Free ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One by Julie Harvey Delcourt Page B

been.
    All these years he allowed himself to be twisted against her by his own guilt and the lying words of the one person he knew never to trust.  It had been too easy to try and wash away love with reckless behavior and bitter arrogance. Not that such knowledge would make a difference now.  He should have found a way to get back to her. He had tried once and then given up.  David had made the point that both Sebastian and Jessy had done what they needed to survive these last years.  What mattered was what they did from here.  It was not going to be easy to convince Jessamy to trust him again.  He had no idea how to reconcile what he needed and what he was here to do, but Tamworth’s suit made it imperative he win her back before it was too late.
    He had made a career of being bad, licentious and self-serving.  It was a hard habit to break, an identity not easy to separate from who he might be if given a chance.  Jessy had seen what he was beneath and trusted him not to hurt her.  She had shown absolute faith in him but, he almost destroyed her. He then had the temerity to blame her for supposedly becoming a courtesan, marrying another man, and not waiting like some nun in her father’s house for the day he would return.  She wasn’t a princess in some damn dragon guarded tower waiting to be rescued.  Jessy was more the type to grab a sword and slay the dragon herself.  
    He was a hypocrite and it was a bitter pill to swallow.  He had hated her for supposedly doing pretty much what he had been doing; the essence of hypocrisy. Yes, he had amends to make, scores to settle and duties to take up.  He knew he would never be quite the kind of man that David was, but he didn’t have to be a total cretin either.  He just needed an opportunity to talk to her and then, hopefully, a further chance to prove to her he was the man she had believed he could be, the man he realized he desperately wanted to be.
    Jessy was unaware as she rode toward Bridge House that she wasn’t getting rid of Sebastian St. Just.  He just hoped the series of events that had brought him home would not take him away again before he had the time to follow through on winning her back.  Tamworth’s sudden departure told him that the king had arrived on England’s shores and he knew that meant his work was about to begin.
                 
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Still pondering Edward’s sudden departure, Jessy rode through the dark and foggy night to Bridge House.  Where in the world Edward could have run off to at this hour, and exactly who had landed, did not distract her long.  Tamworth was highly placed in the Foreign Office, and she knew it was unlikely she would ever find out what he had been called to do or who he was meeting.  It was best not to be interested when she was sure to never receive any answers.  It was only a way to pretend Sebastian was not filling her head with his presence, his scent and his touch.
    What she was currently doing did not fail to strike her as idiotic.  The growing restlessness that had begun to nag her for the past year would not be satiated by drinking, gambling and dancing.  She certainly didn’t even want to consider that Sebastian was the answer.  Once, he had been the center of her universe, the answer to every question in her life, her future.  She couldn’t afford to allow that to happen to her again.  Drowning herself in the slightly wicked pleasures of Bridge House would have to be distraction enough tonight.
    Tomorrow, she vowed, she would do her damnedest to not think of him at all.
    A part of her relished the freedom, the total lack of constraint that characterized this world versus the one she had left only moments ago.  There had always been a wildness in her and it chafed against the rigid and demanding structure of society.  Life in the countryside with doting parents, who didn’t raise her terribly conventionally, had offered her a life that was entirely