If the Viscount Falls (29 page)

And the decision was made for her. Again.

No, she couldn't blame this one on him. This one was entirely hers. She'd sent him running away.

Everyone knew it, too, which was nowhere more apparent than in the carriage once they were all settled in and headed off. Lisette was unusually silent. The duke's wooden expression said that he wished he could be anywhere else but here. And Tristan was studying her with a cold gaze.

He did that for a mile or so before he spoke. “You're a cruel woman, Jane Vernon.”

“Tristan!” Lisette chided. “Don't be rude.”

“I'll be as rude as I please to her,” he told his sister, with a jerk of his head toward Jane. “That man is mad for her, and she just keeps toying with him.”

Guilt swamped Jane. And she'd thought that spending half a day trapped with
Dom
would be bad? She must have been dreaming.

“It's none of our concern,” Lisette murmured.

“The hell it isn't.” Tristan stared hard at Jane. “Is this about Nancy? About the fact that if she has a child, Dom will lose the title and the estate?”

“No, of course not!” How dared he!

“Tristan, please—” Lisette began.

“That's why you jilted him years ago, isn't it?” Tristan persisted. “Because he no longer had any money, and you'd lose your fortune if you married him?”

“I did not jilt him!” Jane shouted.

An unnatural silence fell in the carriage, and she cursed her quick tongue. But really, this was all Dom's fault for never telling his family the truth. She was tired of being made to look the villainess when she'd done nothing wrong.

“What do you mean?” Lisette asked.

Jane released an exasperated breath. “I mean, I
did
jilt him. But only because he tricked me into it.” When that brought a smug smile to Tristan's face, she narrowed her eyes on him. “You knew.”

“Not the details. I just knew something wasn't right. But since it was clear that neither you nor my idiot brother were going to say anything without being prod
ded into it, I . . . er . . . did a bit of prodding.” He smirked at her. “You do tend to speak your mind when you get angry.”

Jane scowled at him. “You're just like
him,
manipulative and arrogant and—”

“I beg to differ,” Tristan said jovially. “He's just like
me.
I taught him everything he knows.”

“Yes, indeed,” Lisette said with a snort. “You taught him to be as much an idiot as you.” She glanced from Tristan to Jane. “So, is one of you going to tell me what is going on? About the jilting, I mean?”

Tristan cocked an eyebrow at Jane. “Well?”

She sighed. The cat was out of the bag now. Might as well reveal the rest.

So she related the whole tale, from Dom's plotting with Nancy at the ball to George's involvement to how she'd finally discovered the truth.

When she finished, Tristan let out a low whistle. “Hell and thunder. My big brother has a better talent for deception than I realized.”

“Not as good as you'd think,” Jane muttered. “If I hadn't been so wounded and angry at the time, I would have noticed how . . . manufactured the whole thing felt.”

Lisette patted her hand. “You were young. We were all more volatile then.” Her voice hardened. “And he hit you just where it hurt, the curst devil. No wonder you want to strangle him half the time. I would have strung him up by his toes if he'd done such a thing to
me
!”

To Jane's surprise, the duke kept silent, though he appeared to be musing on something.

Tristan did
not,
however, keep quiet. “Now see here, sis, Dom thought he was doing right by her. You know what life was like for him then—running here and there for Ravenswood and Pinter, living in garrets, learning investigations from the bottom up. It wasn't the sort of existence for a lady.”

Jane sniffed. “Lisette lived it. She helped you in Paris, didn't she?”

“Not until I was much older,” Lisette admitted. “And not until Tristan had established himself with the French secret police and Eugène Vidocq. By the time I was working for Vidocq myself, Tristan and I had a very nice apartment adjoining his town house, and I was already twenty-three. You were, what, seventeen when you and Dom got engaged?”

“And you weren't bred for such a life,” Tristan put in. “Whereas Lisette had been scraping by with me and Mother for years.”

Jane crossed her arms over her chest. “All right, so my circumstances were a bit different. But I had been managing the household for my aunt for some time by then.” Although Dom hadn't apparently known that.

“That's still a far cry from garrets in Spitalfields,” Tristan said.

“I would have shared any garret with him if he would only have asked!” Jane cried. “But from the beginning, he urged me to jilt him. I
told
him I wouldn't, yet he refused to listen!”

“In other words, you left
him
no choice,” the duke
said, the first time he'd spoken since they entered the carriage.

It caught Jane off guard. “What do you mean?”

Max shrugged. “You just said he wanted you to end it. Well, he knew
he
couldn't end it without damaging your reputation. So he must have thought he had no choice but to manipulate you into acting to preserve your future. He did it for you.”

“He did it for himself!” Jane cried. “So he wouldn't have to be saddled with a . . . a gently born wife who might drag him down in difficult times.”

As the stark words echoed in the carriage, she realized that was exactly what hurt so much about their parting. That Dom hadn't had the faith in her to believe her love would survive even a garret.

Lisette reached over to squeeze Jane's hand, but it was the duke's reaction that Jane most noticed. His eyes shone so kindly upon her. “That's why you never went after him later. Why you never sought him out once you knew the truth. Because you were afraid that it was always about you and your ‘flaws.' Not him.”

Tears clogged Jane's throat. “I waited for
years
. I was sure he would come to his senses and seek me out. But he never did.”

“Not because of anything to do with you,” Lisette said.

