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“Except you can.” Juliet caught her chin gently in her hand and stared at her with a soft smile, trying to impart as much calm and hope as she possibly could. “You can say no to this—no to the pain in your arm. No to the eye you cannot see out of. No to the beatings. All you need to do is say yes to me. Please, Ness, take what I’m offering you.”
“What are you offering?”
“Hope.”
Ness’s swollen bottom lip pulled inward as a tear slipped out of her right eye. With a gasp, she nodded.
Juliet inclined her head to her and smiled. “Good. Put on solid boots and a heavy cloak with a hood the best you can and go to my room to wait for me. You can bring nothing else.”
“I have to tell Gertie—”
“No. She cannot know. I will come back and tell her and send her to you when it is safe. The only way we are going to escape without being followed is if we leave together, one horse, tonight. It is the only way I can make you disappear.”
Juliet held her hand out to her and Ness took it. Juliet squeezed it and the painful wince on Ness’s face with the movement struck Juliet to her core.
She had to get Ness out of there.
{ Chapter 24 }
“Juliet—dear lass, is that you?”
The earl’s gruff voice into the darkness of the corridor made her jump.
With the only light far off from the one lit sconce in the hallway, Juliet looked to her right into the opening of the solarium. Just past the dining table area and the walls made of glass, she peered into the area where plants filled the space. For as many times as she’d dined in the solarium, this area of the tall octagonal glass structure was cordoned off with a half wall and was the domain of Cook and the groundskeeper as far as Juliet had been able to tell.
Juliet had already been to the stables and nudged the stableboy awake to saddle a sturdy horse for her. She’d had him put on the longest saddle available, for Ness was going to have to ride with her—there was no way Ness could handle a horse on her own with her beaten body and broken arm.
The last thing she needed at the moment was the earl requesting her attention. But she also couldn’t create any suspicion about her plan to get Ness out of Whetland.
Juliet moved past the table into the far back end of the solarium, searching among the waist-high rows of plant beds. Beans and peas curled up along tall twine-wrapped stakes that hovered over plush rows of cabbage, lettuce, herbs and radishes.
There, off to the far right, the glow of a smoking pipe moved in the air. Her eyes adjusted to the light of the moon streaming down from above and made out the earl’s figure on a bench along an outer glass wall.
“What are you doing out here alone? There are still a few of your family standing and celebrating—they moved into the great hall for feats of strength, I believe.” As she moved toward him she hoped the darkness hid her cagey eyes. She didn’t need the earl to suspect she’d just confirmed the pathway to the stables that held the least possibility of running across anyone.
He chuckled, waving his pipe in the air. “Let the young whelps roar about. I needed some quiet.”
Sudden concern wrinkled her brow. “You are not feeling well?”
“No—nothing as silly as that. I am well enough.” He patted the empty bench next to him. “Come, sit, lass.”
She needed to get back up to Ness, yet couldn’t resist moving over to the earl and sitting down next to him. For as much as she hoped she could return to Whetland—to Evan—after this, she knew full well she couldn’t count on anything. She needed to make what she was about to do as right as she could for Evan, even if it was through his grandfather.
She looked up at the angled glass above them, the dark sky with the stars and the moon glimmering through the panes.
“This is pretty. The stars look like twinkling fire bugs lighting the air.”
He pointed upward with his pipe. “It was always my sweet Lettie’s favorite place at this time of night. The dark sky, the sweet smell of earth and plants growing.”
“I can see why.” Her head dipped and she stared at her hands folded ever-so-composed on her lap. She had to get this over with as quickly as possible and the truth was the most direct route to that. “Evan never should have married me today.”
“No?” He drew a long breath of the pipe, the bowl of it glowing orange in the dark. “It seemed quite the right thing to do in my eyes.”
“But I am not who you think me to be.”
“And just who are ye, lass?”
“My father was a baron and I was trained to be a lady, yes, that was not a lie. But that was when I was young. Since that time, I’ve been a mistress and the madame of a brothel. My past is nothing but scandal. It’s not what you deserve in a granddaughter-in-law. Not what Evan deserves.”
