“Such a relationship between you both is the height of impropriety. You are an unmarried female, and he is a rakehell of the worst order.”
“He wept when he told me about Spy,” Verity said. “I can assure you that he wasn’t wooing me. He simply sought solace from someone who has experienced a great deal of loss herself.”
“You told him about Lord Leopold?” he asked, surprised.
“Of course I did. He wondered why I was weeping at Sybil’s ball, if you will recall.”
“He ought not to have concerned himself with you.”
“Cease your bluster, brother, and tell me what is weighing upon you this evening.” She gave him an arch look. “Because we both know that it has nothing to do with the Duke of Kingham and his dog and me.”
She was right, curse her.
Partially right.
The idea of his sister being friends with Kingham was sitting as well as a turned fish course in his stomach. But the real source of his frustrated ire was the woman he had married.
The woman he loved.
The woman who stubbornly continued to love someone else.
So much so that she still fretted over that man’s welfare and begged him to offer the bastard a better situation than the one he currently had at Eastlake Hall.
“Well?” Verity prodded. “Have you nothing to say?”
Where to begin?
He finished his whisky and contemplated pouring another. “She’s still in love with him,” he bit out at last.
“Sybil?”
“Yes.” Everett exhaled a heavy sigh and rose, returning to the bottle to refill his tumbler. “Who else?”
“Have you asked her, then?”
He heard the pity in Verity’s voice, and it made him want to throw his glass against the wall just to watch it shatter. In the end, he settled for stalking about to his chair, glass in hand, to drown himself in his sorrows.
“Of course I haven’t asked her,” he admitted. “I needn’t. Her feelings are more than apparent. This evening, she asked me to take him on as one of the domestics either here in London or at Riverdale Abbey.”
“She did?”
His sister’s obvious shock gratified him, but he was still damned furious about Sybil begging for a situation for her lover from him, as if her request were hardly of note.
“Yes, she did,” he bit out.
“And what did you tell her?”
He raked his free hand through his hair. “I told her no, naturally. I told her that she possessed an astonishing amount of cheek to make such a request of me, and that harboring such a person in our household would be an affront to our mothers and you.”
“You were correct in that, brother. I don’t know what Sybil could have been thinking, other than that perhaps her concern for the gentleman triumphed over her ordinary good sense.”
It was a very politic explanation. One he might have agreed with, had he not been utterly devastated at the realization that Sybil’s feelings hadn’t altered.
“I don’t know how I can forgive her for this,” he rasped, voice hoarse and raw. “The poets always write about unrequited love. Now I know why. It’s a bloody misery, Verity. One unlike anything I’ve ever known.”
“Oh, Everett,” she murmured, and that was all.
There was naught more to say, truly. They sat together in silence, drinking their whisky and trying their utmost to forget.
