A silence hung between them. She opened her mouth to speak but stopped herself, the words refusing to form.
It was awkward, but Nicholas didn’t seem inclined to fill the silence. Instead, he reached for his cup, unbothered.
There it was again—that carefully crafted nonchalance. But Violet couldn’t shake the thought that it might be yet another layer of armor, something he wielded to shield himself, just as he had admitted to her before.
When he finally broke the silence, his voice was casual. As though they had just been discussing the weather before.
“Well, the ball is over,” he noted. “What do you plan on doing with your time now, Violet?”
The abrupt change in topic startled her.
“I—” She cleared her throat, gathering herself. “I’ve decided to go horseback riding today.”
“Horseback riding?”
“It will give me something to do,” she replied, perhaps too quickly.
Her fingers toyed with the edge of her napkin. The truth was, without the ball preparations to keep her mind occupied, her thoughts had been drifting already. If she didn’t find a distraction, she feared she’d spend far too much time thinking about Nicholas.
“Well, then,” he smirked, “I wish you good luck. Do try not to fall.”
Violet’s brows knit together at his teasing tone, but she didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she offered him a polite smile. “Thank you. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”
As he stood and left the room, Violet remained seated, her thoughts swirling.
The more she got to know him, the more confused she felt. His sudden shifts left her questioning everything she thought she understood about him.
How can one person be so infuriatingly guarded yet so disarmingly candid in the same breath?
One moment, he was challenging her, prodding at her with pointed questions; the next, he was shutting down entirely, as if nothing they’d discussed held any weight at all.
He was impossible; that’s what he was.
She wondered just how long it would take for her to figure him out.
Nicholas sat at his desk. As usual, he was too distracted to get any real work done.
Violet’s words from breakfast lingered in his mind, stubborn and unyielding. He hated to admit it, but he had thought about ridiculous notions of true love more often than he would have liked.
It was stuck, like a thorn in his mind.
Someone who feels things deeply and experiences things deeply.
He was a man of practicality, of reason. Feeling things deeply had never been part of the equation for him. And yet, when she had said those words, it had stirred something in him.
The truth of it was painfully clear—Violet was the opposite of him. Open, hopeful, yearning for a world filled with dreams and ideals. And he? He was a man who had long ago learned to suppress, to defer, to survive.
Funny that they had been thrown together like this, then. Fate was a strange thing.
But their differences were precisely why he needed to put an end to whatever strange dynamic was forming between them.
He could not be the Prince Charming that he knew she still yearned for. His own limitations that gnawed at him. She deserved someone who could meet her where she was, someone who could give her what she dreamed of.Someone who could feel deeply.
Nicholas leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and running a hand through his hair.
“I would not even know where to start,” he admitted grimly to himself.
He wondered how she would have reacted if he told her how he had dealt with the news of his father’s passing.
