She entered the parlor and there was something pinched to her expression, something dull and tired, but when she saw him, she smiled. He crossed to her and bent to kiss her, loving how her arms wound around his neck, how her lips parted on the softest, sweetest sigh.
“I didn’t expect you back until closer to supper,” he breathed when their lips parted, even though she stayed in his arms, looking up at him.
Now she did release him and paced away to pour herself a drink. She didn’t take tea, but got herself a glass of whisky. “I ended up crying off my meeting with my sisters,” she explained.
He tilted his head. “Oh? Why? I thought you were excited to snoop around Julia’s new abode and determine if you needed to put on armor when it came to her new protector.”
She pivoted and speared him with a glance. “I don’t recall telling you about the armor.”
“I guessed.” He smiled, but it fell. She did look truly troubled. “Are you well?”
“Yes. I just…oh, I’ll just tell you, I need to tell you.”
She seemed to be talking to herself. She motioned to the settee and they took their place there together. She downed half her whisky in a gulp and then set the glass aside. Now her full attention was on him.
He took her hands. “You’re starting to frighten me. What do you need to tell me that makes you so pale?”
“I bumped into Simone Stanhope at my dressmaker’s shop,” she began. “And she told me…she told me that Southwater and your wife were turned away, very publicly, from an assembly and they had an argument afterward, right in the street.”
He felt his eyes widen at that unexpected news and the wave of righteous triumph that rolled through him. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Christ, they must have both been humiliated. What a farce.”
She didn’t respond, but stared at her drink. His laughter faded and he thought of Honora’s unexpected approach to him at his solicitor’s. “That’swhy she wants to talk to me,” he murmured.
Evelina did lift her gaze then. “What? Who wants to talk to you? Your wife?”
He flinched. “She won’t be my wife in a fortnight, according to the solicitor. But yes. She sent her sister as an emissary and I’ve agreed to see Florence tomorrow.”
Evelina’s expression went entirely blank at that statement. An erasing that he realized was something she rarely did with him. “I see,” she said softly. “And you think it has something to do with this new societal rejection?”
“I think the timing is suspect, yes,” he said, and leaned back on the settee, draping his arm along the back. “You must have felt a thrill hearing the news, knowing the two of them are sitting in their misery.”
She was very quiet for what felt like a lifetime and then she met his gaze. “No,” she said quietly but firmly.
He wrinkled his brow. “No? Truly?”
She shook her head. “Simone said those words and I waited for that feeling, but there was nothing. I didn’t care if they were hurt or happy. And I realized I had no further interest in causing them discomfort. I just felt…I’m tired, Vaughn.”
He shifted. “If you’d like we could retire early.”
“Not physically tired.” She got up and paced away from him and he felt every inch of that distance like it was a mile. “I’m tired of staying angry. I’m tired of tailoring my life and our time together toward how it will play to them. I just want to let it go.”
He followed her to his feet as a flash of pure, powerful panic accosted him. “What does that mean?”
“You know what I mean!” Her voice elevated slightly and her fists tightened at her sides. “Following them, making sure they see us, doing whatever we can to…to tweak them. I can’t do that anymore.”
He tried desperately to get enough breath in his lungs as this statement crashed through him. He was shaking and he realized it wasn’t because he wanted to continue to harm Southwater and Florence anymore. It was because his arrangement with Evelina had been built entirely on that. If she ended that, she ended this.
“So what does that mean for us?” he asked, wishing his voice didn’t shake like his hands. “Do you not want to be with me anymore?”
The tears in her eyes were obvious for a brief moment before she blinked them away. “Am I with you, Vaughn?”
He said nothing. He couldn’t. That question had erased his ability to speak. To think. To do anything but spiral into all the answers, the good and the bad. The lies and the truths that had been built in such a short, but intense time.
“I see,” he said at last, trying to overcome the sense of loss that he shouldn’t feel with this woman. Equally unable to cross the gulf that now seemed to stretch between them. Was that even possible given what they’d built this attachment on?
She shook her head and finished her whisky. “I think I ought to go. I think you want me to. Or need me to.”
Every fiber in Vaughn’s being screamed at him to stop her. To ask her to stay. To tell her…God, what would he tell her? He couldn’t even sort out the cacophony in this own head, let alone put words to it that would make any sense.
