Right now, it was anger.
“Youstopped me.”
More puzzle pieces began clicking into place.
“I didn’t demand twenty thousand pounds from your mother,” he said, stating a truth they both knew, but was key to an additional truth that had yet to be aired. “She offered it to me if I would leave, and I refused. But now I understandwhyshe offered it.Whyshe encouraged Stoke to offer for you.”
Artemis’s brow gathered with perplexity. This piece of the puzzle hadn’t yet clicked into place for her.
“She was going to pass off my child as my brother’s. If there had been a boy, her grandson would have been no less a personage than an earl.”
Artemis opened her mouth, as if to refute his words, then slowly closed it.There, within her eyes, he saw it—belief. She knew the duchess would want as much for her grandchild—and would be ruthless in the attainment of it.
Bran exhaled a long, steadying breath.
At last, the truth—all of it—was out, and he had no idea how to proceed in this uncharted territory. In some strange way, it put him and Artemis back where they’d begun—in a place where no lies existed between them.
Ten years on, however, that was a complicated space.
Artemis was the one to break the silence. “The thing about my mother,” she said. “She had what she saw as my best interests at heart. I’m her only daughter, and she loves me.”
“Artemis, love is many things and expressed in many ways, but not like that.” Though he saw very little of this was her fault, this needed to be said. “She denied us a future.”
Resistance sparked in her eyes. “You and I were young and inexperienced, Bran. Too young and too inexperienced. The verydistinct possibility exists that we would have married in haste and soured on one another once we got into the weeds of marriage.”
“Is that what she told you?”
Artemis held her silence.
“And you believed her?”
Still, she didn’t speak.
He huffed a humorless laugh. “And here you are, still that naïve young woman.”
She flinched.
From a certain angle, Bran supposed those words could be viewed as an insult. But that wasn’t how he’d spoken them. They weren’t hurled so much as voiced observation. In this way, he was able to view Artemis from a distance he’d never been able to achieve. “Perhaps the duchess was correct,” he found himself saying from this remove where he couldn’t feel so very much.
Even in the half-light of night, he could see Artemis had gone pale. “She was?”
“Perhaps what we felt wouldn’t have lasted.” And still he kept speaking. “After all, we aren’t now what we were then.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, he said, “Gwyneth and I are leaving Somerton at first light.”
Artemis shook her head adamantly. “Please don’t, Bran.”
But he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be swayed. “Artemis, you need time and …” Would that the world were different and he didn’t need to say, “Ineed time.”
“Haven’t we had enough of that?” Her voice skated on the edge of breaking.
The next words were the hardest to speak … “Apparently not.”
She held his gaze for three solid seconds, and his resolve wavered.
If he let her go now, for a second time, he might lose her for good.
But … too much yet remained to be worked out in his mind.
And in hers, too.
