She looked up. Her face was drawn, the blue in her eyes drowned out by gray. “Malcolm.”
“I’ve been looking for you.” It was absurd, probably, the way he’d chased her down. Transparent. He couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Oh.” She glanced down at the settee, a thick flutter of curly lashes, and then back up to meet his gaze. “Have I missed supper? I... was not attending to the time.”
It was growing dark; the sky was a thousand shades of purple in the dusk. She had to have known she’d missed the evening meal.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. Her mouth made a tight line, holding something in. “Nothing. I’ve—” Her voice cracked, and her lips clamped down harder, her eyes going back to the sea.
He was at her side before he could stop himself, and if she did not want this—didn’t want his arms and his mouth and his shameless abandon—then she could bloody well order him to stop.
“Tell me,” he said and put his arms around her, resting his palm on her knee.
She took a quick breath and did not look at him. “I’ve had a letter from my father. An answer to mine.”
Archer’s heart pitched. Dropped.
He hadn’t—thought it would come so soon. That was all. This parting. His arms tightened around her: stupid, foolish, as though he might keep her. As though, if he held on hard enough, he could tear her out of the fabric of her world.
He made himself ask. “He has a plan then? For the princess?”
“He does not believe me.”
He couldn’t parse her words, although they’d come out steady. As though she’d said them again and again in her mind.
“What?” he demanded
Her breath hitched, her chest rising in a tight jerk beneath his hands. “Of all the things I imagined he might say, I must admit that this did not suggest itself. He says—he says I am to go back to Bridestowe before I make a spectacle of myself, and if I do not go, he will have me sent to our country seat with a chaperone of his choosing. He says that the Princess of Monfalcone is safe at home, that she has no plans to visit England, and that if I spread this wild tale beyond our family, he will be forced to take more drastic measures to ensure the sobriety of my mind.”
Archer felt like he was choking. He did not know what to do with the ire throttling his throat, the clumsy outrage that made his fingers numb. “Ruby,” he said thickly.
She flung up her chin, fast enough to nearly knock his nose with the back of her head. “I’m not going to Bridestowe. I’m not giving up on any of this. On the house, on the princess.”
On you.
He almost heard her say it—or else wished he had.
“I know,” he said. “It’s not in you to give up.”
“It’s only that I—that I—” She flung herself out of the circle of his arms to stand, crossing to the window, her whole body vibrating with tension. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel.”
He had some suggestions. Anger. Stupefaction. Scarcely checked and distinctly murderous rage. He could run Hangleton through for the way the man kept on betraying her.
“I was prepared for criticism,” she said. Her voice shook as she looked out at the ocean. “Of how I had handled the situation. For some action I had taken or failed to take, for some standard of perfection I did not meet. But this—” She stopped abruptly and turned to look at Archer, blue-gray eyes brilliant, sun on seawater. “He let me down.”
He moved to stand beside her, feeling helpless, afraid to take her hands. “He did.”
“He disappointed me.”
“He was wrong,” Archer murmured. “Over and over. He’s been wrong about you.”
“I know,” she said, and now the tears that had threatened her voice spilled through her lashes and glittered like gemstones on her cheeks. “I know that he does not value me. That he does not appreciate what I’ve done for our family. But I thought—” She reached up and swiped at her face, and the naked anguish in her eyes cut Archer off at the knees. “I always believed that if I truly needed him, he would be there.”
He set his hands to her shoulders, caressing the seam of her dress with his thumbs. “Ruby.”
“Even now—” She broke off and looked back at the window. The deepening dusk had turned the glass to a mirror; Archer could see the ghost silhouettes of their bodies, standing close enough to form a single whole. “Even now, I keep thinking it must be some mistake. That perhaps—if only I write to him again. Explain myself better. Perhaps then I can make him—”
