AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Please,” she said serenely. “You have a child together. If he was going to ask for your hand, it would have happened long ago.”
Georgina straightened and continued down the stairs while I just stood there numbly, trying to relocate my legs. When she reached the bottom, she turned once more and looked me up and down, like she could see the doubt seeping through my pores.
She hadn’t heard our arguments, I told myself. She hadn’t seen anything. It was all in my head, and meanwhile, I knew Xavier and I could at least try to make things work if that was what we both wanted.
We had to. We were a family.
Or at least, we could be.
“The writing’s on the wall,” she called. “It’s only a matter of time. Best cut him loose and move on before he does it for you.”
* * *
I stood frozenon the stairs, clutching the carved banister for what seemed like an hour before I finally managed to tamp down the tears and stop myself from running after Georgina. Tearing apart her perfect coif and finding whatever shred of self-esteem I had left.
But what she thought ultimately didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter if the Dowager Duchess of Kendal didn’t believe I had what it took to stand in her admittedly perfect shoes.
It didn’t matter if she thought I was nothing more than an uncouth American who belonged in a barn more than a country manor.
I sniffed. Shows what she knew anyway, if that were true. I was born and raised in New York freaking City. This entire manor was closer to a barn than the house where I’d grown up.
Anyway, the only person’s thoughts that mattered were Xavier’s.
And I hadn’t given up on us yet.
I jogged up the rest of the stairs, then, with more self-assurance than I’d had since arriving at Kendal, navigated the maze of corridors with their contemptuous portraits and priceless antiques until I had found my way back to Xavier’s office.
Where I heard another prim, collected voice speaking to him inside, audible only through the crack in the slightly open door.
“Honestly, Kip. I’m worried about you. We all are. I’ve never seen you this unhappy, and you really don’t deserve it.”
I froze in place at the sound of Imogene’s saccharine voice floating through the door. I wanted to go in. But the thought of facing her after I’d just dealt with Georgina left me cold.
I turned to leave. But stopped when I heard Xavier’s response.
“Maybe I don’t deserve happiness.”
I swallowed. Normally, if someone said something like that so overtly, I’d accuse them of fishing for compliments. I’d suspect that they were just self-deprecating to get others to rain praise.
But I knew Xavier. He was more prone to keeping things bottled up to explode than stating how he felt, for attention or otherwise. The fact that he was saying this at all broke my heart even more.
“You can’t be so hard on yourself,” Imogene told him. “It’s not your fault if she doesn’t appreciate Kendal.”
“Isn’t it?”
I winced. I could just imagine him sitting there, shoving his hands into his dark hair and rubbing his temples the way he did when he was stressed. Sometimes he let me rub them for him. We would sit on the bed together, me leaning against the headboard, him laying back on my chest, my legs wrapped about his waist. I loved the warm, solid feel of his body pressing mine into the mattress and the way his head would rest on my chest while I worked. And then, most rewardingly, the heavy sigh of relaxation when my fingers coaxed his worries away, enough where, just before he fell asleep, he would turn over and reward me with a sweet, drowsy kiss.
I never imagined I would be the reason he needed that kind of release, though.
There was some shuffling in the room, and I heard footsteps on the herringbone wood floors. Light taps of a woman’s heels as she paced.
“Kip, no one respects your sense of adventure more than I do, truly,” Imogene said. “You opened up your life to someone whom, let’s be honest, you hardly know. You took a great big leap with her. But it’s not your fault, darling, if she couldn’t leap so far. It isn’t.”
There was a loud, unintelligible grumble, but no argument.
“She is unhappy,” Xavier gave in at last. “I just can’t seem to get it right.”
