Vernon blinked. “Leaving already? We were just beginning our chat.”
But Mason simply downed the last of his drink and set the glass down, perfectly centered, on the polished table.
“I don’t engage in conversations with cowards,” he said with a voice like steel wrapped in velvet. “And I have better things to do than listen to insects buzz.”
Vernon rose too quickly, his smirk cracking.
“You think you can stop this?” he snapped. “You think a little posturing will frighten me off? I know the law. I have the clause.”
Mason met his eyes with calm, deadly precision. “And I have the truth.”
Then, with neither haste nor hesitation, he walked out. Vernon called something after him. It was a taunt, a threat, perhaps a last gasp of self-importance, but Mason didn’t hear it. In fact, he didn’t care.
His coat swirled at his ankles as he stepped out into the dusk. The cold bit at his jaw, but he barely noticed. The solicitor would have the will to him soon, but Mason already knew what had to be done.
He wasn’t a man who believed in fairy tales and especially not in fate. Certainly not in happy endings. He had seen too much of life’s cruelness. With that said, he was the last man deserving of a wife.
But Cordelia Brookes was not the kind of woman one stood by and watched be taken apart. And if the only way to protect her was to tether her to him… then so be it.
Chapter Nineteen
Cordelia sat before the small dressing table, the lamplight catching the dark sheen of her hair as she drew the brush through it with slow, absent strokes. A strand snagged in the bristles, and she winced, though it was not the tug that made her eyes smart.
Only hours ago, she had thought herself free. She thought herself saved.
Her reflection regarded her with pale, tired eyes, and she could not look at it for long. Freedom had seemed so near she had almost reached for it; she had almost dared to believe that all the worry and vigilance might at last be set aside. Instead, she was returned to the same old prison, and worse, it was a prison that wore her guardian’s smile.
How foolish she had been to let hope grow so large in her chest. Vernon always won. Whether by cunning words, legal trickery, or sheer persistence, he found his way back into command. Shehad told herself this morning that the future was hers to shape; now, she knew it was his to govern.
The brush paused in her hand. The solicitor’s voice still rang in her ears, measured and polite, yet each syllable had fallen like cold rain.
“A fighting chance,” he had said.
And what weapons did she possess? Only herself—and what was she worth, truly?
Her mother’s voice came then, unbidden as it so often did.A woman without beauty must be useful, Cordelia, or she is nothing at all.The words sank like stones, pulling her deeper into the dark. She was neither beautiful nor free. She had failed in both.
She resumed brushing, the motion mechanical, the long black strands sliding like ribbons through her fingers. Mason’s face rose in her mind, his steady gaze, the quiet way he had walked beside her back to the carriage, saying little yet seeming to bear some of the weight she carried. She had wanted to thank him. She had wanted, albeit absurdly, to lean on him.
But what right had she to place her burdens upon him?
No, she must manage this herself. She always had. And if Vernon triumphed in the end, well… she would endure it. She had endured worse.
A soft knock broke the stillness, so unexpected at such an hour that Cordelia’s brush stilled mid-stroke. The household had long since gone to bed. For a moment she wondered if she had imagined it, but the knock came again, quiet yet insistent.
She straightened in her chair. “Come in,” she called, her voice steadier than she felt.
The door opened, and there he stood, frozen, as if an unseen hand had caught his shoulder. His amber eyes fixed upon her, but not, she thought with a leap of confusion, in the usual manner. His gaze had dropped from her face to the dark waves that fell, unbound, about her shoulders.
“I… ” he began and then seemed to think better of it. A faint, almost boyish awkwardness touched his features. “Your hair… I had not realized it was—” He hesitated, as though no word would quite suffice. “It is… different. Beautiful.”
Heat rose at once to her cheeks, a most inconvenient reaction, and she bent her head a little as though to resume her brushing. “You are kind to say so,” she murmured though she suspected he was not attempting kindness so much as recovering from surprise.
“May I come in?”
She gestured lightly toward the chair near the hearth. “Of course.”
He stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. The click of the latch seemed to deepen the quiet between them. He did not take the chair but came to stand beside it with his hands loosely clasped and his expression studying her in that careful way of his, as if weighing not only what to say, but whether he had the right to say it.
