxford.”

“But that’s different. You at least—”

She looked at him.

“You,” he said quietly, “can read.” And then he glanced away, so that he would not have to see his own shame reflected in her eyes.

She didn’t say anything. He’d wanted her to protest, to tell him it wasn’t true, that he could bridge that gap. But then, she wouldn’t lie to him. He was uneducated. And illiterate. And while it made not a bit of difference in the world of business, she must see how impassable a barrier it posed with his brothers. He squeezed her hand, where it was still trapped in his. He wasn’t letting her go—not even now, when she must see what he truly was.

She ran her thumb down his fingers. A tiny caress, but a caress nonetheless.

“When I met you,” she said quietly, “I’d lost the ability to glance in a looking glass and believe I was worth something.”

She repeated that touch a second time, and his eyes fluttered shut.

“And then you looked at me and you told me I mattered. You didn’t need theories or arguments to make me believe it. You just…looked. And you believed.”

They’d touched before—in affection, in lust, even in comfort. But her hand, stroking his, returning the strong grip he gave her—this was something different.

“There is…there is something I came here to tell you, Ash. There’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But right now, I want you to know one thing.”

Her hand whispered up behind him, finding the nape of his neck. She drew his head down to rest against hers.

“You matter,” she whispered to him. “You are important. And you are the single most magnificent man I have ever had the honor of meeting.”

His breath shivered out and he put his free arm around her, pulling her close. He could feel her chest rise and fall. Her breath mingled with his.