AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You hoped I wanted you as part of the family. You believed I was hinting at marriage.” She set her teacup on the table and pressed both hands to her heart. “That’s why you planned to propose. You bought a ring. You wore the ugliest garment in England. Only to find out I’d played you a trick. Oh, Justin.”
“Please. I beg you, don’t make it soundthatpitiful. Leave a man a few shreds of pride.”
“I’m so very sorry. Truly, I’m ashamed of myself.”
“I’m ashamed of the way I spoke to you afterward. I made it sound as if it’s been a trial to love you.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “The fact is, it’s been rather wonderous. If not for our entirely one-sided romance, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what it is to be in love.” He would never regret that, despite how it had ended.
“I brought this.” She drew a lace handkerchief from her pocket. One corner was knotted around the sapphire ring.
He waved it off. “I don’t want it back. Mind, I’m not going to tell you I could never bear to wed another. I will eventually have to marry. That’s how earldoms survive. But whomever I marry, I don’t expect I’ll like her very much, much less love her, and the chances that she’ll have eyes the precise color of summer skies the day after a rain are so small as to be infinitesimal. So keep the thing.”
“You’re certain.”
“Do with it as you wish.”
“Very well. I’ll take you at your word on that.” She refilled his tea. “So after you left, my mother told me to search my heart. And that’s what I did, all night. I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t a cursory search, either. I turned my heart out like a pocket and shook it for loose coins.”
“Find anything of interest?” He lifted the tea to his lips.
“Well, apparently I’m in love with you.”
The teacup and saucer slipped from his hands and fell to the floor, sending tea sloshing on her slippers. “Christ.”
She laughed. “You are a curse on good china.”
“Nevermind the china. Go back to the bit where somewhere between the hours of midnight and five this morning, you deluded yourself into believing you love me.”
“Deluded myself? Give me more credit than that.”
“Don’t tease me, Chloe. Not today, not about this.”
“I’m not teasing.”
“I don’t trust my own perceptions. I’ve misunderstood you at every turn.”
She smiled a little. “You understood me better than I understood myself. I was awake all night, reliving the history of our acquaintance. Every word, every look, every incidental touch. I remember all of it so clearly, as though I’d been saving up the memories. Making treasures of them.” She picked at the lace edging of the handkerchief. “From the start, I cared so deeply what you thought of me. I could never understand why. You were handsome and worldly and intelligent. A caring guardian to your cousin. A perfect gentleman. I couldn’t hope to match you for those things, and that hurt to admit. So I was your opposite. Teasing, improper, shameless at times. Looking back, it’s embarrassingly juvenile. I was desperate to draw your attention, to draw you out.” Her eyes lifted to his. “To draw you closer.”
Her words planted a kernel of hope in his chest. He tried to uproot it before it could take hold.
“You were so hopelessly above me, you see. So I teased you and provoked you and treated you with impertinence—always trying to knock you down a peg. Because if I knocked you down enough pegs, perhaps...” She sighed. “Perhaps then you’d be within my reach.”
Within her reach?
Justin looked out the window and laughed. He couldn’t help it.
“At least I’ve finally managed to make you laugh.”
“Chloe. From our first meeting, I have been your servant. Helpless to follow you like a pup, hanging on your every word. If you allowed it, I would always be within your reach.” He stroked her cheek. “And you, within mine.”
He watched as she unknotted the handkerchief in her lap. She struggled with it, as if her fingers were unsteady. At last it came loose, and she shook the ring into her palm.
“Would you put it on my finger? If you still want to.”
Of course he still wanted to. He wanted to jam that ring on her finger and dip her whole hand in lacquer or glue, just to make sure it stayed there forever.
He shook his head. “No. It’s too hasty.”
“No, it isn’t.”
