"I saw him. His shoulders were shaking. He couldn't even look at me, he was laughing so hard." Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. "I've never been so humiliated in my life."
"Harry, I'm sure there's been some misunderstanding. Sebastian would never…"
"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't defend him. I know what I saw."
"But…"
"He's cruel, Richard. Your friend is cruel, and I never want to speak to him again." She wiped her face with the back of herhand, a gesture their mother would have deplored. "I never want to see him again."
Richard was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. "I'll talk to him. I'm sure he didn't mean…"
"I don't care what he meant. I care what he did." Harriet stood, smoothing her skirts with hands that still trembled. "I'm going inside. I'm going to tell Mama I have a headache and I'm going to bed. And tomorrow, I'm going to pretend this evening never happened."
"Harry…"
"Please, Richard. Just... let me go."
He let her go. He always let her go when she asked, even when he disagreed, even when he thought she was wrong. It was one of the things she loved most about him, his willingness to respect her choices, even the foolish ones.
She didn't know, as she walked back to the house, that she was making the most foolish choice of her life. She didn't know that the story she had told herself, Sebastian Vane, laughing at her poetry, mocking her most vulnerable self, was a lie built on a moment's misinterpretation.
She would believe that lie for seven years.
She would let it harden into hatred, let it calcify around her heart like armour,layer upon layer of resentment, each perceived slight adding to the weight of it, until she could no longer remember what it had felt like to stand in that alcove and talk to him as an equal. She would see him at balls and dinners and house parties, and she would look through him as though he were made of glass. She would hear his name and feel her stomach clench with anger.
And when years later her brother Richard died, thrown from his horse on a grey autumn morning, gone before anyone could reach him, she would blame Sebastian Vane for that too. Notbecause it made sense. Not because he had any hand in it. But because grief needed a target, and he was there, and it was easier than facing the truth: that some losses have no villain and that some pain has no cause…that sometimes the people we love simply leave us and there is no one to punish for it.
CHAPTER ONE
"I would sooner share accommodations with a rabid badger."
Lady Harriet Fordshire delivered this pronouncement with the sort of crystalline clarity that had, over five London seasons, earned her a reputation as either refreshingly forthright or terrifyingly blunt, depending entirely upon whether one was the target of her observations.
The innkeeper, a weathered fellow whose face suggested he had witnessed every variety of human folly and found none of it particularly surprising, merely blinked. "I'm afraid, my lady, that we've no badgers available. Rabid or otherwise."
"A pity." Harriet shook the rain from her travelling cloak with rather more force than strictly necessary. "For I suspect a badger would prove more agreeable company than Lord Vane."
Behind her, she heard a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughs could be rendered in ice and served with a garnish of barely concealed contempt.
"Your confidence in my social graces is, as ever, overwhelming." Lord Sebastian Vane's voice carried that particular quality of aristocratic boredom that suggested nothing in the world could possibly be interesting enough to warrant genuine emotion. "Though I confess some curiosity as to what the badger has done to deserve such an unflattering comparison."
Harriet turned, which required rather more effort than she would have wished to admit. The journey from London had been rather odious, the roads a testament to England's apparent belief that travel should be as punishing as possible, and her every bone ached with the particular misery of twelve hours spent in a jolting carriage. That she should arrive at thismiddling establishment only to findhimalready installed in what was apparently theonly remaining roomseemed less like coincidence and more like evidence that the universe harboured a personal grudge.
"Lord Vane," she said, investing his name with approximately the same enthusiasm one might reserve for announcing an outbreak of plague. "What an absolutely unexpected displeasure."
Sebastian Vane stood near the fire, because of course he did, he had probably commandeered the warmest spot in the establishment the moment he'd arrived, being the insufferable man that he was. The flames cast flickering light across features that Harriet had always thought were wasted on such a disagreeable personality: dark hair that curled slightly at his collar despite what she suspected were vigorous attempts to tame it, grey eyes the colour of winter storms, and a jawline that belonged on a classical sculpture rather than on a man who had once laughed at her poetry.
Not that she noticed such things. She simply possessed excellent powers of observation, which she employed equally upon friends and enemies alike. That Sebastian Vane happened to fall into the latter category was entirely incidental to her assessment of his physical attributes.
Seven years, and she could still hear that laugh. Could still feel the hot flush of humiliation climbing her cheeks as she'd stood in her mother's drawing room, seventeen and foolish and so terribly proud of the verses she'd composed, only to watch Richard's closest friend dissolve into barely suppressed mirth.
He had apologised, of course. Eventually. After Richard had elbowed him sharply in the ribs and hissed something that Harriet hadn't quite caught but which had made Sebastian's face go peculiarly blank. But what good was an apology extracted under duress? The damage had been done. She had locked awayher poetry and her softer feelings alike, and she had never quite forgiven him for being the one to teach her that vulnerability was dangerous.
"Unexpected?" Sebastian raised one dark brow, a skill Harriet had never mastered and secretly envied. "I believe we are both travelling to Fordshire Park. The roads being what they are, it would seem ratherexpectedthat we might find ourselves seeking shelter at the same establishment."
"The displeasure, my lord, remains unexpected. I had hoped,foolishly, it now appears,that the storm might have swept you into a ditch somewhere between here and London."
The innkeeper made a small choking sound. Harriet ignored him.
