He knew that Hector feared pity most of all.
“If you think she pities you,” Ramsay said, shaking his head slowly, “then I fear that you are even further gone than I ever realized.”
By the time Clio returned home, she felt like an overused rag, worn out from the effort of feigning cheer when all she wanted to do was cry.
Her bedchamber wasn’t that far away. All she had to do was get there, and she could finally collapse into a pile of self-pity. It wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
Except, it was.
“Clio.”
Hector’s forbidding voice sounded like the falling of a magistrate’s hammer as he addressed her. She looked up, feeling wretched?—
Only to find that he looked completely wretched, too.
For a moment, she tried to parse his expression, then realized that she was so unbelievably weary of trying to parse his expression. He was a mystery to her, and she was wasting all her energy trying to unravel him. He didn’t want her to know him. If he did, he wouldn’t keep trying to push her away.
But he did. Again and again, he did.
“Good afternoon,” she said, adopting the practiced, polite voice that she’d learned from a thousand parties that she didn’t care about, each full of conversations that bored her. She knew how to fake being fine.
But he looked at her as though her politeness wounded him, somehow.
“Did you enjoy your picnic?” he asked, and his politeness was an act of violence, so perhaps she understood his position better than she’d thought.
She gave him a smile that felt as brittle as spun glass.
“Indeed. Phoebe and Aaron told me that they are expecting a child, which is wonderful news.”
Her tone sounded flat, false, as though somehow shedidn’tfind this news wonderful. She did, though, of course she did—or she would, if she was currently capable of finding anything wonderful at all.
“That is splendid,” he said, and the words were right, but the tone was all wrong.
He finished coming down the front staircase. She finished taking off her bonnet and spencer. This put them close to one another—not purposefully close, but incidentally in proximity, like two ships that just happened to be approaching the harbor at the same time.
It would be so easy to reach for him. Clio’s hand twitched with desire. Because what if she did? What if she reached out and he reached out, too? What if it were as easy to bring back that budding warmth between them? What if she could be honest—things had always gotten better when they were honest, hadn’t they? What if, what if, what if?
She didn’t reach. He didn’t reach, either.
“Did you have a productive morning?” she asked, instead, adjusting the way her gloves sat on her wrists.
He watched her movements with careful eyes.
“Indeed,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Or, rather, it was somewhat less productive than I might have hoped.”
She waited for him to say more. He didn’t.
“A shame,” she offered.
“Indeed,” he said again.
The pause after this was … God, Clio had never felt more awkward in her life.
If the whole thing wasn’t so terrible, she might have laughed at the absurdity of it all. Only a few days prior, she had welcomed this man into her body. She’d moved against him, entirely without self-consciousness, and let herself be affected by passions alone. And then, even more intimate, she’d spoken to him of home—or her lack thereof. He’d told her about his parents. She had felt powerful and full of desire to protect him.
And now, this. It was as though they had somehow become different people entirely.
“Well,” she said, when she could not bear the silence for even a moment longer. “I had best tidy up after my outing.”
