Page 26 of Faith

“I felt she was marrying him because she thought she should.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She shrugged and approached him, stopping in front of his desk. “You and Jakob always get to do what you want. But there are more expectations on her.”

“What the bloody hell does that mean?”

She sighed. “Just forget it.”

“No. Tell me.” He softened the demand with, “Please.”

“Your sister plays the role of the twentieth century English noblewoman even though we are a quarter of the way through the next century. She knows she’s expected to marry well, even though your family doesn’t need the money.”

“Bullocks.”

Her lips curved. “I know that. You know that. Julienne does not. She’s always been the one who did what was expected of her.”

“What about Jakob?”

“Yes, he makes your mother happy, but he’s doing what he wants. I mean how many people get to be an actor, a board member of one of the biggest corporations in the world, and related to British royalty. If he wanted to do something else, he would do it without a thought of how the family would react. Your sister is not built that way. She takes being a good girl to an extreme even I can’t understand.”

“You count yourself as a good girl?” he asked, unable to hide his amusement.

“I was. On the circuit.”

The fact that she mentioned her former life as a skater was enough to intrigue him. She rarely spoke of those years, even though he knew she snuck away to skate every now and then.

“Yes, but you weren’t, correct?”

“I was, then I wasn’t. That’s a heavy responsibility, which could even drive a nun to sin.”

Pain always tinged the edges of her self-depreciating humor. He always wanted to dig more, to know more about that time in her life. Something told him that his inquiry would not be welcomed—especially now.

“You are saying she was marrying to make everyone happy?”

She nodded. “Everyone but her. Although, I don’t know if she really understood how unhappy she’s been these past eighteen months.”

He cocked his head to the side and studied her. “But you have? Why?”

“I’m not family.”

He shook his head. “It’s more than that.”

She sighed and sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “I can identify with being thoroughly unhappy. The last two years of my skating career, I was probably heading into major depression.”

“That’s why you left skating?”

“One of many reasons,” she said in that same voice she had always used for the subject. Four years, and she had yet to ever tell him about it; why the little girl from Colorado walked away from a definite medal at the Olympics. And, he wanted to know. He wanted to know everything about her.

Before he could ask, her phone buzzed. She looked at the caller ID and rolled her eyes. “The press.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t a problem for you.”

“It’s not,” she said rising from the chair. “This is where I get to be rude to tabloid writers. I don’t get to do that enough these days.”

She clicked on the phone. “Marty, I thought I told you to lose my number.”

Jensen watched her walk out of his office, and he fought the urge to follow her. He knew it wouldn’t lead to anything. It couldn’t. His life was perfectly structured and if he took Nicola to bed, that structure would be shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.

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