“It is icy,” she said before she could call the words back. As cold as the man himself. “I think this room is cold.” She glanced up just as he angled his head close to hers, and her breath caught on a quick intake.
“A secret?” he whispered, his breath caressing her ear.
Her belly fluttered again, and she gave an uneven nod.
“I have always hated this room. It is one of her favorites, but it is like a cold mausoleum.” A glimmer lit his eyes, a mischievous twinkle that… softened him. “One day when I was a boy—perhaps five? mayhap six?—I found sketch paper and drew bodies upon them, and with the help of the servants, we attached the missing parts to the ‘poor body-less family members.’”
A startled laugh escaped her. That image of the child bent on fixing the sculptures was so endearing, so adorable that her heart melted in her breast, and despite the fact she knew her reaction to him and his story were folly, she was hopeless to resist that pull. “What did the duchess do?” she asked between her laughter.
He joined in, their amusement mingling as one, and with him so close, she felt his deeper rumble in her belly. “What do you think she did?”
Her amusement trailed off.
What do you think she did?
It was asked so casually, more as a rhetorical question, and yet, she searched for a sign of a test. For that was surely what this was.
Only, she could not find a hint of his usual cynicism or hardness.
Julia slid her attention away from the marquess, her thoughts upended enough to make her careless. “I believe she left them,” Julia murmured. Given his clear devotion, respect, and love for the woman, the duchess had no doubt proven to be a woman deserving of those sentiments because of how she’d treated him as a child. “I believe she indulged you mightily, Lord Ruthven.” The fact that he’d escorted her last evening and now stayed with the duchess spoke volumes of the bond between the pair.
“You are… correct,” he said softly, almost wistfully as he studied a marble bust of the duchess. His gaze slid away from the sculpture and over to Julia. “I believe given our association with the duchess and our commitment to a new beginning between us, it would be appropriate that we refer to one another by our Christian names. Please, call me Harris.”
“Harris,” she repeated. It suited him. Strong and yet with a hint of playfulness befitting the charming rogue he undoubtedly was. “And I am Julia.”
“Julia,” he murmured, collecting her fingers and raising her knuckles to his mouth as though it were the first time they’d met. Her name falling from his lips emerged as though he were testing and tasting it upon his lips. Delicious shivers tingled where he kissed. They raced up her arm and toyed with her heart.
“Why Julia?” he asked, continuing to hold her fingers. With the pad of his thumb, he stroked the inseam where her hand met her wrist, tenderly stroking that powerful digit over the place where her pulse pounded. From a touch so light. And yet so mesmerizing.
“Why what?” she asked, her voice breathless because of that quixotic caress.
He paused briefly. “The name Julia. How did you cease to be Adairia?”
How had she… And then real and pretend got all mixed up in her mind, made a greater muddle by the intoxicating effect he had upon her, and she had to sort herself out to remember who she was.
She’d never been Adairia. She played a game of pretend, on the loss of the only friend and sister she’d known. And Julia went cold inside, his touch suddenly wrong, a gentleness she was undeserving of.
“I was taken in by a family, a mother and a daughter,” she said, telling him the story that was, in fact, Adairia’s, though one in which the roles were reversed, and Julia became the princess Adairia had always sworn she was. “The mum was a former opera singer who couldn’t find employment on the stage. She suffered an illness that left her throat ravaged, and her voice gave out after that. It never returned…and she was forced to quit the stage and turned to selling flowers.” How many times had her mother regaled she and Adairia with tales of her greatness…and then her fall? “There was no father,” she murmured. Perhaps if there’d been a devoted husband, Julia’s mother wouldn’t have struggled in quite the same way. “I was lost. Wandering outside Covent Garden when they found me. Crying.” Julia’s eyes slid shut as the memory of that day slipped forward, the day when her family had become complete. “The girl was near in age to me. But she took my hand and told me everything would be all right. That I could stay with her and her mum.”
Only, she now knew that what had completed her family had left another, Adairia’s rightful one, with a void that could never be filled. She opened her eyes and brought two separate stories of two different girls converging. “The mother, she liked jewels. She used to talk about the men who vied for her favor and shower her with baubles.” Except they hadn’t been real gems; rather they’d been paste pieces her mother had clung to in memory of a time when she’d been sought after. Bitterness brought her lips twisting in a painful grimace. “She said jewels were magical and beautiful, and so she called me Julia.” Realizing he still held her, Julia slipped her hand from his and let her arm drop, feeling an odd sense of loss.
Harris brushed his knuckles over her chin, angling her face up toward his, and
