Page 41 of Atone, Adonis

She met his gaze for a long heartbeat before looking back at the fire. “Yes. All is well.”

Her voice sounded thin even to her own ears though. And he wasn’t buying her assertion. She could tell by the way he studied her in silence, his eyes narrowed and his mouth turned down into a frown. All was not well and they both knew it.

“Would you stop that?” she finally said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Stop what?”

“Staring at me.”

“Why should I do that? You’re beautiful, Jules.” He braced the heel of one boot against the edge of the rug and turned his body toward her, his blue eyes piercing. “And you’re lying. I’m trying to understand why.”

“I am not.”

He only shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He was sitting too close, but his nearness bore little resemblance to the ease they had shared that afternoon. This felt more like a return to form from before their marriage. As if he were inviting a quarrel.

And then she understood. She wasn’t the only one who had been discomfitted by their time together today.

“This is Chester, isn’t it?” she said. The cold, aristocratic Earl who eats servants for breakfast and wears a sneer as if he were born with it. “I don’t like him. Put him back where you keep him and bring me Fred.”

He flinched from her and not for the first time today. She’d seen how hard her words had landed earlier when she’d all but accused him of still acting like the spoiled Darling of Dorset.

Now though, his entire demeanor changed before her eyes. The archly raised eyebrow lowered itself to its normal position and his shoulders softened. “I’ve always been here,” he said.

“Have you, though? And I do not mean the decade when we didn’t speak. I mean these last weeks. Have you been here with me or have you been using Chester as some kind of deflection? Don’t lie to me, Fred. Please.”

She kept her eyes on him, waiting for the gentleman who had been her companion in saving the thrush—her companion for the entirety of her childhood—to show his face again. She knew he was in there and she knew he wasn’t Chester.

When he reached for her hand, his fingers hesitated just shy of hers and she swore she saw them tremble for a moment. But when his palm finally enveloped hers, his skin was warm. And the air between them felt different now; he felt different.

“What I said…it wasn’t a lie. You are beautiful. I’d look at you all day long if you’d let me.”

“I can’t.” She felt her heart pound against the walls of her chest. “I can’t let you.”

“I know that. I’m not a man you can care for. But you asked me for the truth.”

She closed her eyes. If he was truth-telling she ought to do the same. “Chester is not a man I could care for.” She couldn’t believe the words that were about to leave her mouth but she said them anyway. “But the man who would make broth or hem a gown…the one who was so kind to that thrush, or the one who brought Thomas here through a snowstorm. If things were different, I believe I could care for that man.”

The admission felt monumentally dangerous. Like skating out onto ice that had not been depth tested.

A faint smile ghosted over his lips. “Those were me. Every one of them. But things are not different.”

“No, they aren’t.”

She’d hoped that saying the words aloud would dissipate some of the tension she could feel between them. It didn’t. And when she opened her eyes again to look at him, she saw the same war of indecision on his face that must be playing out on her own.

There was something else there too though. “What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you, Jules. I can’t.”

She almost told him to keep his secrets, that it was best if she didn’t know them. There had been so much clarity in her anger, so much purity in her wrath. And now nothing felt clear. She was no longer twelve; she could admit that the world was not made in black and white, not populated by only villains and heroes. That there were shades of gray in all of us.

Because there were too many moments lately when she could forget about what had happened…when she was simply walking or cooking or laughing with Fred…and she felt light. A kind of fizzy, bubbling lightness she hadn’t experienced in ages. And the world didn’t feel too muddy and hard. It felt crystal clear and bright in a way that nothing else did.

It was only afterwards when she was alone again that the brightness dissipated. When she recalled her wits and her memory, or when she caught Thomas’s expression. And then she remembered who Fred was and what he had done.

And yet, here he was, so close and yet so impossibly far from the Disgraced Darling of Dorset. When she thought too much of the discrepancy, she felt the ground beneath her feet tilt.