“I didn’t,” he said pointedly, raising a brow.
“Of course you did. The door was open and the lamps were lit. You already had my whisky waiting for me.”
He had, damn her.
“Perhaps I merely wished for company. I certainly didn’t want to listen to your fanciful, womanish notions.”
“Love is womanish, is it?”
Love was stupidity.
Impossibility.
Love was the currency of fools, the poison and the antidote.
Everett cleared his throat. “Yes. It is.”
“And yet, you feel it,” Verity pressed. “You feel it in your heart. I see the way you look at her when you think no one else is watching. Don’t bother to deny it.”
He tossed back the remainder of his whisky. “What I feel doesn’t signify. You know that. She is in love with another.”
“But she isn’t married to him. She is married to you.”
“Love isn’t required for marriage.” He poured another measure of whisky into his glass, growing weary of this particular subject.
Needing to numb himself.
“Of course not, but when it is already there, why not let it grow? If you found a rosebush that you hadn’t planted growing wild in your garden, would you dig it out, or would you tend to it so that it could one day bloom?”
He raised his replenished glass toward Verity in mock salute. “I have a head gardener to fret over that sort of thing.”
His sister sighed, plainly cross with him. “It was an analogy, and you know it. You’re being deliberately obtuse.”
So he was. But all this love folderol made him deuced uncomfortable.
“Let us speak of something more pleasant, sister.”
“I cannot help but believe this is what has landed you in the trouble in which you currently find yourself mired.”
He sighed again. “Verity.”
“You don’t want to speak of it, I know. But have you tried talking with Sybil about any of this? Have you tried asking her if there would be room in her heart for another?”
“As there is room in your heart for more than Lord Leopold?” he snapped without thinking.
The moment he saw the raw desolation flashing across his sister’s face and the tears glistening in her eyes, he regretted his hasty words.
“Forgive me,” he entreated. “I didn’t mean to be so harsh.”
She waved a hand and summoned a smile—for his benefit, he supposed. “You were only speaking the truth. I can honestly tell you that no other gentleman has held a candle to Leo. My heart belongs to him. But if I were to find myself a married woman, I would do everything in my power to love my husband in return.”
His roiling emotions spilled over. “I don’t want her to love me out of pity. I want her to loveme. I want her to chooseme, and not out of duty or obligation or to escape her father’s wrath, but because she chooses me and me alone, damn it.”
“There is the emotion you’ve been hiding,” Verity said with a smile. “I knew it was there, somewhere.”
He growled and drank his whisky, nettled at her interference, even if he knew she had naught but good intentions.
“Oh, you needn’t look so vexed with me,” his sister said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I have a proposition for you. On our next trip to the Children’s Foundling Hospital, I shall gently and discreetly inquire with Sybil if there is room in her heart for another.”
