“Broderick,” she whipped back. “Gertrude’s Season was marred with scandal because of me.” She touched a hand to her chest. “No good can come from me being there. There’s no purpose to my being there.”
There was a finality there in her tone that marked the end of their time together.
She started back over to her table and began stacking her pages.
Panic flared in his chest. “We made love,” he repeated on an angry whisper.
And this time, he seemed to penetrate whatever wall she’d erected about herself.
Reggie stared at him with wide, stricken eyes, and then all emotion was so quickly masked he might have merely imagined that response. “It was sex, Broderick,” she said flatly in this grand reversal of roles.
He sank back on his heels.
With any other woman, any other lover before this, such a statement would have held true. Not with her. It hadn’t been just sex, and he’d not allow her to make it out to be as though it were not . . . more. “Don’t do that. You know that’s not true.”
The color bled from her cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you don’t just get to leave. Not without telling me why.”
“Why?” she echoed.
“Everything. All of it,” he said, slashing a palm through the air. “You are determined to leave: first to establish your own business.” Pain knifed at him. “And now today.” After they’d made love, and he’d lost every corner of his soul to her. “I deserve an explanation as to why it’s so damned easy for you to walk away.”
A frantic giggle bubbled in her throat, but never made it past her lips. “Is that what you think? That any of this has been ‘easy’ for me?” Her narrow shoulders went back, and her spine straightened. Reggie turned back, and she held his gaze. “Just go,” she said simply. “Live your life and let me live mine.” Gathering a hammer from a nearby worktable, she fell to a knee and set to work tugging a board free.
That was it—just go.
He stalked over, closing the distance between them in three long strides. “No,” he said softly. Broderick put to her the question he’d asked her in this very place when he’d first learned of her plans. “This is about me deserving to know why a woman who I made a member of my family sought to steal my staff and my servants and used my club business dealings to her advantage.” That managed to pierce the icy veneer she’d erected. “And you insisted there were reasons.” He held her gaze. “But you never said what those reasons were for your leaving.”
She jumped up. “You are unrelenting,” she gritted. “What do you want me to say?” She took a step forward, putting him on the retreat. Her frantic movements knocked loose several curls, and they tumbled over her shoulder, falling to her waist, a crimson waterfall that danced back and forth with her every step. “Are you determined to shred my pride?”
He scoffed. “Of course not.” How little she thought of him.
Reggie kept coming, until his legs knocked into a worktable. “Do you want me to tell you that I love you?” she rasped. “That I’ve loved you for ten years, and that all of this”—she swept her arms around the hall—“was to protect myself?”
He collapsed into that table, rattling the tools scattered there. “What?” he whispered.
Reflected back in her eyes was his own shock. All the color left her cheeks. A quavering hand went to her mouth. “No . . . ,” she said quickly. She shook her head as if he were the Devil come to collect her soul.
“You love me?”
Reggie looked away.
Nothing made sense. And yet everything now did. You see the world in absolutes, Broderick. As long as I’ve known you, that has been your way . . . You once saw Ryker Black and Adair Thorne as the enemy, but they’ve been more, too. Her words whispered forward, haunting him with the truth of his own obstinacy. His mind raced, rapidly putting together pieces of a puzzle that suddenly made sense. This was why she’d sought to leave. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Emotion hoarsened his voice.
“What would you have had me say?” A strained laugh filtered from her lips. “That it was too much being around you? That I loved you?” Her laughter faded, replaced with a stoic strength he’d long admired in her. “I lost my heart to you; I’d not lose my pride, too.”
What a bloody fool he’d been. He swiped a hand over his face. Reggie had always been more stubborn and prouder than anyone. She’d never have humbled herself by confessing feelings to him, a man who’d been so blinded by his need to join himself to the ton.
And yet . . . how had he not seen it before this angry utterance spilling from her lips?
The same reason you didn’t see that which was in your own damned heart. Because you were blind, and she was Reggie, a woman in your employ and off-limits for it.
The silence stretched on, taut and awkward and unending.
Reggie was the first to look away. She pressed her fingertips into her temples. “Now you know, and there is nothing for you to do with it,” she said, her voice catching, and then she dropped her arms, fire flaring in her eyes once more. “But I’ll be damned if you have me come back and watch you court some other woman and—”
He was across the room in three long strides. Broderick kissed her, stealing away the remainder of those words.
Reggie stiffened in his arms and then melted against him.
“I want you,” he rasped between each slant of his mouth over hers. “I love you.”
Reggie drew back in his arms; her cheeks flushed. “What?” Her wide eyes roved over his face.
He’d resisted seeing that which he wanted, her standing there . . . So much damned time lost. “I don’t have much time left.”
Her face crumpled. “Don’t say that.”
“I don’t,” he said matter-of-factly. It was why offering her love now was selfish. He would not be the man one day beside her. And that cleaved him in two. “One day there will be someone.” And from the corner of hell he found himself spending eternity in, he’d hate that nameless bastard. “A man who woos you and wins you—”
“Stop it.” She glared at him. “Don’t talk like that.”
“A man who is deserving of your love.” One who appreciated her in ways that Broderick hadn’t until it was too late.
“Stop,” she begged.
“Shh,” he urged, gathering the lone tear that tumbled down her cheek. That wasn’t why he’d told her this. How much time he’d lost . . . they’d lost together. “I want you to have your music hall and my staff as your own, if that is what you desire. But what time I have, I want it to be with you.”
He wanted to be with her.
Broderick, whom she’d spent years only dreaming of a future with, would abandon every hope for marriage to a proper lady for her.
Broderick palmed her cheek. “Will you not say something?” he asked, a hesitancy there that had never marked words from this man.
Surely he knew he was all she’d ever wanted. And yet . . . selfishly, this wasn’t enough. She didn’t want their time to be fleeting and ended by a crime committed by another, doled out by a man bent on revenge.
Her lips trembled. “I want that. I want you. I love you.”
He framed her face between his hands, and with an agonized laugh, Broderick dropped his brow to hers. “I love you,” he repeated. It had taken the threat of losing her to realize that she completed him in ways that he’d been empty before her. “Marry me?”
A sob burst from her throat, and she threw herself into his arms. He staggered under her embrace and then crashed down, landing hard. “Yes.”
A knock sounded at the front door, and Reggie glanced over. “Miss Spark?”
“Your architect.” He kissed her neck.
She giggled. “Stop. My builders are here.”
God, she was magnificent. How had it taken him so long to see it? Nay, to fully appreciate the true depth of her spirit and strength.
“May I stay?”
She drew back. “Stay?”
He wouldn’t impose himself on her plans. He’d take only what she was willing to share. “I don’t want to be underfoot—”
Reggie twined her arms about his neck. “You silly man. I want you with me. Always.”
He nipped at her earlobe, and she dissolved into a breathy fit of laughter. “Do you know you’re the first person to ever call me ‘silly’?”