Lady Guinevere and the Rogue with a Brogue - Julie Johnstone Page 0,72

that heartfelt vow, she believed him. She did. But there was an unanswered question she desperately needed him to answer.

“If you had truly cared for me five years ago, if you had not been pursuing Elizabeth, how was it that you ended up in a library with her? How was it that you were discovered kissing her?”

Deafening silence descended. It was tormenting.

“Ye throw accusations at me as if ye yerself are blameless, as if yer very actions were not what drove me to her.” His voice was deceptively calm, but she could feel his fury. It pricked her skin. “How is it I came to be in the library, ye asked?”

Each word lashed her with its force. “You know that’s what I asked,” she shot back, refusing to be cowed by him, though she felt as if she had awoken a sleeping wolf.

“I’ll tell ye.” He drew so close to her that she could not have put a thread between them. “When I met ye that fateful night in the ballroom, ye cast a blinding light before me when I had not even known I was standing in utter darkness, and all I could see from that moment on was ye. And by the end of that night, I came to understand that yer beauty was the least mesmerizing of yer qualities.”

Her breath caught at that. No one had called her beautiful back then. She had been pudgy with freckles, and her eyes and mouth had been too large for her face. The boys had all teased her. Asher had never told her these things before. “You could not possibly have thought me beautiful.”

His gaze burned into hers. “I did. Ye smiled across the ballroom at me when everyone else merely gazed curiously. Ye met my eyes straight on and smiled. It was the friendliest, most welcoming smile. In that crowded ballroom where I was a curiosity—the man who had thought he was a bastard but discovered he was a toff—ye were the only one who did not look at me as if ye were judging me. Ye looked at me as if ye could not see why I would not belong, be I a marquess, a chimney sweep, or a future duke.”

This man, the one talking now, was the man she had fallen for almost instantly that night. He had looked at her as if he wanted to hear what she had to say, as if she was not a nuisance to be tolerated simply because her family was wealthy. Could his words be believed?

“Yer wit intrigued me,” he continued. “Yer intelligence fascinated me. Yer smile warmed a place inside me I had not realized was frozen from years of being scorned.”

Her jaw went slack at his words. It was all the things she had ever wanted: to be loved for who she was on the inside. Her heart thudded in her ears as the blood rushed through her veins, pushing hope and fear through her. He had to be deceiving her, but if he was not…?

She found her tongue with a will she did not know she possessed. He had given her pretty words. No, good God, they were magnificent words. She wanted to weep at the beauty of them, but they did not answer her question. She could not allow herself to be willfully blind. “And how did these things lead you to kiss another woman in a library?”

His mouth twisted, and his expression grew hard. “Because, Guin, I saw ye that night on the terrace with Kilgore. Ye were in his arms kissing him just as tonight—” Asher cursed and grew rigid. “He kissed ye.”

“Yes,” she said. “Just as tonight.”

“I am the biggest fool,” he replied.

His admission made her feel dizzy and discomfited. And…and hopeful. Blast him. “You must have left the terrace before I pulled away. Kilgore kissed me without my permission, but can you say the same? Was it Elizabeth who kissed you?”

“Aye.”

Guinevere’s hope soared.

“But—”

“Why must there be a but?” she wailed, forgetting to keep her voice low. She wanted to pummel his chest and knock sense into his male Scot’s brain. “But you kissed her back because she was too tempting to resist?” she flung out, flailing her arms like a wild woman. Her pulse strummed in a whizzing fashion.

He’d done this to her! He’d stolen her heart, then broken it. Then she’d tried to repair it—or rather fortify it—only to have him stroll back into her life and force her to confront