AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wanted to make him hurt the same way I had. I wanted to make him realize how he’d treated me. How he’d treated all of the women in his life… like we were disposable.
I swallowed down my tears, channeling my despair into anger instead. Will was staring at me, a strange look on his face. As if he was looking for the right words to say but couldn’t find them. His eyes shifted back to the wall behind me, yet again, and I felt anger well up inside of me.
“Clearly, I’m boring you!” I yelled, causing him to look back at me.
“Amelia, I…” He stammered, the words serious and quiet.
“What?” I retorted.
“I love you.”
His voice was low, and I almost thought I heard him incorrectly. But the phrase was unmistakable.
I love you.
It was as if the room had become frozen in time. Everything was in slow-motion. My brain was playing his words over and over again…I love you… and I couldn’t seem to understand them.
He loved me?
I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no idea what, and so I simply stared at him, my body unmoving. Suddenly, he was approaching me, his arms outstretched towards my body. I let it happen, as if I was in a dream, falling into his strong chest. But I couldn’t relax – I was like a statue, cold and unfeeling.
He said he loved me.
But how could I trust him? How could I let this man into my heart?
He had broken it when we were merely children, leaving for Eton and never returning.
He had teased it and tortured it over the past few weeks.
He had let me believe that I could trust him… and then he’d broken my trust yet again.
They sayfool me once, shame on you… fool me twice, shame on me.
It had been far more than twice now, hadn’t it?
But there was a still a part of me that wanted to forget all of that. I wanted to melt into his arms and feel the warmth of his body against mine. I wanted to feel safe and protected.
I wanted him to be mine.
His lips crashed into mine, and I suddenly felt a sharp burn of scotch against my tongue.
It was as if the dream was shattered. The burn of the alcohol was like a bucket of cold water, reminding me of who I was… and who Will was.
I pushed him away, using strength I didn’t know I had. He didn’t fight back, and instead fell backwards onto the desk, his expression betraying hurt and confusion. The half-drunk bottle of scotch fell and careened down, shattering on the floor into a thousand pieces of ragged glass.
He would take my heart and break it into a million pieces.
The sound of crashing glass broke the spell of the moment. I felt a sharp jolt of anger.
“I could never love a drunken rake.”
The words came out of my mouth as if they were spoken by a different person. I watched as Will’s face crumpled, and I immediately wished I could take them back. But I couldn’t.
Because they were true.
I did loveWill. I had known it since I had first laid eyes on him in the garden at Lord Turley’s engagement party… perhaps I had always known it. I loved the boy I had grown up with, the boy who had taught me to climb trees and play hide and seek… the man who had tended to my uncle on his sickbed and given me a place to stay when I had nowhere else to go. I loved the man who had kissed me underneath the thick velvet curtains of his dressing room, and pushed me against the wall of his library…
But I didn’t lovethisperson. I didn’t love the drunken rake he had become.
