Page 65 of Gentleman Jim

“And what about me? What about what I’ve suffered?” She gave another tug to his hair, forcing him to meet her eyes. Her body was trembling with yearning for more of his kisses. More of his touch. But she yearned for something else even more. She wanted—needed—the truth. “Why didn’t you come back to me?”

He stared down at her for a long moment. The heat of passion slowly faded from his face. It was replaced by an emotion she couldn’t identify. His throat spasmed on a swallow. And then he lay down at her side, his head coming to rest on the pillow next to her. “I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t. You didn’t send me so much as a single letter.” She looked at him in the waning candlelight, their faces only inches apart. “Why?”

“Because…” There was a peculiar sheen to his gray eyes. “In order to move forward…I had to let you go.”

St. Clare had never contemplated saying the words aloud, let alone uttering them to Maggie Honeywell herself. Confessing to her that once he’d left Beasley Park—once he’d begun his transformation into John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare—he’d been obliged to think of her as an inextricable part of his unfortunate past. A past that had been better left forgotten.

I had to let you go.

It had been the only way to survive.

“I understand,” she said. That didn’t prevent the hurt from welling in her eyes.

The sight of it made his chest constrict. He touched her cheek. Her skin was soft as warm silk beneath his fingers. “Maggie—”

“I do. I even understand why you sought out Fred.”

The mere mention of his rival’s name was enough to make St. Clare’s muscles tense with anger. “I didn’t seek him out.” He hadn’t. Not initially. “I saw him quite by chance one afternoon in Bond street, not long after I arrived in London.”

Fred had been strolling down the opposite side of the street in company with a fashionable companion. It was impossible to mistake that bulldog gait and copper-colored shock of hair. Impossible to forget that look of smug entitlement.

In that moment, emerging from Weston’s after having just been measured for a half dozen new coats, the long-suppressed reality of St. Clare’s past had rushed upon him with a frightening power. All the slings and arrows of his youth. All that roiling anger. The deep sense of unfairness about it all, and the bone-deep desire to, one day, balance the scales.

He’d thought he had put those feelings behind him. Locked them away and thrown the key into the depths of the Tiber. He’d left them there, buried in Italy—a necessary sacrifice in order to affect the transformation into the gentleman he was today. But in Bond Street, those feelings had been brutally resurrected.

“And later?” Maggie asked. “At the gaming hell?”

“That, I’m afraid, wasn’t as much of a coincidence as it seemed.”

She didn’t appear surprised. “You contrived the whole of it, I gather.”

“I did.”

It had taken little effort to discover where Fred spent his evenings, and even less for St. Clare to arrange to be there himself. The gaming hell had been smoke-filled and dark, and Fred’s powers of recognition none the better for drink. He hadn’t known St. Clare at all.

But St. Clare had known him.

Indeed, there had been little in his life more satisfying than putting a bullet through Fred’s shoulder.

“You could have contrived to meet me,” Maggie said.

“I couldn’t.” St. Clare paused, adding darkly, “And not because of what you said in Hyde Park, about my hate for him outlasting my love for you.”

“Then why?” A glimmer of vulnerability shone in her eyes.

He held her gaze. Lying beside each other on the curtained bed, the two of them face-to-face in the shadows, it felt as if they were children again, sharing secrets.

But not quite children.

He was a man grown—shirtless, injured, and half drunk. And she was a beautiful, alluring woman. His woman.

It was impossible to be anything but honest with her.

“Because…I knew if I saw you again, I’d go all to pieces. Everything I’ve worked for—my title, Allendale’s support, the very life I live now. If I saw you again, I knew I’d risk it all to get you back, even if it meant destroying myself in the process.”

She gave him a reproving look. “What a bleak way you have of viewing the matter. You saw me again that night in Grosvenor Square and your world hasn’t ended.”