Undressed with the Marquess (Lost Lords of London #3) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,115
born for wealth.
He’d always been a man of single-minded purpose. That hadn’t changed because of what she’d revealed. Just like he’d always done, Dare was content to make decisions that only left him and the people around him hurting.
We just have to see her married . . . It doesn’t matter whether or not she likes you, Temperance . . .
He’d always been chasing money, and it would have been so very easy to resent him for it, had he been driven by his own selfish greed. But it had never been that way with him. Everything he’d ever done had been because of the people in the streets, searching for help in a hopeless world. All the while he’d been helping others, however, he’d deliberately set out to sabotage his own happiness and security.
Not so very long ago, it would have been easy to resent him for all the wrong paths he continued to travel and choose. But that had been before. Before she’d come here and learned all he’d lost . . . and what had truly shaped him.
Now, he made sense.
He made sense in ways he never had before—his making decisions that ultimately saw him less safe and never truly happy because he didn’t believe himself worthy of it.
And what was worse, knowing as much, knowing why he was the way he was . . . it changed nothing. It didn’t make life better for him. It didn’t bring him peace with the remaining kin he had alive. And it didn’t heal her brokenness.
“Buck up. You look like you’re headed to the gallows,” Gwynn said as she drew Temperance’s gown overhead.
The silk slid in a whispery glide over her hips and then settled in a whoosh at her ankles.
She winced.
“I’m sorry,” Gwynn said, horror filling her eyes. “That was the wrong choice of words.”
And yet . . .
Temperance’s gaze caught in the windowpane. Her expression wasn’t vastly unlike what it had been the day she’d gone to face Dare at that hated prison.
“Come. It is simply dinner,” her friend went on, mistaking the reason for Temperance’s forlornness. “We’ve been eating since we were born. Perhaps Lady Kinsley will find a suitor tonight, and we can be that much closer to leaving.”
And yet . . . that wouldn’t happen because it wasn’t what Kinsley wished.
And there wouldn’t be a babe, which meant . . . there was no money forthcoming by which to help Gwynn and Chance.
In the end, it had all been for naught.
And yet . . . these days she’d spent with Dare? Not once had she thought of the money to be had at the end of their arrangement. Or even really of Gwynn and Chance. She’d simply thought of him.
Gwynn hummed happily to herself.
“Lady Kinsley doesn’t wish to marry,” she said quietly.
Her friend’s little song faded to a slow stop. “What?”
Before she lost the courage to say what needed to be said, she spoke. “She doesn’t wish to marry, and . . . so the terms of the arrangement cannot be met. There will be no funds.” Which meant there would be that continued impediment between Gwynn and Chance.
Silence.
Thick and heavy and palpable.
Gwynn’s lips formed a little circle, and out slipped just one breathy utterance: “Oh.” She sat on the vanity chair.
Temperance sank into the sliver of a seat left alongside her friend. “I’m so sorry.” Those three words, however, didn’t solve the divide that continued to exist between Gwynn and Chance. She bit hard on the inside of her cheek.
Gwynn glanced over. “I want to marry your brother and be close to him,” the other woman murmured.
“I know,” she whispered, her voice shattered. “I—”
“Hush.” Her friend glared at her. “Let me finish. What I was going to say was that I want to marry your brother and be close to him . . . but I wouldn’t have you sacrificing yourself for me.” Gwynn hung her head. “It was wrong of me to ask you to.”
“You asked nothing of me.”
Gwynn shook her head. “I knew you chose to come to a place you didn’t wish to be for me and Chance. I let you do that. And it was wrong.”
Temperance cried softly, the tears falling freely. “Why are you taking this so well?”
Her friend dusted them back. “Because I love you. You are like a sister to me. We will figure this out.” Gwynn folded an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. “All three of us.”