“What are you doing?” she hisses as he marches her outside and into the cool night air.
“You and Miss Demeroven are going into the gardens and you’re going to have whatever this is out. We’ll distract Montson if he shows back up. It’s dark, no one will notice, and I’m frankly sick of you either being drunk or depressed.”
Gwen gapes up at him as he hauls her to the mouth of the hedge maze, more expansive and grander than the Harringtons’. The very sight of it sends shivers down her spine with memories of the last time she and Beth—she can’t do this.
“You can let go,” she hears.
She turns and finds Bobby looking awfully sheepish while Beth shakes out her arm. “Sorry,” Bobby mumbles.
“In, both of you,” Albie directs, waiting with his arm outstretched toward the high green walls. “Come back when you can be civil.”
“I can’t,” Beth says, looking a bit pale.
“We’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re in the lavatory, and then with Meredith. No one will know,” Albie insists.
“And if I won’t?” Beth challenges.
“Yeah,” Gwen adds. “Suppose we all just stand here until Lord Ashmond spots us, what then, Albie?”
She means it as a taunt to her cousin, to highlight the futility of his ruse, but Beth groans and strides straight into the hedge maze. Albie grins and gestures for Gwen to follow. That wasn’t the outcome she wanted.
Albie raises an eyebrow and Gwen gives her own frustrated sigh, stalking after Beth. Who is she kidding—of course this is what she wanted. She’s just not sure what to do with the opportunity now that everything’s so horribly broken.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Beth
Beth wends through the hedgerows, stomping a bit and listening to Gwen shuffle along behind her. She’s not ready to face her yet and so keeps winding them deeper into the labyrinth. Lord Montson abandoned her, and Gwen was goading her, and she’s trussed up and hot and tired and she just wants to keep storming away until she fades into these stupid hedges forever.
“Beth, Jesus, stop.”
She whips around, startled by Gwen’s hoarse whisper, and finds the other woman only feet away. She’s slightly sweaty and a little disheveled by now, but utterly, wrenchingly gorgeous. Her blond hair has fallen in whisps around her face with the rest of it piled up in a twisted braid on her head. Her collarbones catch the moonlight above them and her eyes seem bigger and darker here, alone in the hedges.
She’s so beautiful, and so wonderful, and there just in front of her, and Beth can’t have her. The frustration makes her itch to punch something. “No champagne for the hedges?”
She feels vicious, like if she jabs Gwen hard enough maybe she can pull her down into her pit of despair. Because while Beth’s been miserable and alone, it’s looked like Gwen’s beenhaving a marvelous time being “ill” with drink, cavorting with her cousins and father, one big happy family.
“I’m refraining,” Gwen says tightly. “I’m surprised you let Albie force you in here. You must have people to talk to, invitations to give out, flowers to pick.”
“Well we can’t all gamble and drink our feelings away. Some of us have responsibilities.”
“Yes, like condemning decades of women to unhappy marriages. Can’t let that one go by.”
“Don’t talk politics now,” Beth says quickly. “I’m sick of it. It’s all they talk about.”
“You weren’t sick of it in the ballroom,” Gwen counters. “More than happy to take Montson’s side now, aren’t you?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” Beth exclaims, her voice rising above their heated whisper. “If it’s not talk of the wedding, it’s talk of that stupid act. You get to drink and run wild, and I’m trapped with them all the time.”
“I haven’t been running wild,” Gwen argues.
“You’ve been having a gay old time forgetting about me, and I’m trapped in hell,” Beth spits back.
“You think I’m having fun, watching you parade around with Montson? You think this isn’t ripping me apart? You left me, like yesterday’s trash,” Gwen says, stepping closer, her face dark and tight. “You threw me away, threw my father away, and you want to judge how we’re coping while you’re the talk of the ton?”
“I didn’t throw you away,” Beth says quickly, the fight sapped out of her now that she’s this close to Gwen. Now that she can see the tears running down her lover’s face. Now that she can see she’s lost weight, can see the bags beneath her eyes.
“You get this big life, with the pride of the ton. Luxury and happiness. And I’m stuck watching you have it while everyone else around me goes off to their stupid happy endings. And I’m just standing there with no one. You don’t think it’s killing me?”
