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“You will go with Conrad,” Sabine agreed as if the matter were settled.

“He will not take me.”

Roysa frowned, standing. “Did Rory ‘take’ you?”

She blinked, finally understanding.

“He will send me back,” she argued. But it seemed none of the women were listening to her. “He hates me for abandoning him,” she insisted.

Sabine pulled her to her feet, the others looking at her as if they were in on a secret she had yet to learn.

“He does not hate you, Cait. He loves you. And once he realizes you only stopped writing him because you thought to punish yourself for something that was never your fault . . . he will understand. You will make him understand.”

You thought to punish yourself for something that was never your fault.

“But it is, was, my . . .”

She stopped when all three women glared at her, looking at her with fire in their eyes, with a determination that Cait neither understood nor felt. But the idea of denying them was even more terrifying than following Conrad to London.

More terrifying than what he would do when he realized she’d defied him.

More terrifying than confessing that she’d not stopped thinking of him, not for one day, since that tournament.