She stiffened in his arms, brows snapping together. “I don’t care a fig if he tells the world my secrets.”
She would care, of course. She would care when Knight planted the seed of their time together in the ear of the aristocracy. In Castleton’s ear. She would care when it ruined her marriage and her future and her sisters’ happiness. She would care when her parents could no longer look her in the eye. “You should care. You have a life to live. You have a family to think of. You have an earl to marry. I won’t have your ruination on my head. I won’t have it alongside all the rest.”
She pulled herself up to her full height, caring not a bit that she was half-dressed and could likely not see very well. It didn’t matter, of course. She was a queen. “I am not in need of saving. I am perfectly well without it. For a scandalous, wicked man, you are all too willing to assume the mantle of responsibility.”
“You are my responsibility.” Did she not see that? “You became my responsibility the moment you entered my office.”
She’d been his from the start.
Her gaze narrowed. “I was not looking for a keeper.”
Irritation flared. He took her shoulders in hand and made his promise. “Well, you haven’t a choice. I have spent years atoning for my sins, desperate to keep from wreaking more destruction than I already have. I will not have you near it. I will not have you touched by it.” The words came on a flood of desperation . . . panic that he could not deny. “Dammit, Pippa, I have to do this. Don’t you see?”
“I don’t.” There was panic in her voice as well, in the way her fingers gripped his arms tight. “What of me? What of my responsibility? You think I will not feel the heavy weight of your marrying a woman you don’t know out of some false sense of honor?”
“There is nothing false about this,” he said. “This is what I can give you.” He reached for her, pulled her close. Wished it was forever. “Don’t you see, love? Saving you . . . it’s my purpose. I have tried so hard . . .” He trailed off.
“To what?” When he did not immediately answer, she added, “Jasper?”
Perhaps it was his name on her lips that made him tell the truth . . . perhaps it was the soft question—and something he was too afraid to name—in her blue eyes . . . perhaps it was simply her presence.
But he told her. “To atone. If not for me . . . Baine would be alive, and Lavinia would be well.”
“Lavinia has chosen her life,” Pippa argued. “She’s a husband and children . . .”
“A husband in debt to Knight. Children who must grow in the shadow of their useless father. A marriage born of my own father’s fear that he’d never rid himself of his crippled daughter.”
She shook her head. “That’s not your sin.”
“Of course it is!” he burst out, spinning away from her. “It’s all mine. I’ve spent the last six years trying to rewrite it, but that is my past. It’s my legacy. I am the contact for the girls at the Angel . . . I choose to be. I try to keep them safe. The second they want out . . . the moment they choose another life for themselves, I help them. They come to me; I get them out. I’ve helped dozens of them . . . found places for them, work that can be done on their feet instead of their back. Country estates where they can be safe . . . every one of them a placeholder for her.”
For the sister he could not save, whose life he’d destroyed.
For the brother whose life he’d taken as surely as if he’d crashed the damn carriage himself.
“It’s not your fault,” she said again. “You couldn’t have known.”
He’d thought the words a hundred times. A million. But they never comforted. “If Baine were earl . . . he would have heirs. He would have sons. He would have the life he deserved.”
“The life you deserve as well.”
The words came on a vision of that life. Of those little blond, bespectacled girls and laughing boys capturing frogs in the heat of a Devonshire summer. Of their mother. Of his wife. “That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t deserve it. I stole it from him. I robbed it from him while I was in the arms of his mistress.”
She stilled at the words. “His mistress. That’s why you didn’t touch me. Didn’t kiss me. Why you don’t . . . with other women.” How the hell did she know that? She answered before he could ask the question. “The lady at the card table . . . and Miss Tasser . . . they both implied that . . .”
Dammit. “Did they.” It was not a question.
She pinned him with that knowing blue gaze. “Is it true?”
He could lie. He’d spent half a decade convincing London that he hadn’t stopped the rakish behavior. That he’d made women his life’s work. He could lie, and she’d never discover the truth.
But he did not want to lie to her. Not about this. “It’s been six years.”
“Since you’ve lain with a woman?”
He did not speak, and the truth was in the silence.
She pressed on, eyes wide. “Since you’ve lain with any woman?”