Instead, he lowered himself onto the bench beside her, not close enough to touch, but close enough that he could smell the rosewater in her hair, could see the faint dusting of freckles across her nose that the sun had brought out. The groom had been dispatched to fetch a carriage; they were, for the moment, quite alone.
"You asked me earlier what had changed," he said slowly. "I told you nothing had. That was not... entirely true."
Vanessa went very still. "Oh?"
"Something has changed. I cannot tell you what, not yet, perhaps not ever,but something has shifted, and I find myself... unsettled."
"Unsettled by what?"
By you. By the knowledge of what you feel for me. By the impossibility of my situation.
"By circumstances beyond my control," he said. "By truths I was not meant to know."
Her breath caught. For a moment something flickered in her eyes. Fear, perhaps. Or recognition. Or some complicated mixture of both that he did not know how to interpret.
"What truths?"
He should not have said anything. He was walking too close to the edge, risking everything on words that revealed too much. But there was something about this moment, the quiet of the park around them, the intimacy of their shared solitude, the lingering electricity of their earlier contact that made him reckless.
"Merely that the world is more complicated than I had believed," he said, retreating into vagueness. "And that certain... certainties... have proven less certain than I thought."
"You are speaking in riddles."
"I know. Forgive me. I do not mean to be obscure." He turned to face her, struck again by her nearness, by the intelligence in her eyes, by everything about her that had fascinated him for six years. "May I ask you something?"
"You may ask. I cannot promise to answer."
"Do you ever feel that there are things you wish to say things that press against your lips, demanding utterance,but you cannot speak them? Because speaking them would changeeverything, and you are not certain the change would be for the better?"
Vanessa was silent for a long moment. Her hands were folded in her lap, her fingers twisting together in a gesture he had seen before, a nervous habit she had never quite managed to break. When she spoke, her voice was soft.
"Every day."
"Then you understand my predicament."
"Perhaps." She looked down at her hands, stilling their restless movement. "Or perhaps I simply have my own predicament, and recognise a fellow sufferer."
"What is your predicament?"
She laughed…a small, sad sound that seemed to catch in her throat. "That, Lord Montehood, I am not at liberty to say."
His own words, turned back upon him and he did indeed deserve that.
"Then we are both keeping secrets," he said.
"It would appear so."
"Is that not exhausting? Carrying the weight of unspoken things?"
"Dreadfully exhausting." She met his eyes, and there was something raw in her gaze, a vulnerability he had rarely seen from her. "But the alternative is worse."
"Is it?"
"You tell me. Would you have your secrets exposed? All the things you keep hidden, laid bare for the world to see?"
The letters flashed through his mind. Her secrets, already exposed…at least to him. The thought made him feel sick with guilt. He knew things about her that she had never meant anyone to know. He had read her private thoughts, her deepest yearnings and her most intimate confessions.
And she had no idea.
