She let out a low breath, turning from him. “Because it’s old pain, and old pain is boring. No one likes hearing about heartbreaks that occurred two years ago. They start wondering why you’re not over it, as if grief and betrayal obey calendars.”
“Is that why you refused every other offer?”
She turned back, her eyes flashing at him. “Do you think I’m still in love with him?”
He didn’t flinch. “I’m asking.”
She scoffed. Loudly. “God above,no. Don’t flatter that man on my behalf.”
Robert blinked, just once. She saw it, that flicker of tension leaving his shoulders, and in it, something else… Could it have been relief?
She blinked then narrowed her eyes. “Wait… Were youjealous?”
“No.”
“Youwere.”
“I was not. I was… concerned.”
“For my emotional well-being?”
“For my sanity,” he muttered.
She grinned, despite herself. “Well. That is almost flattering.”
He gave her a look. “The truth. Please.”
She sighed, tilting her head to study the lines of the floorboards. “It wasn’t love. Not even close. It was… infatuation. The kind you read about in silly novels. He told me, very seriously, I might add, that he had royal blood. That his great-aunt was cousin to the King’s second mistress or some nonsense. I was sixteenwhen I first met him, and I thought,Oh, how noble. How tragic. How dashing.”
Robert looked as though he might actually groan.
“I know,” she said quickly. “You don’t have to say anything. I cringe just remembering it. But it wasn’t real. I never evenknewhim. I just wanted to be wanted. And he made it seem like I was special.”
Robert was silent again, but this time it wasn’t cold. It was a weighted silence, and all she could do was wonder what he was thinking.
Robert watched her closely.
There was something about the way Evelyn stood now that he couldn’t stop thinking about. Her posture was straight but brittle at the edges, like a porcelain figure set too close to the edge of a table. He could see the effort it took her to keep from folding in on herself.
She hesitated, and then, with a visible breath, she let caution slip away.
“I had lost faith in marriage,” she said in a low and tired tone of voice. “And in men. In promises. In all those pretty, useless ideas girls are raised on. I don’t believe in happily ever afters. I don’twant to tie my happiness to a man, least of all one who doesn’t care about me.”
The words struck something in his chest. It was not guilt, not quite, but itwassomething heavier, older—perhaps an echo of understanding that hadn’t existed before. Robert said nothing at first, not because he was angry but because she was right.
He had pursued this union with unrelenting precision as he did all things that mattered. Evelyn had been a piece in a puzzle, a thread in a tapestry whose image only he understood. She was the key to her father, and her father was the key toanswers. And in that pursuit, he hadn’t once paused to consider that she was more than a means to an end. He had never allowed himself the luxury of such consideration… until now.
“I didn’t understand before,” he said at last, his voice quieter than usual. “But I do now.”
She blinked at him, looking utterly surprised. Maybe even disarmed.
“If that is your wish, I shall throw them out of my home with a dramatic flair that would rival the bard himself,” he tried to jest.
A flicker of a smile graced her beautiful lips, but her answer surprised him. “No,” she told him with fiery determination. “That will make them think that I am afraid. Or worse yet, that I still harbor feeling for that wretch of a man. No,” she added again, shaking her head. “They shall attend our wedding as Mama has planned.”
He studied her, the set of her mouth, the weariness behind her eyes, the thin thread of color rising to her cheeks. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with rest and everything to do with having to be strong for far too long.
“Then, the wedding will proceed,” he agreed, simply because it had to happen, “but I do not wish for you to be unhappy in the marriage.”
