He laughed. “Is this how you see your husband?” Christ, he’d kill to hear that one word from her lips.
“You’re like a chameleon,” she murmured. “Ever changing depending on the company you keep.”
“It’s only your company I care about.”
She studied him. “Tell me, would that still have been the case if I had married someone else?”
Swift coldness spread through his body. “That didn’t happen.”
“No, but had you been a few hours, mere hours, later, you and I would never have reunited.”
“Annulment seems to be all the rage.”
She arched a brow.
“Just not for us.” Never them. That awful feeling returned again. He’d have to have a good conversation with her father when they met again.
Her lips curved upward, and Bishop was once again reminded how his mood could rise and fall just with her lips.
“Are you saying you’d have forced an annulment if I’d married some other man?”
Yes? Bishop had spent every moment since they met againnotthinking about what he’d have done had he been too late. If he had not entered the Lyon’s Den at that point in time. There wasn’t any useeither. It hadn’t happened. But since the moment that one venomous word,annulment, had dropped, his mind had spun.
It still raged with it.
“I’d have done my best to seduce you back to my side.” He meant it. God help him, he meant every blasted word. He didn’t care if that made him a bad man. Even now, if she slipped from his reach again, he wasn’t sure what he’d become. The thought alone hollowed him out. He wasn’t a poet or a saint, but he refused to lose her. Not after he’d found her. “What about you? Would you have come?”
“And caused another scandal?” She scoffed. “No.”
Minx.
“And if it could be done without a scandal?” Probably impossible.
“I’m not certain.” Her gaze dipped over him. “If there is no offense taken, there would be no harm done.”
“Then I’d have made the impossible possible.”
“It’s a moot point now.”
Moot indeed. Yet why did people persist in turning over such thoughts, unlived moments, paths never taken, words never spoken? Perhaps it was the mind’s way of steadying itself when the heart had gone to war. A man must at leastappearto be master of his thoughts, even when he could not master circumstance.
He knew it. Still, he was not immune to it.
“You are right.” Bishop dragged a hand over his face. “It feels like I’ve lost control over my whole life the moment I stepped foot back in London. It’s rather disconcerting.”
“I know how you feel,” she said softly. “I suppose that happens when one comes face to face with one’s past. We cannot outrun what we were, only choose differently at each point.”
“Then let’s choose better,” he murmured, curving his lips lightly.
One of her brows flicked upward. “Haven’t we done that already?”
“I don’t know.” He nudged her knee with his. “There are still some better decisions to be made.”
She yanked her legs to the side. “Hah, you rogue!”
“I accept that gladly,” Bishop said, leaning back. “I’d rather be your rogue than your saint. I’ve no other plans anyway.”
“Except to make up for your roguish behavior?”
