Page 76 of A Caribbean Heiress in Paris
Luz could see how much it was costing him to confess this. The shame and self-loathing seemed to roll off him in waves. “What does this have to do with the distillery? With the ball tomorrow?”
“My brother Apollo—”
“Apollo?” Aurora whispered from the corner. Luz cringed, wishing she had listened to Evan and granted him privacy.
“He helped me find my mother’s will,” he continued, hands clasped tightly in front of him. “She left a copy of it with her nursemaid at the asylum he put her in, and for the last year we’ve been looking for it. We finally found it just about a month ago.” A month ago, or around the time when he’d proposed the arrangement to her. “I promised I’d support him when he exposed my father’s secret and claimed his place as heir apparent, in exchange for him helping me find the evidence to take the distillery back from my father.”
“Beatrice and Adalyn don’t know?”
He shook his head miserably. “No.”
She could see the weight of that secret in the slump of his shoulders. “You’ll lose your place,” she said in a low voice, now truly regretting her insistence that they have an audience for this.
“Yes.” A flash of bitterness came over his face. “I know being married to an earl had more appeal, but it seems you were not planning to stay cleaved to my side much longer. I’m just helping you along in your decision.”
Nowshe was truly angry.
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t make this about me or my designs on your title. You know very well I don’t give a farthing about any of that. It’s admirable that you’ve stood by your brother. I respect the sacrifice you are willing to make to make things right, but you’ve roped me in as collateral damage to your revenge scheme, and I’m supposed to not ask any questions.” She was shaking with fury. He’d let her think he was done with her instead of telling her the truth. “I have my sister and my business to think about. This could put all my plans in jeopardy.”
“I will not let this touch you,” he told her with the confidence of those who didn’t know what it was to be the other.
“You have no control over who chooses to take your father’s side on this.” She was very close to screaming, and astonishingly her outrage only seemed to temper his mood more. “You allowed me to begin a partnership with your sister, when all the while you were working to blow apart your life—and mine in the process.” It wasn’t that he didn’t tell her, not really. Because in a way she understood that. What she resented was that he had let her believe this was about them.
“I have associates, I have allies that will not turn their backs on me. If your concern is that you’ll be left adrift because I will no longer be the heir apparent—”
“Your title has never featured in your lists of attributes, as far as I’m concerned,” she said through gritted teeth. “It would be wise for you to remember that I am not your lost love, Charlotte. I am the woman you married for business, and you have not acted in good faith. You gave me yourwordthat I would not lose in this.” If he only knew just how much she’d lost already.
Her heart, her body, her damned senses.
“You’re angry,” he said with enraging calm.
“I am not angry.” She felt the muscles in her face clench and shift as she fought to keep her temper under control. “I amfurious. You lied to me, again and again.”
“I made a promise to my brother, Luz Alana. It was the only way to get the Braeburn. When I agreed to all this, you weren’t—” He bit off the words, and she almost shook his shoulders to demand he say them. “If I could do this again, I would never do anything that would hurt you.”
Tell me why. Say the words, damn it! Don’t leave me out here in the wind.
“You could’ve let me know that there were things you could not tell me. My business is everything I have, and if it fails...” Her voice went out then. A flickering candle put out by a gust of wind. Whatever he saw in her face made him move, and suddenly he was inches from her. He placed his hands on either side of her face, and they were so cold. Like the blood had gone completely from his body. This close, she felt the tremors racking through his body. He looked at her with wild, fearful eyes.
This man was terrified.
“You have me. You have everything I have. You haveme.” He ground out the words, as if he wanted to etch them into her. And she would not walk toward that mirage, that sad fever dream of a future of love that she’d made up in her desert of solitude and responsibilities.
“You have me. James Evanston Sinclair, your husband.” Calloused and devastatingly gentle fingers wiped her tears. “I want you to stay, Luz Alana, in my house with me. We just need to get through tomorrow—”
“It’s not that simple.” She shook her head stubbornly, fighting the seductive song of his words, of his promises.
“It appears I’ve arrived just in time!” a male voice bellowed from outside the office, and Evan’s entire body went rigid. They both turned in the direction it came from, and there in the doorway Evan had occupied only minutes before stood a man that could’ve been her husband’s twin.
“What in the world?” Manuela cried, leaning dramatically on the wall as she took in the sight before her. The resemblance was uncanny: the same height and wide shoulders, the whisky-colored eyes and wide, generous mouth. But remarkably the thing that made it impossible to deny them as siblings was the eyebrows. The two men were nearly identical but for Apollo’s brown skin.
“What are you doing here, Apollo?” Evan asked, in a tone that indicated he was once again close to losing his battle with control.
Apollo raised one of those piratical Sinclair eyebrows and sauntered into the room.
“I knew you’d cock it up and decided to come and offer my assistance before you lost a limb.”
“Do you mind watching your bloody language in front of my wife and her friends?” Apollo barely reacted to Evan’s bellowing and turned his attention to Luz.