“You can't know that,” Jane choked out. “Once he established the agency, he could have approached me again. But he didn't want me.”

“I doubt that,” Lisette said reassuringly. “He never
married anyone else, did he?” She sighed. “What you don't understand is that Dom, of all of us, was the one most hurt by Papa's . . . lack of affection. Papa showed Tristan a great deal of attention and I was his only daughter, his little girl. But Dom—”

“Was the one whose birth killed your father's wife.” Jane remembered that bit of their family history.

Lisette nodded. “If what George said before he died is true, then their mother bore Dom at great risk to herself, because she was jealous over our mother. So Papa must have looked at Dom as . . . well . . . a living representation of how he'd failed his wife.”

Tristan snorted. “Father didn't feel deeply enough for that. He just saw Dom as the second son, like every other man of his ilk.” He glanced at the duke. “No offense, Max.”

“None taken,” the duke said. “But I think Lisette is mostly right. Your father doted on his bastards; that's not typical. And for all that he and George didn't get along, he certainly had him well educated and gave him plenty of responsibility.”

“Whereas he just stuck Dom off at school and ignored him.” Lisette glanced at Jane. “I know it's no excuse for his behavior, but Dom has always blamed himself for too many things—his mother's death being only the first. If he'd married you, he would have blamed himself for every moment of unhappiness the two of you suffered as a result of his being disinherited and your losing your fortune. Perhaps he couldn't face that.”

Jane thought of Dom last night, brought low by the conviction that he'd caused a massacre, of all things, by not acting upon his conscience. Might he have been the same if in marrying her, he thought he'd made her life a misery?

“All the same, it should have been my choice, too.” Jane glanced at Max. “And he did have other choices. He could have consulted me on a plan whereby we would wait five years until he established himself, and then we would reconsider marriage. I might have agreed to
that
. But he didn't even try.”

Max's gaze held a trace of pity. “Perhaps he didn't want you to wait. If he thought you'd be better off without him, then perhaps he believed you would come to think so, too, if he took himself out of your life.”

“Yes,” Jane snapped, “he thought me so shallow and foolish that I would fall out of love with him the minute things got hard. How flattering.”

“Or perhaps he just thought
himself
incapable of holding on to the love of a woman as fine as you,” Tristan ventured. “God knows I had my own doubts about holding on to the love of a good woman, after growing up with our feckless father.”

What had Dom said about why he hadn't come for her?
The point is, you would have been a fool to choose me over one of them. And I was astute enough to realize it.

When he'd told her all the reasons he'd been convinced that she would never accept him, she'd focused on his inability to believe her strong enough, determined enough, to share his trials.

But there were two ways to see it. Perhaps
he
hadn't thought himself worthy enough to keep her love.

She didn't want that to sway her emotions, but it did.

“I know it sounds as if we're making excuses for him,” Lisette said, “and clearly he did act with great presumption toward you, but at the time he obviously thought he was doing the right thing.”

“He still does,” Jane said dryly. “He has expressed no remorse for what he did. He says he would do it again if he had the chance.”

All right, so last night he
had
murmured those special words that had prompted her to seduce him:
Oh, God, Jane, why did I let you go? I've been lost ever since.
But that was regret. Not remorse. Not exactly.

“That does sound like Dom,” Lisette said with a shake of her head. “Never admit you're wrong, even when you are. Never let anyone too close. He doesn't like to bare his heart to anyone for fear they will destroy it.”

“But I think he's changing,” Tristan said. “Last night he told me how he got his scar.”

“He did!” Lisette cried. “Oh, Tristan, you have to tell us what he said. I'm sure Jane wants to know as much as any of us.”

Jane bit back the impulse to admit that she already knew. After all, when she'd last seen Tristan, she'd said she didn't, and she certainly didn't want Tristan figuring out that she must have met up privately with Dom in the interim. It wouldn't take much for him to figure out the real reason Dom was half-dressed in the stables.

Still, it warmed her that after Dom had revealed his secret to her, he'd done the same with his brother. If he could change that much after so many years, it gave her hope for their future together. And right now, she could use a little hope.

17

I
T WAS WELL
past noon as they approached Blakeborough's town house in the most fashionable part of Mayfair. Dom hadn't had the chance to speak to Jane alone since they'd rushed to London so quickly, but his one glimpse of her, looking fresh and pretty and bright in her sun-colored pelisse-dress, had made him want to howl his frustration. Especially when she'd refused to ride with him.

Damn it, this had gone on long enough. He would take her aside and make things right between them the minute they finished consulting with her fiancé about Barlow.

Fiancé.
The very word scraped him raw. Dom had met Blakeborough half a dozen times back when he'd been courting Jane, but their paths hadn't crossed since then. As Dom recalled, the earl had been too handsome for his own good.

Through the years, however, rumors had begun to circulate about the man's disposition—that he was a
curmudgeon of sorts, cynical about women and about marriage in general. Which is why Dom had initially been surprised to hear that Jane was engaged to the arse.

Still
was engaged to the arse.

Dom scowled. He'd spent the entire trip imagining what he would do when confronted with the man.

The idea of challenging Blakeborough to a duel over Jane was tempting, but not remotely practical. For one thing, it would hurt Jane's reputation. For another, it might result in Dom losing her anyway. Because if afterward Dom had to flee to avoid prosecution, she might not agree to leave England with him. Besides, it would be awfully hard to drag Rathmoor Park out of arrears from afar.