were the walls. She could see a few places that had been patched, but they only seemed to add to the building’s charm.
“It doesn’t seem abandoned,” she commented. He’d released her hand so that she could move around and explore the open space at her leisure.
“It isn’t really.” She ought to feel unnerved that, while she was looking at the walls and the floors and the tables and windows, he continued watching her.
But she liked it. She liked the way he looked at her. No one had ever found her even remotely interesting before. If they did, it had been to identify the flaws they’d like to fix.
Jules rocked back onto his heels, appearing more relaxed here than at the estate. Less as though he was being the person everyone expected him to be and more as though this was the person he needed to be to preserve his own spirit. At the opposite end of the room, where a large hearth took up half of the wall, she caught sight of a bookshelf and some furnishings. She drifted in that direction and realized there was a single comfortable chair, a table with a second wooden chair, a lantern of sorts, and candles.
“You maintain it for yourself.”
Blankets had been folded at the end of a rudimentary cot. “That’s not why I brought you here.” He’d noticed the direction of her gaze and was quick to dispel any notions she might conjure up about him.
“Do you sleep here, then?”
“Sometimes. My father used it as a retreat of sorts, and for the past three years, I’ve done the same.” Charley wondered if he talked about his father very often with his mother or Bethany. It was difficult to imagine him discussing his feelings with Tabetha. His youngest sister seemed to look upon him more as a very controlling uncle than a loving brother.
Charley hated that guilt plagued him for such an unintentional blunder. Although in some instances, it was something that might be considered regrettable, in his case, Jules obviously deemed it unforgivable. The consequences of sleeping in that morning were enough to torment anyone, let alone a man who valued honor as highly as he did. But… “It’s something anyone could have done.”
He knew exactly what she was referring to. The haunted expression he sent her revealed all the feelings he kept locked away from the world. Why could he show them to her? What was it about her that made him open up more?
He lowered himself onto the wooden chair despite the fact that she still stood and dropped his head into his hands. Trappings of their outward persons ceased to exist now that they’d escaped the manor at Westerley Crossings, now that they were absent from the people who wanted to see them in very particular ways.
He shuddered. “I was at a brothel.” After he spoke the words, she could swear she felt a ripple of pain roll off him. He glanced up. “I apologize. I didn’t bring you here so that I could confess sins you have no wish to hear.”
Charley allowed her bottom to rest against the table beside him. If—and that was still as far as she could consider—if she accepted his proposal, she would want to know as much as possible about him. From where she perched, she could see him from a different angle than usual. His maple-colored hair springing up from his head appeared untamable, and she could see why it constantly escaped the queue he tied at the back of his neck. His shoulders seemed broad and sturdy but were slumped as he wrestled with a past he didn’t know how to release.
“Tell me.”
He didn’t speak right away. A distant look crept into his eyes as the memory hypnotized him. “My father had recently warned me that I would have to give up the carousing I’d fallen into. We were arguing more than ever before. The worst of us—Mantis, Chase, and I—didn’t have much better to do at the time and had done nothing to make our families proud.”
She could only imagine how popular he was in London. And all the trouble such devil-may-care young men could get themselves into with nothing to do but pursue leisure.
“When a person doesn’t have a vocation, or a passion, I think that it must be easy to fall into depravity. I’ve seen it happen to some of my mother’s friends. Only, women tend to stir up trouble, when such is the case, by gossiping and