Page 149 of The Boxing Baroness

Sin was standing on the deck, looking out over the same body of water he’d crossed mere weeks earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Of course, the four days since they’d left Reims also seemed like a lifetime ago.

It had been the last night he’d spent with Marianne.

“This must end before we return home,” she’d told him in the early hours of the morning—after she’d shared the conversation with her mother, cried a little, and then made love to him with a ferocity that left him both sated and restless.

He should have guessed what she was about to say.

She’d not been mourning—at least not entirely—the loss of the mother she had met and then lost so quickly. She’d been saying goodbye to him. To any chance for them.

Sin had looked into her eyes and seen the truth: She would not be badgered—or even begged, which he was not too proud to do—into accepting him.

But he’d opened his mouth to try both.

In the end, nothing that he’d said had moved her.

“You feel this way now,” she’d said. “But you would come to resent me over time—no, you would,” she’d insisted when he’d tried to argue. “A marriage so unequal would only end in anguish for us both.”

“I believe you are wrong, Marianne.”

“Then we are destined to disagree.” She’d given a shaky sigh, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. “You gave me your word when we started this that it would end before we returned home. Are you really going to break your promise to me now?”

What a cunning, punishing jab that had been.

And so, after a long, miserable moment, he had nodded. “It will be as you wish.”

Surprise had flashed in her beloved hazel eyes, and for an instant he’d wondered if he had made a mistake giving up so quickly—if she might have capitulated? But the moment, if it had ever existed, had been lost.

The drive from Reims to Calais was nothing like that from Himmelhause to Reims.

Elliot, Sin, and Guy shared a caravan, while the three women stayed in the other. Conversation, when it happened between the two groups, was brief and stilted.

He wasn’t the only one who’d been given his marching papers it seemed.

Guy dropped his arms on the rail beside Sin. “So . . .” he said, and then waited.

Sin had been avoiding his best friend for days. It hadn’t been easy—especially considering they had only the one caravan among the three of them.

“So . . .” Guy said again, as if Sin could have possibly missed it the first time.

“You will not stop, will you?” Sin asked.

“No. Did she give you the boot?” Guy asked.

“Did you get the boot?” Sin countered.

“Yes,” he answered promptly, clearly more interested in discussing his own situation than prying into Sin’s. “I think the two of them must have bolstered each other up in Reims.”

Sin disagreed but kept that to himself.

“I suppose it is for the best.” Guy sighed.

Sin definitely disagreed with that, but he had no intention of baring his shredded soul for inspection, not even to his oldest friend.

“Still, you’d have thought I was offering her a dead badger by the way she reacted to my offer.”

Sin raised his eyebrows. “A carte blanche?”