“Exactly!” She pointed a finger at him. “I had the same thought!”
“Clever.” Kendall was pacing now.
“Thank you. Fabrizio is a menace.”
“Agreed. He almost certainly has a plan to weasel money out of us.”
“Yes. He finagled an invitation from Lady Isolde for a reason.”
“Clearly.”
“He needs to be stopped.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you agreeing with me?” Allie frowned. “It’s unnerving.”
Kendall paused, spinning to peer at her. “I’m . . . sorry?”
“You are disrupting our hateful equilibrium. I hardly recognize you like this . . . so . . . so rational and . . . understanding.”
She didn’t add that she saw shades of Tristan in their repartee. That this was precisely how she would have imagined an adult conversation with her brother to progress.
It was . . . unsettling.
“Never fear,” he snorted. “I am certain this accord is merely temporary.”
“It needn’t be.”
We could become Tristan and Allie again, she thought.
Madonna,but she would give almost anything to have her brother back.
“Ah. So you’re willing to tame that shrewish tongue of yours?” he said sharply. “Agree to my plans for your future? Realize that I do know what is best for you?”
A less power-hungry man might have said those words as a joke, but not Kendall. He meant them as seriously as the first time he had said them.
So . . . a reconciliation was clearly not in the cards.
“Hardly. I rather hoped you would finally recognize that I understand my own mind and wishes for my future.”
“Charswood is a good man.”
“Yes, he is. But that does not automatically mean I will be happy as his wife.”
That I will feel as if I belong, she did not dare add.
Drat Ethan and his poet’s perception.
“Bah! We have had this conversationad nauseum. I am done with it.” Kendall turned for the door.
“Done withme, you mean?”
Her twin flinched, the slightest twitch of his shoulders.
“Charswood is here for you, and I expect you to dance attendance on him,” he said, tone chilly. “We have an agreement, after all.”
“There is the despotic brother I know only too well.” Allie pushed to her feet. “Lead the way, my gaoler.”
