“Our agreement was always a practical one,” she said.
He wanted to scream. He had lost count of how many times she had said this only to act in a way that entirely contradicted it.
“Do you feel anything for me?” he asked.
She got up and walked to the fireplace.
“What I feel is not the point. What we agreed upon is the point. There was to be no love in this. It was an arrangement. A friendship at most.”
“It is not even a friendship,” he said, keeping his voice level. “None of my friends flinch when I raise my voice. And you were not like this in London — this seems to have come upon you suddenly since we arrived here. Why?”
“You were not my husband then. And we were not alone in a remote country house.”
So it was just how the vicar had concluded. It was because he was now her husband. But did their remote location play a part also? Would she be more comfortable near her friends in town?
“So, if we returned to London, you would stop acting as though I were a sleeping monster waiting to wake?”
“No,” she said. “You do not understand me at all.”
“No,” he agreed. “I do not.” He raised his arms in frustration — and at once she took a step back. He sank into his chair.
“We are at an impasse. I do not know what we are to do.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “It seems you are incapable of keeping your side of the agreement.”
“I am perfectly capable of keeping to my side of the agreement,” he fired back. “I can be cold if that is what you want. I can take my meals alone. I can tend to the estate on my own. I can be a stepfather to Lavinia without ever crossing your path. If this is what you wish — a cold coexistence rather than a friendship, or a marriage, or anything at all — then that is what you shall have.” He stopped. Then kept going, because he was in it now. “In fact, if you wish, I need not speak to you at all.”
“Perhaps that is best,” she said.
She spoke the words quietly, as though pronouncing a sentence or making a vow. He had not meant any of it. He had wanted her to fight back — to tell him that she did want a friendship, that she wanted more. He had accomplished the opposite entirely.
“Very well,” he said at last. “That is what you wish, and that is what you shall have.”
CHAPTER 32
HELENA
She walked quickly, and did not stop until her chamber door was closed behind her.
Then she stood in the middle of the room and did not move.
The coldness in his voice at the end had shaken her more than his anger ever had. She had braced herself for the anger — had been waiting for it, reading the signs of it the way she had learned to read them, cataloguing each shift in his expression and the set of his shoulders. But the anger had not come. What had come instead was something quieter and far more final. A man who had decided to stop trying.
She had done that. She had taken something that was trying very hard to grow and she had put her hands around it and held on until it stopped.
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
The worst of it was that she had meant none of it. Not a single word of it after the first, and she was not even certain she had meant those. She had wanted him to come back at her. To refuse to let it stand. To do the thing he always did, push back, make her laugh, find some angle she had not considered. Instead he had gone very still and very cold, and said very well, and that had been that.
She had wounded him. She knew it with a certainty that sat like a stone in the center of her chest. Not annoyed him, not frustrated him — wounded him. She had seen it in his face in the moment before he masked it, that brief unguarded second when he had looked at her as though she had said something that could not be taken back.
And the terrible truth, the one she could not look at directly, was that the reason she had kept pushing was not because she did not care. It was precisely because she did. She had felt it coming for weeks — this slow, creeping, terrifying feeling of needing him, of looking for him in a room before she had even decided to look. And every time she felt it she had pushed it back down and told herself that an arrangement was an arrangement, that she knew exactly what this was, that she was not going to make that mistake again.
Because she knew what happened when you loved someone who held power over your life. She had learned it very thoroughly, in the years she had spent finding new ways to make herself smaller, quieter, less likely to draw the kind of attention that ended badly. She had spent three years inside that lesson. She was not going to take it again.
Even if Gideon was nothing like Huxley. Even if she knew that, fully, in every rational part of her mind. Her heart had not yet caught up to what her mind knew, and until it did, the only safe thing was distance.
A knock at the door.
