When a Rogue Meets His Match - Elizabeth Hoyt Page 0,97

well. “I’m married to you, Gideon, through no fault of my own. If it’s not that you don’t trust me, then why won’t you talk to me?” She shook her head as he remained silent. “You were the one who placed us in this position. If you didn’t want a wife who cared, then perhaps you should’ve studied me better before you made your devil’s bargain with my uncle.”

And with that she swept from the room.

* * *

Messalina was just finishing her toilet the next morning when she paused to take a deep breath. She’d hardly slept last night, turning over and over Gideon’s betrayal, how she felt about him, and whether he felt anything at all for her. Fortunately, she’d spent the night in one of the guest rooms, sparing Lucretia her restlessness.

When she woke there had been a moment—a tiny moment—when she thought Gideon lay beside her.

She swallowed. Her heart ached.

But no. She’d vowed to put the matter of Gideon’s perfidy aside for the nonce. He was injured. Keys had even admitted—after intense questioning that Messalina wasn’t at all sorry for—that Gideon had come close to being murdered. Had Keys not arrived in time…

She shuddered. The fact was, even angry with Gideon for his many wrongs and wrongheadedness, she still felt a pull toward him.

Someone knocked at her bedroom door.

“Come,” she called as Bartlett started putting away the brush and hairpins.

A maid peeped in. “You’ve a visitor, ma’am. Mr. Julian Greycourt. The butler has put him in the sitting room.”

Messalina felt a cowardly urge to tell the maid to inform her brother that she wasn’t home. Julian had brought her only pain since his arrival in London, and he’d shown no remorse for it.

She stared at herself in the mirror and remembered a time when she was very young and had fallen on a wooden floor. A great splinter had embedded itself in her palm. She’d known that the splinter had to be removed, but even at so young an age, she anticipated the pain it would cause her. She’d shied away from the tweezers her nanny had held. It wasn’t until Julian had been called to the nursery and talked to her quietly for ten minutes or more that she was able to let the nanny pull the splinter.

He’d been so kind then, so gentle, and she’d looked up to him as her perfect older brother.

But she wasn’t a little girl now, and Julian had long ago lost the ability to comfort her.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” the maid asked.

Messalina glanced up. “Of course. Please let my brother know that I’ll attend him shortly, and tell Hicks to send tea.”

She walked down the hallways and stairs mulling on Julian and how far he’d wandered from the laughing boy of his youth. When she looked up, she found herself in front of the sitting room doors. She squared her shoulders, bracing herself to meet her brother before she opened the door.

Julian was standing by the fireplace, gazing into the small fire there, his long braid of hair thrown over his shoulder, his face pensive.

Sometimes she wondered if her brother posed as the romantic poet on purpose. But then he’d been all alone when she’d entered the sitting room.

Perhaps he was truly as lonely as he seemed.

He looked up belatedly as she crossed the room.

“I’ve ordered tea,” she said. “I hope this will be a pleasant visit.”

“I suppose that depends on your definition of pleasant,” he drawled.

She sat on the settee. “Does it? Well, then, I define a pleasant visit as conversation that doesn’t leave me in fear for my new furniture.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’d hardly attack you.”

“No?” She placed her arm on the back of the settee, eyeing him soberly. “Not physically, of course, but I think you have no compunction about attacking my mental state.”

He pressed his lips together. “Would you have preferred to never know about your husband’s deception?”

“No,” she replied calmly but with bite. “But I don’t think my preferences came into your decision at all. You wanted to score a point against Gideon, and if you had to go through my heart to do it, you saw no problem.”

He stared at her with gray eyes identical to hers—save for the fact that she’d never seen that cold expression in her own mirror.

She turned as the door opened. Two maids entered, bearing an enormous tray between them of tea and tiny cakes.

They were followed immediately by Lucretia. “Why didn’t you tell me we were