arms to ignite the tiniest glow of hope into her shivering heart.
“I’m going to tell you something, Prudence, and I don’t require a response. In fact…” he hesitated. “It would be better if you just let me bungle through it, as we both know I will.”
She swallowed in reply, staring down at his large hands. At once so masculine and elegant, so capable and so brutal.
His voice was paradoxically decisive and uncertain, but it lacked the harshness of before. It contained a hoarse note too tame for desperation and too bleak for nonchalance.
Composure, it seemed, eluded them both.
“Deceit has been a relentless part of my entire life,” he began, dousing a bit of her hopes. Tempting her to curl in upon herself like a salted snail.
But she didn’t move.
And he didn’t stop.
“The only things I remember of my parents, are the lies they used to hurt each other with. When my father died, Caroline and I survived only through dishonest means. Everything we had could be taken by a craftier thief, a better con artist. It was the game we learned to play on the streets. After she…after I…” He broke off, filling his chest with an endless inhale as he pressed his thumbs into the grip of her fists as if he could likewise penetrate her closed heart.
Prudence relaxed her grip incrementally, doing her best to allow her insides to mirror the action. To open. To hear him.
“My parents never documented our birth, so I had no papers. I read the name Carlton off an advertisement for the Carlton Football Club posted on the building next to the military office where I joined up.” He made a rueful noise, shaking his head at the younger man. “Another lie I told, one I thought would have no consequences because I fully intended to die in some hole on another continent somewhere. I never thought I’d live to see England again. Instead, I shot a swath through entire countries. Killing for an empire that fabricates falsehoods and misrepresentations to the world as if words like humanity and honor do not exist in the face of progress and expansion. And then…”
He turned her hands palm up to caress the delicate lines there with his thumbs as he continued. “I became a police officer, of all things. And I implore you to find me a vocation wherein someone is confronted with more deception. Not only do criminals lie to me for every kind of reason, but regular, frightened, generally honest people do as well, merely for what I am and the authority I wield. My subordinates consistently report errors and embellishments, and many of them, apparently, use the uniform for criminal enterprise.”
He crept closer on his knees, powerful thighs bunching and straining against his trousers as he entreated her to hear him. “So much of my day-to-day life is spent unraveling untruths and investigating inaccuracies. I see them everywhere, and because of that, I think I’ve come to expect them from everyone.”
“I understand,” she murmured, as a sense of sympathy infiltrated her gloom. Such a life was not easy, such a mindset awfully arduous and burdensome. “You’re telling me this is why you are unable to trust.”
He gathered her hands to his chest as he brought their gazes even. Anchoring them against his pounding heart, he placed a fingertip beneath her jaw, nudging her to look up at him. Something shone in his gaze she’d never marked before. A gentle contrition. The glimmer of vulnerability. “Sweetheart. I’m telling you why I’ve been a fool. An unmitigated bastard. Prudence…I’m sorry.”
She would have sworn her heart ceased beating if not for the thrumming in her ears. Had she heard him correctly? Or was she fantasizing this?
Had she fainted again?
Her gaze flew to his, searching for signs that she was truly going mad.
“You…don’t have to—”
“I do,” he insisted, his visage claimed by an emotion both desolate and resolute. “The truth is, I don’t know you like a man should know his wife, but that is my failing, not yours. Beyond that, I think you are an honest person, possessed of integrity I’ve only ever pretended to have.”
She stalled, blinking over at him in wonder. “You do?”
His features softened as he regarded her with such infinite tenderness, she felt as though it might melt her completely. “Yes. You’re so open and vulnerable. You tell me everything you’re thinking. You tell me what you want, and what you feel and what you know to be true. Hell, that