Could she enjoy a life with him? While she did not dislike horses, she could not imagine a future where she spent her days in the stables the way he did. But he wasn’t a cruel man, and she suspected he would not deny her own interests.
Perhaps she could grow to appreciate Mr. Osbourne in time. His looks were pleasing enough, and he did not appear to be a cruel or petty man. Mrs. Dove-Lyon seemed to be a woman who chose the men for these arrangements carefully. Kindness had been on the top of Georgie’s list.
She continued on through the maze, ducking around corners. After coming across three gentlemen in quick succession, she wondered if the game might have come to an end. After all, the gentlemen who collected the most tokens would proceed. Each lady only had three, along with a number of black ribbons. She had one token left.
The sound of female voices caught her attention. They were low, punctuated by laughter. She paused to see the silhouette of two ladies, barely visible through a gap in the thick boxwood hedges, holding hands in what appeared to Georgie to be a loving, playful embrace.
She froze, not wanting to make her presence known. Not only because she didn’t want to intrude on the pair, but she knew that their discovery, even in a place as ridden in scandal as the Lyon’s Den, was a risk for them both.
Turning on her heel, she picked up her skirts and dashed off around another path, which snaked this way and that, hoping to avoid anyone else before the bell rang once more, marking the end of tonight’s game. She rounded a corner and nearly crashed into a rather solid masculine form.
“Excuse me,” she said, her hands reaching up to adjust her mask, which had gone slightly askew from the collision.
There was no reply from him, and the shadows made it nearly impossible to discern this gentleman’s identity. He was masked like all the others, and yet a bolt of awareness flared, her body understanding who was before her. That place against his chest where her head might rest was where it had always been, and under the expensive cologne he now wore, she breathed in the echo of Tom’s scent.
His body stiffened under her touch, and the idea that her presence would be such anathema to him sent a sliver of pain to her chest.
Georgie stepped back, trying to remind herself that this sting of rejection was merely the return of one she’d dealt him years before. But when they parted years ago, she’d been the only one still in love.
Maybe she still was.
“My apologies,” she said, hoping he would mistake her breathlessness for embarrassment.
Save for a quick nod, there was no reply. The air felt heavy and restless, as if the weight of a thousand thoughts and feelings had formed, whirling around them unsettled, like before a summer storm.
“I suppose you are waiting on a question,” she said, even as her mind went blank. “I’m just not certain what to ask.”
The seconds seemed to stretch as he waited, possibly against his will, for her question. The game would end soon, and he needed her token to make it through to the next round. There was no way she would deny him, but it occurred to her she had him captive. And if she did not take this opportunity to speak with him, she might never have another chance.
“Before I do, I need to tell you something. You are not unworthy, Tom. Indeed, you are very much worthy of every happiness and good thing you deserve,” she began, using every ounce of her nerve to keep her voice steady. She’d done it before,years ago, when her heart was breaking at letting him go. Surely, she could do it again. “If I could take everything back I would, and not just because of my current circumstances.”
She felt the wobble in her voice, and stopped just a moment to take a breath, before continuing.
“But because I hope that perhaps one day you may despise me a little less,” she said, “and maybe one day you’ll understand why I had to say those horrible things. Because I didn’t mean them.”
He stepped forward, silent, and rested his hands on her shoulders, the gentle weight of his touch a sweet torture. And a cruel reminder of the tenderness she’d lost…lost because she’d been trying to keep her father happy. Lost to keep an uneasy peace within a family and a legacy coming apart at the edges. It was more unraveled now than it had ever been, and she’d sacrificed her happiness…for what?
In this moment where she felt on the precipice, about to fall into her future with a man she may grow to like but never love, she found the gentle yet possessive weight of Tom’s hands on her shoulders. She wanted to melt into him, if only for a little while. To take one moment for herself. Something she could hang onto for a lifetime.
Suddenly, the storm abated, and her question was right there, waiting to be asked. Blinking away the tears, she looked up through the mask.
“Would you kiss me?”
Chapter Eleven
“Would you kissme?”
There was something about her question—something so fragile and final—that ripped into whatever armor he’d tried to wrap around his heart from the moment Tom knew he needed to approach Georgie to win his final token of the night. That old latent fear that she’d reject him, sending him away without a token—or worse, a black ribbon—had come nearer to the surface than he’d cared to admit.
The Hawthornes were all imperious to one degree or another. Even Gabriel, his best friend, couldn’t seem to help himself from time to time, crying foul when Tom bested him at some game or another.
Contrition was not part of the Hawthornes’ language. Until tonight, apparently. Georgie’s remorseful apology—unexpected and so goddamn heartfelt—had been so damned unexpected.
And so had her question.
He cleared his throat, looking down at her, lingering on her lips which seemed even more kissable than they had been when they were younger. It had been four years since he’d kissed her; a chaste brush of lips that, at nineteen, had set his body on fire. Four years later, and no longer a misguided youth, thoselips tempted him to break a thousand promises he’d made to himself.
“If you don’t want to, I can ask another quest—”
