AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘Hattie!’ Freddie skidded to a stop behind him in time to witness her disappear around the corner. He gripped Jasper’s sleeve, all the colour suddenly drained from his face. ‘She can’t handle Hades! She isn’t strong enough! She’s going to damned well kill herself!’
Jasper lunged for Freddie’s cravat and pulled it tight, undecided whether or not to smash the overbearing idiot’s teeth in or simply throw him to the ground.
‘Lord Beaufort...’ The same oily reporter who had just bothered Hattie sidled up to them, and because they had all already caused enough of a scene, he instead dragged Freddie back up his steps and slammed the door closed behind them.
Only then did he fling his friend backwards with a growl. ‘What the hell, Freddie!’ Incensed and reeling, Jasper began to pace. ‘I wanted her to have a choice, God damn it! A choice! After fate has taken so much of that away from her, I wanted her to have all the say in the most important decision in her life. Wanted her to want me as much as I want her for all the right reasons! But now—’ he jabbed his finger in the fool’s face ‘—thanks to your overbearing interference she has to marry me whether she wants to or not!’
‘Only if she doesn’t kill herself first.’ Freddie was screaming in his face again. Irrational and panicked. ‘That horse is...’ Jasper did not give him time to finish, instead gripping him by the shoulders and pushing him against the wall this time.
‘That horse is no match for your sister! Nothing is! Not me. Not you. Not even the last bloody rites! When Hattie puts her mind to something, nothing fazes her. Nothing beats her. When are you going to get it through your thick head that she’s stronger than all of us put together?’
He let go of Freddie and stepped back, trying to calm his breathing while searching his mind for a solution which might fix this mess—but he already knew there wasn’t one. There was no way to limit the damage which had just been done when Freddie had come through the front door and all three of them had left it, the most tenacious one probably already tearing down the length of Long Acre like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Realisation of that truth, and perhaps all of the others, slowly dawned on Freddie’s face. ‘What do we do now then?’
‘There is no we in this situation, Freddie, as you’ve done quite enough. So have I.’ He should have found a way to explain all his reasoning and his plan to Hattie before he took the decision out of her hands. In that, he was no better than her idiot brother. ‘What happens next is for Hattie to decide, not us. As it always should have been.’
It took no convincing at all to send Freddie home to deal with the aftermath there. Once he had been reminded that he had a wife, a mother and another sister at home about to be knocked sideways by the latest twist to the scandal, his friend had practically sprinted out of the back door. Jasper waited only as long as he assumed it would take for him to hail a hackney before he departed via the back entrance too, hoping he knew Hattie well enough to know exactly where she would head to find some solace and calm herself.
The relief was palpable when he saw her sitting on their little bench by the duck pond, staring out at nothing while the fearsome horse she had stolen stood nearby munching on the daisies.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’ Her eyes lifted to his, unsure this time rather than tear-stained.
‘I read your letter.’ She raised the crumpled open sheets a few inches before they dropped listlessly back into her lap. ‘It was so long it took me half an hour.’
‘I suppose it was a bit of a long ramble, but in my defence, I wrote it in the middle of the night.’
‘If you were up anyway, you should have delivered it. Softened the ground before you pulled it out from under me.’ She sighed as she stared at his handwriting. ‘How much of it is the truth?’
‘All of it.’ He shrugged and sat beside her. ‘I love you and the only way that I could see that we had a future was to confront the past. Start that big cumbersome destructive boulder rolling and get it out of our way.’
‘When you say it like that, it seems almost noble that you abandoned me.’ She still could not look at him and fiddled with a curled corner of his missive which looked like it had already been fiddled with a lot.
‘If you read my letter then you know that I wasn’t quite noble and selfless enough to abandon you completely. While Saint Jasper was adamant he was going to step aside and give all those much worthier beaus a chance to woo you for the rest of the Season, the sinner couldn’t stand to give them free rein.’ That was why, in his letter, he had begged her to meet him here. Twice a week. To do his own bit of subtle wooing to make sure she couldn’t forget him. ‘I couldn’t stand not to see you, Hattie. I love you.’ He reached over to take her hand which remained limp under his.
‘In what way do you love me?’
‘Way?’
She shrugged; her gaze fixed in her lap. ‘Like a friend or a sister or...’
Jasper lifted her chin with his index finger so that she could see into his soul. ‘Like a man loves a woman. The all-consuming, need every part of you, hearts and flowers for ever kind.’
‘You do not have to say that just because I have been ruined and you feel sorry for me.’
‘I am pretty sure I said it in that letter before you were ruined and, for the record, I have never felt sorry for you.’ She scoffed at that, and he huffed. ‘Well, all right... I’ll confess I feel sorry for you now—as now that you are ruined you are stuck with me when I wanted you to have a choice. I wanted you to want me irrespective of everything that has happened—not because of it. I am pretty sure I said as much in that damn letter too.’ He snatched the top sheet from her fingers to check. ‘Are you sure that you’ve read it? All of it?’
She nodded.
‘Then why do you doubt me still, Hattie? Why? When I’ve told you that I love you and that the second the dust from my stupid moot scandal settled I was going to do everything that I could until I had convinced you to shackle yourself to me for all eternity?’ He pointed to the relevant paragraph in the middle of the page.
‘Because everyone seems to think you can do better. Because you blow hot and cold. Because...’ One fat tear dropped on the page still resting in her lap, the salty droplet mixing with the ink on the paper and all the letters began to merge in the smudge. ‘I think, in those dark moments when doubt is at its most fertile, that you can do better too and because I cannot find it in me to ever resist you, but you constantly resist me.’
That would have been laughable if he could not see that she believed it. ‘I have done such a good job of that, haven’t I? I’ve spent the last month in a haze of lust for you, Hattie. Ever since that afternoon in my office I cannot think straight for wanting you half of the time. I almost had you then. Came so close to ripping all of your clothes off before I came to my senses.’ Her eyes closed as she winced. ‘I’ve been trying to be a gentleman and limit myself but...’
Jasper paused to run all her words back through his head and then recall every moment of that afternoon again then groaned aloud when he recalled exactly when he had come to his senses. How she had reacted. Her speed to cover herself and hide her lower body. He had put that down to other parts of her being exposed, not the one which he always forgot about because to him it had never mattered. ‘This is about your leg, isn’t it? You think that I stopped ripping your clothes off like a madman possessed because it disgusted me.’
