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“Wait,” Manuela said, her mask fully gone now. Every emotion naked and visible on her face. “Will I see you soon?”
Cora wanted to tell her she’d fix everything. That she’d get rid of this villain and make sure they never had to be apart. But instead, like a spineless, feckless coward, she ran.
“Congratulations to you both,” she said in answer, before walking away.
“What do you need?” Alfie asked, slipping into step beside her, his strong hand sliding into hers as she fought for control.
“To not be here,” she said as she rushed out of the ballroom.
“Your Grace.” The commanding masculine voice made Cora slow her steps, long enough to search for its owner.
“Bloody hell,” Alfie whispered when he turned his head to the man walking toward them. “Blanchet truly had a gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What do you want, Edouard?” Cora demanded, utterly unable to maintain any façade of civility.
“To announce the railway, Your Grace. That is what we are here to do.” The reproach in the man’s voice told her he’d probably been watching her near breakdown.
“Mama, if you want to go—” Alfie whispered in her ear, but she shook her head, willing herself to do what she’d come to do. Once she announced the railway there would be no going back.
“We can announce.”
Blanchet shot her a dubious look.
“I can’t go, dear,” she said shakily to Alfie. “Edouard is right. We must do what we’ve come here to accomplish.” The other man was still looking at her suspiciously, but when she began walking, he followed. Cora launched herself into the task at hand as if her next breath depended on it. She boasted about the new railway. She toasted with her associates as she made herself push away the thought of Manuela in a carriage with that man.
She smiled and accepted congratulations on securing the last parcel of land needed to complete their unprecedented venture, and not once did she break down at the thought of at what cost she’d done so. She volleyed a few barbs at those in the group who had doubted her and by some miracle didn’t fall to the ground and sob for what she’d given up.
When it was over, and she finally left the palace with Alfie at her side, she looked straight into his eyes and confronted the judgment and pity in his gaze. They rode away in suffocating silence. Cora looking ahead, her spine straight and hollow inside and it was no one’s doing but her own.
Twenty-Two
“I can fake an illnessif you need some time,” Aurora whispered in Manuela’s ear as they made their way into the parlor where her parents waited for her.
She shook her head, grateful to her friend, but there was no use in delaying this confrontation with her parents.
“Hija, that is the dress you wore to meet the British ambassador?” Manuela’s mother said in greeting as she entered the foyer of the town house on Place des Vosges she had not set foot in since before her departure for Edinburgh.
“Mamá,” she said, woodenly leaning in to be bussed on the cheek. Then looked down at the gown that Cora had threatened to tear off her body just an hour earlier. Manuela had felt beautiful and adored, then. In mere seconds her mother had managed to obscure even that small ray of light for her.
“I think I was too successful with our surprise, Doña Consuelo.” She stiffened at the sound of Felix’s too-placid voice, which was beginning to seriously grate on her nerves. “Our girl seems to have been stunned into silence.” She wasn’thisanything and just hearing the words revolted her. It had taken everything in her to get through that carriage ride without flinging herself from it.
It was all so disgusting. The lying, the pretending. Felix didn’t care about her, and he cared even less about trapping her in a marriage for his own benefit.
Manuela was done with all of it.
For once she wouldn’t dwell on her mother’s comments about her clothes or her appearance. The only thing that mattered was fixing things with Cora. But first she had to stand up to her parents. She had to tear away the guilt and duty they had unfairly bound around her for so long. She hadn’t ruined them, they’d ruined themselves, and again and again other people had had to fix it. Manuela was done being the collateral damage for their wastefulness.
“I need to speak with you,” she whispered to her mother, who was eyeing her with almost hostile intensity.
“We do need to talk, hija.” She squeezed Manuela’s shoulder too tightly and lifted a beaming face to Felix, who was standing with her father, and was yet to speak or even look at her.
Doña Consuelo sent a withering look to Aurora, but her friend thrived under the disapproval of her elders and remained unmoved, shoulder to shoulder with Manuela. Her mother considered Aurora’s insistence on becoming a physician unseemly and had almost forbade her from staying at the house the Montalbans had leased for their stay in Paris. That was until she heard the fashionable address and decided that she could overlook her distaste.
“Felix, it is so good of you to bring her to us, but we’d love to sit with our Manuela for a visit, just the three of us. It’s been so long since New York.” Her stomach dropped at her mother’s tone, the way her lip curled when she spoke.
They knew. Somehow, they knew.
“Of course, Doña Consuelo,” Felix assented. He looked at Manuela in that appreciative yet detached way he always did. Like she was a collectible piece that he didn’t want lost or broken. “I will go back to my hotel but will be here in the morning to finalize the invitations for the wedding. There are so many prominent South American families here.” He seemed to savor the words. “It truly was an oversight to not consider a Paris wedding earlier.” He grinned again and took Manuela’s hand so firmly she had to resist snatching it away. “Or maybe that was your plan all along, querida mía.” It took everything she had not to strike him. He seemed oblivious, so indifferent to her discomfort, even when she did nothing to hide it. He simply didn’t care about how she fared in this arrangement.
