“I do not want to marry you,” she said, quickly and without feeling.
He stared at her for a moment, his bright-blue eyes blinking once, and then he gave a hoarse chuckle, a little bark of laughter, that shook his body. “Well, thank you for that information, Harriet. I see you’ve still never learned how to properly communicate, despite all the languages you’ve mastered.”
She frowned. “You do not want to marry me, either,” she added, hoping that was what she had missed the first time.
It made him stare at her, incredulous. “I don’t?” he said, sarcasm dripping from every consonant.
“Well, I know I am not… I am not of the usual pedigree for the likes of a baron,” she reasoned. “And even if I were, I do not think you would have chosen me.”
He gave a humorless chuckle, tossing something glinting and small between his palms. “Do you know anything about this?”
She took a step forward to accept something he was holding out toward her, clenched in his fist. Into her palm fell a heavy, gold ring, clearly sized for a man. She drew it close to her face, inspecting the antique pallor of its finish and tilting it to the side.
“‘Mea Culpa,’” she read aloud, from the engraving inside the ring.
“Yes,” he agreed, tightening his jaw and straining his neck from side to side. “Somehow, I suspect it is.”
“What is this?” she asked, looking at him over the top of the ring. “Something Willa put in your envelope?”
He nodded, sighing and running a hand over his hair. “It was probably my uncle’s. That would make the most sense, wouldn’t it?”
She shook her head. “No. The baron did wear a ring, but it was silver. I don’t know whose this was, but it wasn’t his. He never wore gold. He used to jest that he was allergic to it and that was why the baroness handled the coin.”
He grimaced, his face pulling taut in the motion. “Is that so?” he managed, sounding a bit clogged as he pushed himself to his feet. “Maybe there is an explanation, then, if I read the damned letter it came wrapped in. I haven’t yet. Did you read yours?”
“My letter?” she repeated, realizing she had left it somewhere. Back in the parlor? “No. Not yet.”
He nodded, reaching out to accept the ring back from her. “I suppose it will just be more of the same, anyway. ‘Marry or else.’ Did you know she intended this?”
“Of course not,” Hattie answered, finally returning enough to herself to feel a spark of offense. “I hadn’t an inkling. But that is what I came to talk about.”
He twisted his lips, looking almost amused. “To express your disinterest?”
“To come to an accord,” she said, taking a step toward him, as though proximity might make her better understood. “Neither of us wish for this match and we both know it, but that only provides us with the basis to enter into it with a set of clear understandings. Isn’t that right?”
“‘Understandings’?” he repeated, his brows ticking up a notch as she drew closer to him, close enough that he had to tilt his head down to continue to meet her eye. “Such as?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, wrinkling her brow. “But it seems there ought to be some, doesn’t it? I have never been married before. I have observed many marriages; all of them appear very different. Why, there is a tribe in Siberia—”
“Please do not,” he said, holding his hand up between them, his palm almost to the tip of her nose. “God, you have not changed a single whit.”
She huffed, twisting her hands together in her skirt. “I do not know if you have!” she shot back, her voice gone shrill. “I barely remember you at all!”
That gave him pause—or seemed to, anyway.
His hand moved slowly away, almost like a coquette’s fan, revealing the faces hiding on either side of it. He looked skeptical, once she could see him again, those blue eyes narrowed. “That isn’t true,” he said.
“It is,” she replied, desperation making her hoarse. “Years are like miles, Elias. And you are nothing of the boy I do remember, what little of him does remain. You are a stranger to me. And I…”
“You arenota stranger to me, Harriet French,” he hissed back, drawing even closer somehow, until their toes collided, until the heat of his words brushed her cheeks as they were spoken in gusts of breath. “You areexactlythe same.”
She breathed out, exasperated as she tilted her face up to try to search for a reflection that made sense in those eyes of his. “I do not know what that means.”
“Barren fields,” he said, leaning down just an inch, just a breath closer as he lowered his voice. “Don’t you recall?”
“‘Barren fields,’” she repeated, baffled. But then there was something odd. A sting in her nose. A bleariness in her eyes. Salt in her throat. “No, I… I…”
“It’ll come to you,” he decided, taking a sudden step back and sending all that cool, static air in the room to swirl around her in place of where his body had been. “Think on it. You’re a smart woman.”
