Page 6 of Atone, Adonis

Chapter

3

Fred felt his chest constrict as his hand gripped the letter. Thomas wanted him back in Dorset. Dorset was the one place in England where he swore he’d never set foot again.

No.

He read the entirety of the letter and then read it again, just to make certain he hadn’t been in some kind of fever-dream the first time. Farrow Cottage and its inhabitants were after all the embodiment of his warmest, happiest childhood memories. Perhaps if he were ill he might imagine a missive as absurd as this one.

But, alas, no. Thomas wanted him to marry his sister. The demand was so far from the bounds of reality—so preposterous—that Fred could barely wrap his mind around it.

He hardly even remembered Julianna, except in the broadest of strokes. How he’d called her Jules and her brother called her Julie-bug. How, after the accident, her eyes had blown so wide with fear and shock Fred couldn’t stand to look at them. And how, to his utter shame, he’d been glad when she’d turned her face into Thomas’s chest and hidden it away.

He dipped his quill into the inkwell, letting the nib hover over the pristine sheet of vellum while he composed his reply.

Thomas,

I am in receipt of your letter but I wonder if you can say the same for your wits. Although, perhaps, I should not be surprised. You always were a practical jokester of the highest order. On the odd chance this is not the joke I must presume it to be, I will say that, as it happens, I am not well-suited to marriage.

And I doubt your sister would thank you for volunteering her for the task, however well-respected the title of Countess of Chester may be. Is it the respect you’re after? It cannot be the money. If you recall, I have already offered my protection and my funds to you both and was turned down in no uncertain terms. I believe you said at the time, and I do quote, that I might go fuck myself.

You will understand why I question your wits now, to write and demand I offer her my hand in marriage. I am certainly not the man for the job and I—

He stopped writing. The quill tip blotted against the page, a single ink dot spreading like blood across its off-white expanse. He stared at the half-written letter and then into the fire burning in the hearth.

That night.

That terrible night was clawing itself back into his memory. He had no wish to revisit it. Not the accident, nor the steamer packet he and Eva used to cross the Channel only hours later. Certainly not the way the wind had whipped a frenzy across the deck, making his teeth clack together until his jaw had ached.

He had never regretted his choice to flee. But now, tonight, sitting in his study with Thomas’s letter in his hand, he let himself question that impulsive decision made a decade ago by a boy who was too young to understand its repercussions. What it would mean to lose his home, his best friend, and his reputation in one fell swoop. How it would hurt him so badly he never bothered to try and have any of those things ever again.

He reached for the unfinished reply on his desk, balled it up, and tossed it into the fire where the flames greedily took it.

No.

No second guessing of decisions made too long ago to change.

No wondering what if, or perhaps.

No thinking of that night again.

Just the remembrance of it made his chest hurt, as if some long expired part of him was trying to awaken.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen, was it?

He’d read Frankenstein. He understood the danger of reviving things, flesh or feeling, that were better left dead. He would never—ever—marry Julianna Farrow.

And yet, here he still sat, long after the fire had eaten that damnable letter.

He couldn’t go back to Dorset. Not the place of mud and rain and too many splintered lives. Where the gossip rags didn’t merely follow him as they did in London, they had defined him. Where he was not an earl but a cautionary tale, endlessly retold. The Darling of Dorset Disgraced. The Local Adonis who Lightfooted Away.

He would never be able to live down the decision he’d last made there. He’d only been eighteen for Christ’s sake, but it didn’t matter.

He could refuse.

He could send the letter back with a single sentence: No.

He could, with remarkable ease, do what he usually did: hide behind the facade of the Earl of Chester. He was handsome, he was rich, and he was not afraid of being as aloof as was needed to ensure his peace and quiet. His general air of churlishness didn’t stop the intrusions of the papers or the occasional misguided debutante, but it generally did the job everywhere else.