She opened the other drawer and paused. There was a stack of letters there, and she realized she was intruding on his private items. Things not meant to be shared with her. She was about to close the drawer and back away when she noticed a name written in a firm hand in the middle of a sentence on the page on the top of the stack.

Miss Anne Shelley.

Her hands shook as she drew the letter from the drawer and turned it over to start reading from the beginning.

Chapter 19

Jasper opened his eyes with a contented sigh. He rarely allowed himself a nap in the middle of the day, but after making love to Thomasina, it was impossible not to need the respite. Now he felt refreshed as he rubbed his eyes and sat up to find her.

When he did, his heart began to pound. She was sitting at his dressing table in just his shirt, the chair pivoted to face the bed. In her hand was one of the letters from Reynolds. The rest were stacked beside her on the tabletop. Her face was pale, her cheeks streaked with tears, and she was staring at him as if she had never seen him before. As if she didn’t know him at all.

And he knew in that moment what she had done, what she knew and what it had all destroyed. He leapt to his feet, completely uncaring about his nakedness as he took a long step toward her.

“What are you doing?” he snapped, far more sharply than he intended in the face of her utter censure.

She jerked from the chair and backed away from him. “You want to take that angry tone with me?”

“You ought not have gone through my private things,” he said, fighting to gentle that tone. He’d always gone to defensiveness when he had done something wrong.

She shook her head. “Perhaps not, though that wasn’t my intention as I dreamily looked at all the things in this room that define who you are. Including these lies.” She threw the letter in her hand toward him.

He stooped to pick the item up and clutched it to his chest, as if he could undo the power of it. But he couldn’t. Her rage and hurt and betrayal were all alive on her face. She was no longer trying to be pleasing when it came to him.

And she was beautiful. So beautiful in that moment that it hurt his heart to look at her and know she no longer trusted him. Especially when her expression crumpled a fraction and tears filled her eyes.

“I asked you about Anne,” she whispered. “Over and over again. And you lied to me. I told you about my own search and you acted as if it didn’t matter. You looked me in the face, you bastard, and you pretended like you knew nothing when in fact you had so much information about her.”