Free Seduced by Jess Michaels

sigh. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Don’t be sorry,” Audrey insisted. “It’s clear you are distracted by very serious thoughts. Perhaps we can help in some way?”
    Letty bit her lip. Although she had spoken to Aaron about this subject a few days ago, his male perspective on the situation wasn’t quite as comforting as she knew her cousins could be. It was so very tempting to allow the truth, the whole truth, to boil over.
    Except she couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t reveal her late husband’s secrets. The fact that Jack Blackwood was the man who haunted her every thought was also not something she could say. Claire would certainly tell War and word would get back to Jack.
    Humiliation would be the only result, to say the least. How he would crow.
    “Letty?” Juliet pressed, leaning closer. “You’re roaming away in your mind again.”
    Letty shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s truly nothing serious, I assure you. Nothing I want to trouble you all about.”
    Claire leaned forward and caught her hands. “Dearest Letty,” she began, her tone low. “If there is one thing this family has learned, it is that secrets are far more damaging than even the darkest truth. I understand your not feeling comfortable sharing, and I certainly would be the last person to press if you insist on keeping your counsel, but I don’t want to see you rot from the inside with whatever you carry.”
    Rot from the inside. It was an apt description of how Letty sometimes felt, holding back the truth from everyone. Knowing that same truth would ultimately keep her from her own future just as much as it had destroyed her past.
    She shook her head slowly. Her cousins were sympathetic, non-judgmental people. Couldn’t she tell them some portion of the truth? Maybe if she said some of it out loud, it would have less power over her.
    “As you well know, my husband has now been gone just around eighteen months,” she began slowly. “Although my mother has insisted I exit my mourning and is encouraging me to seek out another husband, I don’t know that…” She hesitated. This was where she would have to be careful. “I don’t know that I’m ready to think about marriage again. Perhaps I never will be.”
    “You loved Noah,” Mary said softly.
    “Yes,” Letty said simply.
    It was the truth. Oh, it hadn’t been the kind of love any of her cousins shared with their spouses. That all-consuming, passionate connection seemed very foreign to Letty. But she had loved Noah. She knew he had loved her too, in his own way.
    “I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to lose him,” Juliet said, shivering. “If I were to lose Gabriel—”
    “I don’t think I would ever marry again if Evan were gone,” Josie whispered, her eyes welling with tears at just the thought.
    “Nor Jude,” Audrey said.
    Mary shivered. “I cannot even think of a time when Edward isn’t here for me.”
    Claire held her gaze evenly, and there was understanding in her stare that the others didn’t have. Claire had experienced loss before, Claire had suffered grief and pain. She knew better what Letty had endured and what moving on looked like.
    “ You survived,” Claire said in a soft, even tone that held enormous power. “You are not in the grave with him.”
    Letty jerked out a nod. “Oh, I know. And I suppose that is where my problem lies. I am not interested in marriage at this point, even if I did have a suitor, which I do not. That doesn’t mean I am not…lonely.”
    She said that last sentence and the truth of it hit her so hard she almost lost her breath. She was lonely. Painfully lonely. And she had been for many years, far longer than the mourning period Society dictated. Her marriage had been lonely, her life before it had been lonely.
    And now it was all coming to a head, thanks to one impish criminal and his careless kisses that made her see how stark and empty her life truly was.
    “Of course you are lonely,” Josie breathed,