But this wasn't some love story. She was his penance. Worse than charity, she was a living reminder of what he considered to be his worst failings.
The ache in her chest was so sharp, she had to press her hand against it just to breathe.
"Besides," he continued, "I have an understanding with another woman. My mother has arranged it. It’s a practical match. Mutually beneficial."
She stared at him as her chest cracked in two. The moonlight caught his face, the scar, the rigid set of his jaw. He looked exactly like the man she'd collided with at the first ball. Cold and unreachable. As though the last several weeks hadn't happened. As though this kiss—this kiss that she could still feel burning on her lips?—
As if it had been nothing.
“Mutually beneficial.” The words rang in her ears and made her want to scream.
But she was Estella Hale, and she had been swallowing screams since she was seventeen.
"I see." Her voice was remarkably steady. Thank goodness for that. "I appreciate your honesty."
She shrugged his coat from her shoulders and held it out to him. Her arm was steady too. Small mercies.
He took it carefully so their fingers didn't touch.
"Good night…Lord Blackwood," she said.
She turned and walked back through the terrace doors. She made it to the ladies' retiring room before the tears came.
And even then…she was quiet about it.
15
The letter to his mother sat on Sebastian’s desk, sealed and ready to post.
Please arrange the introduction at your earliest convenience. I am amenable to the match.
Amenable. That was one word for it.
But it was the right thing to do. He'd been telling himself so for the better part of an hour.
It had yet to become convincing.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling of his study. The fire had burned low. He ought to ring for someone to stoke it, but the cold felt appropriate. Deserved, even.
He could still feel her. That was the wretched part. The press of her lips, so sweet and soft. Her palm over his racing heart. The way she'd tasted and the small sound she'd made when he'd deepened the kiss, half gasp and half surrender…
And then her face afterward. The way the hope had drained out of it, slow and terrible. The precise moment she'd believed him. The way she'd squared her shoulders and said Lord Blackwood with careful formality.
He'd taken the brightest, bravest woman he'd ever known and made her feel small and foolish. But what was the alternative?
He scrubbed a hand over his face. The feel of his tight, scarred skin was the reminder he needed.
Even if she could look past his physical defects, she deserved so much more from a husband. Even before the fire he’d had a notoriously foul temper. Of course, back then his bad moods were tempered by his desire for revelry and amusement.
He’d been a half-decent conversationalist back then. But he’d always hated small talk, and he’d never known how to put a gently bred young lady at ease.
He poured himself a whiskey and didn't drink it. Even if she could get past the temper and the lack of civility and the burns… It wouldn’t change the fact that he had no right to be so happy.
There was no world in which it could be called fair that his best friend wound up dead trying to be a hero, and he—the villain—got the happy ending.
No. No, it would not do at all. He could hardly live with himself as it was. To let himself be that greedy, that selfish…
It could never happen. He’d known that all along, but now he had a memory of her kiss to torment him until the day he died.
