“Wait,” he demanded. “Don’t go this way.”
“What way?” she said.
“The tree. In distress,” he replied, feeling a wave of concern for her well-being.
She cocked her head to the side and laughed. There was no humor in it. “Keep your concern, Your Grace. I am not yours to look after,” she said. “Now you must let me go, even if you don’t wish it. But I think, in reality, you do.”
And then she climbed the sill and jumped back out to the tree limb so easily, with seemingly little thought. And without a backward glance.
He wondered how she could be so free, when by all rights, she was a lady who was meant to be in society’s prison.
He could not tear his gaze away from her as she shimmied down the tree.
He gripped that damned sill until he felt splinters cut into his hands, hating himself for watching as if his own life was slipping away with her small form going down that tree.
Society imprisoned ladies, but they also imprisoned men.
There was no forgetting that.
Bloody hell, he wished that he could break all of the rules, that he could have her, that he could keep her, but he couldn’t.
He wished that he had not been shaped in the crucible of his childhood to eschew love. To fear it. To watch it twist and burn all those it touched.
And because that was what he had learned, what had been engraved into him, like a pattern carved into silver, he knew that was what he would do if he fell in love.
He had to let her go.
He would never make this mistake again.
James turned away from the window, cursing himself, hating himself for allowing himself to be swept up.
Yes, by God, he hadallowedit. Hell, he’d wanted it, and some force that he couldn’t quite put his finger on had pushed him to it.
There had been something greater than himself that had led him to kiss her, to wish to consume her and be consumed in turn. But if he did yield, he would consume her in truth.
As his father had his mother. And she had only survived that through his death.
He couldn’t risk doing that to Jack.
The fever in his blood. The madness waiting there.
James had to focus now on what needed to be done. The sooner he did the right thing for the Peabodys the better. The sooner he did the right thing for Jack, the better for all of them.
James drew in a long, shuddering breath and pushed back away from the window. He turned and contemplated the bed that he could so easily have taken her to. A deep part of him, an unspeakable part of him, wished that he had. He wished that he had not chosen the path of nobility, the path of righteousness, perhaps even the path of fear.
The path of fear of ruining her, of disappointing his friend, of choosing more than he thought that he should.
Because he knew that if he dared too far, everything could go up in flames—flames of pain, of regret, and of betrayal.
And the more he had felt alive with wanting her, the more he knew the danger.
It was the very power of how much he wished to have her that meant he could not.
Chapter Eighteen
“My dear, you have a twig in your hair.”
Jacqueline immediately grabbed at her hair, felt the twig in it, pulled it out, and grinned sheepishly at Louise.