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“You are being frightfully stubborn. I cannot credit it.” Without looking at him, she said, “We are not engaged. Yet you persist in acting as if we are still attached. Society knows of our broken engagement. Your father knows of it. Why do you act in this manner?”
“Don’t be like that, Perdie,” he chided.
“Lady Perdita,” she corrected.
He ignored the correction. “We have more history than such a cold formality suggests. Even if we are not engaged, we are friends, are we not?”
How young and earnest he appeared.
“Our history is in the past, Lord Owen. Perhaps later we could be friends, but after you stop acting in this odious manner.”
He stopped, even though her mother was within eyesight, at this point. “You will throw away our marriage over one insignificant quarrel?”
Perdie wanted to slap him. Instead, she withdrew her hand and looked him in the eye. “I’ve changed, Lord Owen. What is insignificant to you is not insignificant to me. I’ve said it before and I will say it again…we no longer suit. I wish you no ill, but I also see no future as your wife. I’m sorry if that wounds you.”
She turned on her heel before he reclaimed the use of his tongue. Although she hoped rejoining her mother would provide some sort of barrier, she was sorely mistaken. As he joined them, opening an easy conversation with her mother, she was very much afraid that the rest of this evening would be wasted on him. Better she plead a headache and return home early.
At this point, it wouldn’t even be a lie. Her stolen moment with Thaddeus felt like a dream slowly slipping from her fingers, and she had no notion of how to hold fast to it.
At least, no notion without accepting his proposal of marriage, which despite the way he made her heart flutter, she still had no intention of doing.
