Page 185 of The Good Duke
Raw emotion filled Simon’s throat. He swallowed several times.
He’d been wrong before. He’d never loved Persephone more than he did right now.
No, he was just realizing, he loved her more each and every day spent with Persephone.
Holding a palm out, she looked for Simon to join her.
Simon caught and bowed over her fingers and drew them close to his mouth. He placed a lingering kiss upon the top of her hand.
“I love you, Persephone Forsyth,” he breathed against her skin. “However, if you’d permit, I’d like to have a…discussion with Lord Bute.”
Hesitating, Persephone glanced back and forth between the two men.
Bute curled his lips in another one of those infuriating, sly grins. “Worry not, Miss Forsyth,” he drawled, all his attention on Simon as he spoke. “You have my assurance, I will not hurt him.”
He couldn’t if he tried.
Oh, God, Simon bloody itched for a privateone-on-onewith Bute.
Persephone matched that smug smile with an even more impressive one of her own. “It’s not the duke I’m worried about.”
Giving Simon’s hands a light squeeze, Persephone quit the gardens and, at last, Simon got the very thing he’d wanted from the moment he’d stepped into the gardens—time alone with the rakish Marquess of Bute.
Chapter 35
With her heart still pounding, Persephone closed the terrace doors behind her and made her way inside Simon’s residence.
She’d been set up, deceived, and publicly ruined by her former love. Regardless of Silas’s profession and motivation to, as he’d claimed, have her as his marchioness, with his actions, he’d proven just as deceitful.
Thetonwould talk.
In the past, when the previous Marquess of Bute sent her away, she’d alternated between the desire to be invisible and the endeavor to be everything proper and decorous, above reproach. Not any longer. It was as though by speaking her fill and calling Silas out for all his many wrongs, she’d beenfreedof the constraints that’d guided and governed her life.
Now, as Persephone waited in the corridor for Simon to return from his own meeting with the marquess, the greatest and most overwhelming lightness filled her.
She’d put herself and her future with Simon first. And there was absolutely not a doubt or worry in her mind he’d not marry her, even if—no,when—this scandal in the gardens came to light.
She trusted Simon.
She believed in him and his love.
He’d never reject her. Not once in all the years they’d been friends or now, when they’d been reunited, had he spurned her.
As the young, starry-eyed girl she’d once been rose from the ashes of her ruin, Persephone smiled and hugged herself.
In this moment, she ached to be in his crushingly powerful but firmly protective arms. She ached to have him fold her in his embrace and never let go.
Except, he remained outside with Silas.
Persephone’s previously boundless joy ebbed. Her smile slipped as, for the first time, she considered the exchange now taking place between Simon and the marquess.
A shamefully belated dread built steadily inside.
She’d beensocaught up in finally being delivered from her past that she’d not let herself focus on what she should have—Simon and all the potential perils of his meeting with Silas.
He and the marquess were both fiendishly proud. They were two men driven by their passions and devoted and committed to those they cared for, and both Simon and the Marquess of Butelovedfiercely.
Though only one of those men proved trustworthy in his love. The other—Silas—the way he handled a woman’s heart was insidious and manipulative. His wasn’t a love that was kind or patient; it didn’t rejoice in truths. Rather, the way he loved was bold and arrogant.
