When a Rogue Meets His Match - Elizabeth Hoyt Page 0,82
loud and ugly in the quiet night.
Slowly Messalina turned to Gideon. “Is it true what my brother says?”
Someday she might be proud that her voice didn’t shake. That no tears filled her eyes.
But then she was well past tears.
Gideon merely looked at her, and she could tell he was calculating. What to tell her. How to bamboozle her. What lie would bring her back into his arms and his control.
If her heart had been a flower blooming only moments before, it was frozen now. Brittle and dead.
He’d never loved her, never even cared for her. It had all been a trap, set and sprung by her own silly emotions.
Messalina lifted her head proudly, facing Gideon, her lips still throbbing from his kiss. “Tell me.”
“Yes,” he ground out. “But you must listen—”
“No. I will not.” She turned and left the garden and the fairy-tale lights behind.
Chapter Thirteen
“This is your home,” said the fox, opening the crooked door to the little cottage. Inside was a bed made of thistledown and moss with beside it a bark table and two chairs. “Keep it neat and clean. You may eat whatever grows within this clearing, but never ever venture into the wild wood.”…
—From Bet and the Fox
Julian watched as Messalina stormed away with Hawthorne following.
Lucretia trailed behind without a word.
“It will be the talk of the town for months,” Quinn muttered. “When she leaves him.”
Julian glanced at him. Not so drunk, then. “Yes, it will.”
He, too, followed Messalina. She wouldn’t want to talk to him tonight—she was obviously devastated—but soon she must. Both she and Lucretia had to leave Hawthorne’s home.
He and Quinn would see to it.
After that perhaps Hawthorne would meet with an untimely accident.
Not that Messalina would ever thank him for it.
But then he’d been protecting his family without any thanks for more than a decade.
By the time Julian reached the garden doors with Quintus beside him, Messalina was storming across the ballroom, people parting before her.
Augustus was watching, his eyes flicking from Lucretia to Messalina to Hawthorne.
He smiled.
Julian almost stopped short, he was so startled. What was Augustus’s game? The man ought to be displeased with his niece’s very public anger at her husband—the man Augustus had arranged to marry her. Yet he looked almost gleeful.
Was it simple pleasure at Messalina and Lucretia’s tears?
A murmuring rose in the ballroom as Messalina made her way farther into the room. Heads canted together, fans rose to cover whispering mouths. Hawthorne actually shoved aside a dandy too slow to move out of his path. The dandy squawked like a chicken pursued by a cock.
Julian strolled leisurely across the ballroom, following in his sisters’ wake. He ignored those who tried to stop him. Those who actually tried to talk to him, their eyes alight with malicious glee.
He ignored them all. They didn’t matter.
Only his family mattered.
As he passed his uncle, Augustus winked and raised his glass in mocking salute.
* * *
Gideon stared out his carriage window, unseeing. The night had started so well. The ball. The introduction to Rookewoode. The way Messalina had smiled up at him so…so trustingly.
So lovingly.
Something caught in his eye, and for a moment his vision blurred.
No. He could fix this. He was canny and cunning and he’d never yet lost a battle of wits. That was all this was in the end. A war of words. He only had to find the right ones and he’d win her back again.
And then he would have her smiles again. Her care for him. Everything would be as it should.
He watched Messalina from beneath his eyelashes. She sat with her sister across from him, her head up, her gaze fixed on the seat beside him, dry eyed.
She wouldn’t even look at him.
Something strange, something that might be panic—an emotion he never felt—battered the cage of his chest.
Damn Greycourt. Damn Quintus. Damn Lucretia. Damn every meddling Greycourt, every aristocrat intent on maintaining the sanctity of the aristocracy, every man, woman, and child who stood between him and Messalina.
He’d had her—her beauty, her wealth and position, her willing help with his ambitions.
Her tenderness.
He’d had her and he was suddenly afraid, not only that he’d never have her again, but that he might not survive without her.
The carriage shuddered to a stop and he glanced up, surprised to find that they were already at Whispers House.
Messalina moved to rise, and he had to scramble to get to the door before her. In the end he offered his hand to Lucretia first.