He did not regret the fact that he’d pushed her away in the stables. He’d had to do it. Her father might come; her father might know him as Quenby. There was no possible future that allowed him to put his mouth on hers again, and smile while he did it.
And at the same time, he could not bring himself to wish he had not kissed her. Hewasn’tsorry for it, not even a little bit. Every time he closed his eyes, the world was all sunset and Ruby Ballimore, and there was no part of him that wished it had not happened. He wouldn’t give the memory up. Not for a fortune of gold.
“I assure you, there’s nothing to apologize for.” She said it so brightly her voice cracked.
The sound made Archer’s throat hurt. He wanted to hold fast to her arm. He wanted to kiss her again, hard enough to wipe away the memory of what he’d said.
“The house seems ready,” he told her, instead of whatever madness was in his mind. “Everything looks in order. I could not have imagined it would come together so quickly nor so well.”
“I’m glad.” She looked down, then back up, and then said, all in a rush, “I had thought to go to Bridestowe. Soon. Now. Before the princess arrives.”
“Go?”
She waved a hand. “Alice and Tamsin are the ones who ought to stay to receive the princess. They possess the skills to be her ladies-in-waiting. I’ve finished. My contribution is at an end.”
Some mad revolt had started up in his body, in his fingers that couldn’t quite let go of her arm, in his feet that had brought him closer without his realizing it.
He said: “You’re giving up, then?”
“I’m not giving up.” Her voice was a touch too loud in the quiet room. “I am accepting the reality of my circumstances, Captain Archer. I am perfectly cognizant of my strengths, and I do not need the appearance of Her Royal Highness to remind me that the social graces are not among them.”
He remembered the way she’d flinched in the tavern when she’d heard Benji laugh. The way she’d assumed it directed at her.
The story she’d flung at him in frustration in the library.I recently finished my fourth Season, which places me very nearly on the shelf. I did not dance at parties because I was not invited to do so.
“Ruby—”
But before he could say anything more, she jerked her chin up. “Alice and Tamsin will do perfectly well for the princess. Better, in truth, if I am not around to make a mull of things.”
“You don’t make a mull of things.”
She did not let him go on, only barreled forward, stubborn and bright and lying through her teeth. “I will no doubt prefer to reside at Bridestowe anyway, rather than blunder about trying to pose as a court lady. Alice and Tamsin will know better than I what to say to the princess when she arrives. They’ll know”—here she stumbled, just a bit, on her words—“how to act.”
“Ruby.” His thumb just stroked her sun-warm skin. “You don’t have to go. Not on the princess’s account—nor mine.”
It was absurd. Stupid. He had spent weeks trying to persuade her to go, and now that she was poised to do it...
Bloody hell. He could not stand to watch her flee. He couldn’t stand to see her look this way, foolish and stubborn and heartbroken and brave.
But she wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “That’s easy for you to say. Has there ever been anyone in your entire life that you could not charm?”
“Of course. A little blond scourge with terrifying eyes.”
She looked up, looked him full in the face. Her gaze—storm gray, sheened with tears—pinned him in place. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She breathed a laugh, a pained, bitter thing he did not recognize. “Of course not. You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to walk into a room and be greeted by derision. To be reminded—constantly, daily—that the way you exist in the world iswrong.”
“Ruby—”
“When I wrote my first paper—when it was accepted by the Royal Archaeological Society—do you know what I did?” Her lips pressed hard together, as if to hold the memory back. But she lifted her chin and kept going. “I laid the journal beside my father’s plate at the breakfast table. I had woken early, you see, to have it waiting for him when he came down. I thought—I truly thought—that he would be proud of me.”
Archer didn’t know how the story ended, but he hated it already. Hated the bruised tenor of her voice.
“He did not look at the journal,” she said quietly. “Only nudged it aside. Finally I plucked up the nerve to show him.That’s you?he said. And then,Thank God you’ve only used initials, Ruby. What a nightmare for me if this got out.”
Archer’s chest hurt. He wanted to run the earl through. Wanted Hangleton on the other side of a cannon.
