“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said at last.
She stumbled and he reached out, catching her elbow to hold her steady. She jolted at the contact of his hand on her and jerked away, staggering back as she stared at him with wide eyes and shaking hands.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
“What do you mean, don’t? Are you saying you deny that since you confessed the truth about your husband’s death to me you’ve been staying away? That you didn’t hide in your room for luncheon, supper and breakfast? That you weren’t in the library trying to avoid bumping into me?”
She shook her head, still staring at him as she backed up another long step.
He let out a long sigh. “Damn it, Felicity, I only wish to talk to you.”
She held up a hand. “Don’t,” she repeated again.
But he couldn’t stop as she wanted him to do. Because of his duty to help her, but for more reasons than just that. He had grown up next to this woman. He had called her a friend—he had secretly called her more. He missed her quick smile and wit, he missed the way she used to tease him and connect with him. He missedher.
He didn’t want to spend however much time he had with her having her rush out of rooms whenever he entered and fake headaches to avoid breaking bread with him.
“Felicity,” he said, gentling his tone.
She caught her breath and he saw tears rush to her eyes. Ones she blinked away with an almost violent fervor, like she didn’t want him to see them. Like she couldn’t show him even the slightest bit of vulnerability.
And in that moment, Asher hated the man who had hurt her more than he had ever hated another person.
“Don’t,” she said on a broken gasp. “I’ve said enough, Asher. I’ve told you the worst, just let me be.”
The way she shook when she said that, the expression on her face, all of it cut Asher down to the bone. Her entire existence had been boiled down to one horrible night and the consequences she had been running from ever since. Now that the secret was out, it was all she talked about, all she expected anyone to care about.
It was all she was, or all she remembered she was. When the truth was so much broader and more beautiful and complicated.
He took a steadying breath and one calculated step toward her. “I don’t want to talk to you about that night, Felicity.”
Her breath slowed slightly and she cocked her head like she didn’t understand. “N-no?”
“No. As you’ve said, you’ve told me enough and I don’t judge you for anything that happened. It is a closed case, as far as I’m concerned, and the only reason you and I will ever discuss it again is to find this book or ifyouwish to broach the subject.”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh.”
He took another step toward her and a breeze stirred the trees around them and sent a whiff of vanilla to his nostrils. Her scent. God, that brought him home again, as much as anything else ever had. When had he first noticed her hair smelled like vanilla? When she was sixteen? Seventeen? Old enough to catch his eye. To make him want things he couldn’t have.
Like he did now.
“I brought you out here because I want to talk aboutus.”
Any softening that had come into her face fled at last and her expression twisted with even more pain than when she thought he wanted to talk about the night she killed her husband. She stared at him, eyes wide and wild.
“Us?” she repeated, dragging out the word, emphasizing it.
He nodded. “Yes, us.”
“What us, Asher?” she said, her voice cracking. “The us when we were children? The us when you kissed me that night on the terrace? The us when you walked away without even looking back?”
He flinched at the accusation. “You know it never could have worked. I kissed you that night and I shouldn’t have. I crossed a line that a servant…or a servant’s son…shouldnevercross.”
“And you strolled off to your education and your future without so much as a thought for me,” Felicity said. “Bully for you. So noble.”
“You had a future laid out for you,” he argued, and immediately wished he could take it back when she turned her head like she’d been slapped. Now that he knew exactly what that future had entailed, he knew it was the wrong thing to say.
“My future,” she repeated, her voice soft and dangerously calm. “Yes, I suppose I did. My mother wanted me to marry a man with a title and with money. But that isn’t why I married Barbridge. Do you want to knowwhyI married him?”
