Page 39 of Betrothal Between Enemies

‘I might as well be gone. I leave in a few days for Florence. I promised your father I would tie up loose ends and finish my projects before I left.’

The import of that was a blow to the stomach, two blows in fact. ‘You were here in the city all along?’ And he hadn’t tried to contact her. So near and he’d not told her.

‘Ismay.’ He said her name like a warning, his intuition reading her reaction like the most open of books. Damn, she hated that he knew her so well. ‘It’s not like that. Your father asked me to make a clean break of it. I gave him my word, and I will honour this one small thing he’s asked of me. It’s for your sake as well, to spare you the gossip,’ he instructed sternly. He reached out an arm to guide her to the side of the crowd.

‘You take too much on yourself,’ she scolded. ‘Where are you living?’

‘If I tell you, you cannot go there, Ismay,’ he cautioned. Of course he cautioned. She was Ismay Rose, the girl who took everything too far, who didn’t know when to stop. ‘I am at the house off Piazza Vittoria.’

‘Our house?’ Irrational anger rocketed through her.

‘It was never going to be our house.’ His mouth was grim now. ‘I should go before anyone sees us together.’

She grabbed his sleeve. ‘Is that what you want? Do you want to leave? Do you want this—us—to be over?’

‘It’s what we planned, Ismay. It’s what you wanted.’ It was not a pleasant reminder. She’d had the chance at the horse race to call it off, to fight for them, and she had not. He gently removed her hand from his arm. ‘Besides, it’s too late now to change your mind. Your father thinks I’m a cad of the highest order. Your mother has quietly broken the engagement in social circles.’

It was a reminder, too, that this had not been what he’d wanted at the end. He’d said he loved her that night in the library. Did he love her still after all she’d asked of him?

‘What if I could fix this? What if I told my father it was all a sham?’ She was begging him now. ‘What if I told him I love you? Come back with me. We can do it together.’

‘Is this the truth talking, Ismay? Or is it guilt?’ The words sounded exhausted. There was no hope in them. That was her fault. There’d been a moment of opportunity, when Alistair had been willing to change course, and she’d frozen. He’d attributed it to her doubt of him when it had really been doubt of herself, her inability to make him happy.

‘What if I told you I’d made a mistake, that I was scared, just as you said I was? I see that now. It took losing you to see all that you meant to me, how you’ve changed me for the better. I’m not afraid anymore.’

‘Excuse me, Ismay. I have packing to see to. It’s best to let things lie.’

* * *

She could not let it lie. Perhaps she had lost Alistair. But he need not lose his reputation with her father, nor her father lose his lifelong friendship with Hugh Burke-Price. Their hastily concocted ruse had far-reaching repercussions, like the aftershocks on Vesuvius, constantly rumbling and rippling. There were still some things that could be saved, and she would save them. She’d meant to confront her father immediately, only to discover he was gone for a couple days, travelling to see some figurines—ironically, work that would have once fallen to Alistair.

Two days did not cool her temper. It only served to heat it. The moment her father returned, Ismay stormed into the study, demanding his attention. ‘You told me Alistair left.’

Her father looked up from his writing, his gaze angry. ‘You saw him? He gave me his word he would not contact you. I should have known not to trust him. I leave town for two days and he takes advantage.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Ismay rushed to Alistair’s defense. He was going to bear no more blame for anything. ‘I saw him. I approached him. He did nothing wrong.’ She paused. ‘In fact, that’s what I want to tell you. He’s guilty of nothing but trying to help me.’

Her father’s brows went up. ‘I am afraid I don’t follow.’

Ismay drew a deep breath and clasped her hands. ‘It was all make-believe. We were appalled by the pact and the arranged marriage, so we tried to get you to unarrange it. At first we thought if we disliked one another enough you’d see the unsuitability, but as we never had any time together, there was no way to demonstrate it. So we changed tactics and decided to like each other wildly, to be so compatible as to be dangerous to ourselves. The gambling, the wagering, the risks, it was all designed to pressure you into calling off the engagement. And it worked, but we discovered something else in the process. We did like each other.’ More than liked. In the process they’d discovered someone just like themselves—someone who was lost, who didn’t fit the moulds the world offered. They were only whole when they were together. She waited expectantly for her father’s reaction, for his absolution of Alistair.

Her father sighed and pushed a hand through thinning hair. He looked tired. He shouldn’t be travelling so much. ‘You are saying all of this, confessing all of this, only now after meeting him in town, a meeting that you think is accidental. Oh my dear girl, don’t you see? He has sent you to beg. You are his key to getting away with everything.’

Ismay scoffed. ‘That makes no sense. If all he was after was the business, the house, the money, he’d never have agreed to the ruse. He wanted to be free as much as I did.’ They had been in this together from the start. ‘He told me he loved me at Eddington’s.’

‘So that you would stop the ruse, child, before it was too late. So that he could have it all while still looking like he’d been on your side all along. What better way to build empathy than to side with you?’

‘I don’t believe that,’ she countered. But hadn’t she accused Alistair of that very thing in the Eddingtons’ library? Right before he’d smashed her up against a wall and shown her how wrong she was?

‘Then, why didn’t you stop the ruse?’ Therein lay the rub.

‘Because I was afraid. Because I doubted myself, and I hurt him in my hesitation. No one has ever loved me the way he loves me. He champions me. He believes in me. He does not seek to change me. I don’t have to be a certain way for him.’ How had she not seen all of that soon enough?

‘But that was part of the ruse,’ her father argued. ‘How do you know that’s true when so much else was false? Be careful you are not picking and choosing arguments in a vacuum, my dear girl, simply because your heart is broken. Do not twist this into something it is not just because you fell for your own invention.’ Her father turned back to sorting his papers. She’d been unsuccessful and dismissed. The ruse had gone far deeper than she’d realised, persuaded more powerfully than she realised. Once again, she’d not known when to stop.

‘I know because he left his winnings to me so that I could start a scientific journal for women,’ she blurted, desperate to make him listen, to make him understand. ‘He wouldn’t have done something like that if he didn’t truly believe in me. That part was real.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘I will write to his father and explain it all so that there need not be a rift between you two, at least.’

Her father looked up again, patient and pitying. ‘Ismay, I am sorry for all of it, for the pact, for how things turned out. But your mother and I agree it’s for the best we all move on. Now, if you don’t mind, I have correspondence to see to.’