Page 68 of Seductive Reprise
“What?”
Happiness had snuck in, which he hadn’t even realized until it rushed out of him again, expelled all at once as if from a bellows.
“No. You are not absolved,” Rose said as she tucked the drape of his banyan back over her legs, covering up her beautiful body. The same body he’d worshiped twice the night before.
He reached for her, but she pulled away. His stomach lurched.
“Tell me, what can I do, what ought I do—”
“You may not have intended it,” she said, looking away from him, breathing deeply as she attempted to remain calm, “but youdidsabotage me. I don’t require your charity. I didn’t need your money.” Her words caught on a sob, and he wanted so desperately to reach for her.
He didn’t.
Instead he stood, tightening the belt on his own dressing gown.
She continued. “I loved you, from that first day we rode into the countryside together. But it can never be, because you don’t understand, you still don’t understand. Not everyone wants riches, to while their days away riding horses!” She buried her face in her hands. He heard her sniffle. It cut him.
But he felt paralyzed, frozen as if trapped in a dream.
When he had finally gathered himself enough to speak, he asked, “Is that what you think?” His voice exuded anger, even as he told himself to calm down. “That I wish to jail you in the countryside with nothing to do but watch meride?”
“No!” she wailed. “But you keep… acting in such a manner! Compelling me to abandon myself, to become an earl’s daughter.”
“I did no such thing.”
“How am I to succeed like this? You bought them all! Nearly every painting! And then put them in a room where no one but you would ever go. No one has seen them, Joseph!” She stood up now, her cheeks pink, tears falling.
“Yusef,” he said weakly, his voice low and hollow. He felt on the verge of falling apart, all at once.
She flinched. “I—”
“Is that it, then?” He cut her off. “Are you running off in the dead of night once more?”
“It’s morning,” she murmured.
“And so your answer to my offer, am I to understand, is no?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have an answer.”
He looked up, his heart pounding.
“Not yet,” she said. “Now, I beg your pardon but… I ought to dress.”
She gave him one last doleful look, clutching his banyan tight across her slim form.
And then she turned away.
Yusef left, retreating through the small hall in a daze. She hadn’t refused him. But she hadn’t accepted him, either. He heard the door shut behind him as he reentered his study and collapsed in his desk chair.
From that spot he had an excellent vantage point of the offending wall, and all her talent that he now possessed, but the gentle morning light could not contend with the room’s heavy curtains. He sat in the dark, alone with her paintings. Hidden from the world.
His gut wrenched, and regret overtook him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As Rose arrived athome, she tried to ignore the sadness that settled upon her the moment she walked the steps up to her building. She’d thought to deliver the canvas of Walter’s portrait and receive her full commission, but her rooms felt positively ghastly after waking that morning in Yusef’s mansion, and the gloom became so heavy it sapped her of all her vigor.
She collapsed upon the flimsy wicker couch and flung an arm over her head. If she married him, that would be her mansion as well. Why did she suffer such ambivalence, leaving the door open to the idea? Where had the pure self-righteousness of her youth gone? She groaned, then closed her eyes.
