“No wonder you were so drawn to my father. He was the very opposite of such a man.”
He nodded. “Yes. I’d known of Chilton over the years, been friendly with him. But after my mother’s death, he truly became one of my closest friends. One of my dearest confidantes. I cherished every moment with him.”
She touched his face. “I know he felt the same about you. I do recall when your mother died, of course. But how old were you?”
“Twenty-one.” He bent his head. “A man and yet I might as well have been a boy for all the good I did.”
She cupped his cheeks. “You couldn’t have changed the broken heart of a woman who was clearly troubled. Or the cold heart of a cruel man. But you did the next best thing, which was ensure that you didn’t lose Marianne. You two are clearly close,I saw that tonight as I watched from above as you interacted. You’re a good brother.”
He flinched. “Am I? Sometimes I don’t know. I became very protective after Mama’s death. After Marianne’s disastrous coming out afterward. I closed in the walls around her and told myself it was to make sure no harm came to her. But I think now that I did her no favors.”
“Why?” Esme asked.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t see what she truly needed thanks to the blinders of my fear for her well-being. I tried to keep her in a box of my control. When she escaped it, it led her to be a little reckless.” He shook his head. “I found her in a very compromising position with Ramsbury during the country party.”
Esme’s eyes went wide and then she smiled. “Good for Marianne.”
He coughed out a laugh at the unexpected response. “I suppose one could see it that way. It’s all led to her happiness in the end.”
“Then perhaps you needn’t beat yourself up about any further.”
He stared at their hands, their fingers folded together against the sheets. “I could have lost her.”
“But you didn’t. Whatever you tried to do, you accepted their love in the end. You celebrate it. You cannot be expected to be perfect, Phineas.”
He jerked his head up at her use of his full given name. At her suggestion that he didn’t have to be what he’d always been, the only way he knew to earn love. “I still could have been better. With her. With you.”
She let out her breath slowly. “I got upset with you tonight after you found me out, but I realize that it wasn’t fair. This situation is difficult for me. I was lucky enough to have a fatherwho loved me. One I could depend on and when he was ripped out from under me, I had to learn to only take care of myself. I wish I’d had a sibling like you are to Marianne, someone to protect me like you did her.”
He cupped her cheek and she leaned into his palm, her green eyes soft in the low firelight. “I’ll protect you.”
Those same eyes fluttered shut and her mouth set, making his heart sink. “I want to believe that,” she said. “To sink into it like a warm bath. But when this is over…I know I’ll only have me to depend on again. I can’t take the loss, so I must avoid ever feeling it.”
When this was over. She meant the investigation they were conducting into her cousin. But she also meant this thing between them. She was already halfway out his door, back to the life she’d been forced to choose. The life she didn’t believe could ever include him.
It stung like fire. But she had been pushed and forced and harmed for far too long for him to try to prod her now. If he wanted her to trust him, to believe him when he finally confessed that he loved her, he had to continue to earn that trust every moment he was with her.
He drew her in and kissed her gently. He wanted to wash her away on his desire, to connect with her the only way she ever truly let him. Instead, he lay down beside her, pulling her back to his chest and wrapping his arms around her to hold her. She let her breath out in a long, trembling sigh.
“I’m not giving up,” he said, his voice muffled against her hair. God, her hair smelled good. “Tonight Francis was on the edge of drunk and it led him to speak imprudently about your father and you. As enraging as that was to hear, it also encourages me to think that he could be driven to whatever the truth is if I ply him with enough alcohol to bring his guard downentirely. If I make him believe I’m an ally, or at least a potential person he could use for his own advancement.”
She turned her face slightly to look at him over her shoulder and he could see how much those words meant to her. How much shewantedto believe he would live up to them. “Thank you, Finn.”
He nuzzled her neck gently and she shivered. “Will you stay with me?”
She was silent for a moment and then she cuddled back more firmly against his body. “For a while. Just a little while.”
CHAPTER 18
Finn sat in his study three days later, staring at some of the arrangements for his sister’s wedding, but he hardly saw the words and numbers swimming on the page. Just as he had been since the ball, he was distracted. Esme took up too great a share of his mind for him to have any other main focus.
Things had shifted between them since he realized he was in love with her. Not only had that feeling grown with every moment he spent with her, but she had changed too. She came to him at night, they shared supper and long talks, and then they made love, over and over until he was weak from her.
But she never stayed for more than a few hours. And she never let him too close beyond her body. If he edged toward anyplace she felt he didn’t belong, she offered pleasant distraction, or she slipped away into the night, leaving him aching for her body and soul.
There was a light knock on the study door and he lifted his head as Bentley entered the room. “You have a missive, my lord.”
“About the wedding?” Finn asked. “They come fast and furious with the ceremony tomorrow. Put it with the pile, I intend to start going through all of it just now.”
