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She shook her head in blank denial.
"The one you sent last night to retrieve the money. My money."
'What a very odd thing to say!" she chirped past her smile.
"Mrs. LeMont..." Edward said hopelessly.
Jude was done with this. "We know you were behind the threat to Miss York, so if you care for your dignity at all, you will cease this ridiculous playacting and tell the truth. This game is over, madam."
Her smile snapped away like a sheet popping in the wind. "Sir," she growled. "I do not know you."
"I am Miss York's fiancé, and that is all you need to know, I'd wager. I consider your threat to her as a threat to me, so here I am to see that it goes no further."
For a moment, her face was frozen in vicious outrage. All the color in her skin gathered in two spots of scarlet high on her checks.
"Perhaps," Jude murmured, "We should take this up with your husband?"
There was her weakness. Her outrage melted into stark fear over the course of several long seconds.
The mad brightness in her eyes suddenly revealed itself as swimming tears, trapped by her lashes. "Don't," she whispered.
"Madam," Edward said, leaning forward a bit, "You must stop this dreadful assault against my sister. I don't know what you think she's done to you—"
"He loves her," she hissed, and Jude felt the shock of those words as if she'd just stripped him bare.
It took more than a few heartbeats for Jude to realize that she wasn't speaking of him.
"He has always loved her."
Edward frowned. "Your husband?"
"If he finds out about this, he will hate me. Please ..."
Edward handed her a handkerchief, and Jude felt a brief moment of vertigo. All the niceties must still be observed, even if the lady was a blackmailer. Among his mother's circle, things would've been handled with a bit more honesty.
Jude interrupted the tender scene as she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. "To put this more bluntly, madam, you dislike Marissa, so you decided to ruin the reputation of the York family and steal from them as well?"
"No! It's not that I wanted to steal from you, but I thought the culprit would be less... identifiable if money was involved."
"But you did mean to ruin the family? Or her, at least."
She stiffened, and her jaw trembled with outrage. "It's not fair! He's my husband. He took me as his wife! I always suspected that he was hesitant to love me. At first I didn't know why. And then I saw them. ..."
"What do you mean?" Aidan barked.
She jumped and pressed the handkerchief to her mouth as she calmed herself. "At a harvest feast. I looked up at him and caught an expression on his face... yearning. Heartbreak. And when I followed his gaze... there was Miss York, strolling by with some other gentleman."
Jude scowled. "And you blamed her for that?"
"Who else was I to blame? My husband? I love him! And she seemed so cool, as if his love hardly affected her at all. I knew that one cruel word from her could've cut him loose, but she was always kind enough to keep him enraptured." "Still—"
"I asked around, and I found they had been sweethearts. I saw the way she was with other men. So flirtatious and bold. I knew ... I assumed she and Charles had... and then ..." She glanced up as if jarred from a secret thought, but when her gaze fell on Jude, her eyes hardened. He knew he looked scornful, but he could not help it.
"Don't look at me that way. I could've lived with it. I told myself it was my imagination. I let myself believe my own eyes had lied. But then he... then he whispered her name. He whispered her name in my bed!"
Heat burned through Jude at that. Jealousy and a horrible, sudden sympathy for this woman's heart.
"He didn't even realize it. He called me by her name, and he didn't even realize." Her soft words broke on a sob, and Edward shot Jude a glare as if he had done something awful.
