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Her look snapped to him, genuine surprise in her eyes. “What makes me happy?”
“Yes? Is it such a hard question?”
Her mouth opened slightly, but no words came forth. She shook her head. “I’ve just never been asked it before.”
Several seconds went by in silence. His eyebrows lifted. “You have no answer?”
Her bottom lip jutted upward as her brow crinkled. Then a sudden smile lifted her cheeks. “When a woman new to the brothel learns how to shine.” The smile cracked wider, the edges of her eyes crinkling. This was not the smile she gave him in the study at the Willows. This was a smile that made the air around her light up, crackle. Would make any man crawl just to be in her realm.
And it damn well stopped his breath in his lungs.
“The moment she realizes her own power.” She shifted on the bench, her right hand lifting, animated. “Sometimes we’ll get a new woman—timid, shy, beaten down by this world and just searching desperately for a shred of a better life. I teach her how to talk, how to smile, how to pander—everything she needs to know for how to get the brothel to work for her, instead of her working for it. And she gains that shred of a decent life, and then years go by and she’s saved enough to last her the rest of her days away from the life. She’s secure and she’s strong and she can move onward. That…that makes me happy. To be a part of that.”
“Does it happen a lot?”
“Not often enough.” The smile on her face softened, tempered, but it still held on her lips. “But when it does…when it does, it’s magic.”
She’d relaxed, ever so slightly, and it exacerbated the fact that Evan had been trying to deny since he’d helped her up into the carriage.
The woman was bloody well beautiful—not just her face and her body—but her soul. Despite the hard edge she’d initially put forth, her heart was made to love, to care.
No wonder his instinctual reaction in the study at the Willows was to get away from her—fast. He was out of his depth here, and he knew it. There were lines that wouldn’t—couldn’t be crossed.
And a woman like Juliet begged for those lines to be crossed.
A bloody ill-advised idea, the whole of this farce of a betrothal to set before his grandfather. But here it was.
He was too deep into it now to turn back.
Present the woman. Make his grandfather happy.
It’d been an easy plan when he’d concocted it three weeks ago.
He just had to keep it so.
{ Chapter 3 }
Juliet sat atop the horse, watching the water stream down from the brim of her poke bonnet in front of her nose. Flashes of light flew through the streaming water, the flickering flames in the lanterns on the side of the coaching inn reflecting oddly through the rain and scattering sparkles.
The blasted man could be quicker about this.
She shifted her stare to the inn’s front door, willing it to open. Rain had started in the afternoon. Hard rain. So much that the carriage had soon gotten stuck in a swath of deep mud six miles back. Hours were lost attempting to free the wheels, to no avail. With nightfall approaching, Evan had taken her on one of the horses to the closest village. A veer from the straight route north, but they needed somewhere to sleep that night.
Juliet stifled the shiver that was determined to make her entire body quake. Her carriage dress and pelisse were not meant for the chill of this fall rain.
He said he would be quick. This wasn’t quick.
Just as she was about to slide off the horse and poke her nose into the coaching inn, Evan opened the door and stormed toward the horse. “We cannot stay here.”
“What? Why not?”
He grabbed the reins from the hitching post. “There’s only one tiny room available.”
She looked out along the main lane through the village. The rest of the buildings along the road were small—a few shops, small homes. “Where is the next inn?”
He sighed, looking up at her with no regard to the steady rain hitting his face. “The next village.”
Her gaze whipped toward the road they had yet to travel. “How far?”
