My Fair Marchioness (Scandalous Affairs Book 3) by Christi Caldwell (best short books to read txt) 📗

was an equal, and not superior to her inferior, the common street trash who on too many occasions had let a man touch her breast through her dress, or grope her buttocks for a pence.

His gaze darkened. The tawny slashes of his brows shot together in an angry line over a pair of frosty cerulean eyes. He growled. “I would happily kill the lot of those lords should your path cross with them again. You need just point them out, and I’ll make them regret their treatment of you… and others who surely suffered the same abuses,” he said sharply.

It took her a moment to register that the fury coating that low growl wasn’t reserved for her, but rather, for the nameless strangers whom she’d spoken of. People of his station. Lords and ladies who shared his ranks, but… also not his heart. Or his depth of compassion. The kind he’d displayed for the duchess and now a righteous indignation on Julia’s behalf. She searched her eyes over his face. “Why?” She managed nothing more than that befuddled whisper that she wasn’t even sure she’d spoken aloud. Why wasn’t he horrified, as he should be, by what she’d revealed? Horrified not at the people of his station, but at her for selling those touches and for disgusting them with her presence? “Why would you offer to do that?” she repeated with a greater insistence.

It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit with who he was or what she believed about him or noblemen, and it left her all muddled in her mind.

“I’m not a monster,” he said gruffly. “But you don’t know that, do you, Julia?”

It was a rhetorical question, and she was grateful for it, because it allowed her to try to order her thoughts and put to rights the cadence of her racing heart.

“You don’t know that,” he repeated more gently as he glided the back of his gloved hand along the curve of her jaw, and it trembled under the power of his touch and the words he spoke. “Because you have only known monsters, and I have not… given proper thought to what your experience has been these years.”

They locked gazes for a long while, and some quiet, unspoken truce floated to the surface, hanging between them.

He gave a slow, meticulous flick of his wrist, and the carriage rocked into motion once more.

Julia sat with her fists at her sides, grateful when he again spoke that he shifted the topic away from the most shameful parts of her life.

“My godmother has been like a mother, Julia,” he said quietly. “I’d not see her hurt, and if that means being cautious and, in so doing, offending you or others, then I am sorry for your hurt feelings, but I will not be sorry for the motives that drive me.”

“That, I can understand,” she said softly.

It had been easier to hate him when she’d believed he viewed her as an inferior, that his resentment and coldness toward her had stemmed from the place she’d come from. But knowing it was because he cared about his godmother and that, even with his reservations about Julia and her identity, he’d still express the outrage he had on her behalf chiseled away at the icy fortress she’d built around herself. It reversed their roles. It made him a hero and her… well, she’d always been a villain in this.

Julia stared at her lap. “I should not be offended by your unease around me,” she murmured. “I am a stranger, and you’ve no reason to trust me.” Desperate to understand more about this man, for reasons she couldn’t understand, she sought more of an understanding about his relationship with his godmother; a woman who clearly meant so much to him. “How did you come to know Her Grace?”

“Our mothers made their Come Out the same Season. They were both diamonds of the first water.” As he spoke about his family, she glanced over. “And from what I understand, my mother was sought after by every gentleman in the market for a wife.” A muscle rippled along his jaw, his mouth tense, and his eyes went hard. “Even those rogues and previously confirmed bachelors, who were not gentlemen.”

“Your father was not kind to her,” she murmured.

Hatred iced his eyes. “He was not.”

She waited for him to say more, but the protracted silence, echoed by the churning of the curricle wheels, indicated he’d no intention of speaking further on the matter of his parents. And by the tense way in which he held himself, he regretted sharing all that he had.

Fiddling with the handle of the parasol, Julia stared out at the passing landscape, at the luxuriant grounds of greenery and flowers she’d never known existed in London. All the while, she considered everything Harris had revealed in just a handful of sentences, ones that had spoken volumes.

She’d simply taken it to be fact that the lords and ladies of such lofty ranks lived to make advantageous marriages. And she realized she’d been holding Harris guilty of the same crime she’d unknowingly committed—passing judgment on people whom she did not know and failing to see them as real souls, with their own hurts and their own struggles.

“The duchess was kind to you, then?” she murmured when he sat still and silent.

He nodded. “After my mother passed, I spent much time in the nurseries, forgotten. Until one day, the duchess stormed the household and took me under her wing. She and Ladies Cowpen and Cavendish.” A wistful smile hovered at the corners of his hard lips, and that ghost of a grin, not the artificial one he’d turned on her, proved real and did very real things to her heart’s rhythm.

That was when Julia knew with absolute certainty just one thing—she was going to leave. The moment they returned, she’d pen a note, confessing