Chapter Thirty-Five
Bea had never realized how loud her own heartbeat was.It filled her ears as she stood alone in her bedchamber, hands braced on the edge of her writing desk, staring down at a blank sheet of paper.
Her fingers shook.Hours had passed since Nicholas had left her rooms.He had closed the door with agonizing gentleness, as if he feared she might break even further if he let it slam.
She could still hear the faint click of the latch.
She had cried until her throat burned, and her head ached.Quiet tears, furious tears, exhausted tears.But eventually the storm had given out, leaving behind only a hollow, aching quiet.
She had hurt him.Deeply.
Worse, she had believed he would betray her.
That knowledge curled inside her like a stain she couldn’t scrub away…ugly and shameful.
She had expected Nicholas to be like every other man of her station, self-interested, calculating, prepared to sacrifice anything and anyone in the name of advancement.
She had assumed he was a perfect expression of the political world she despised.
But he wasn’t.
He never had been.
And she had smugly refused to believe—to see—anything different.She’d been blinded by her own assumptions.
She sat down in her chair slowly, bracing herself as though her knees might give out.She opened the box where she kept her drawings, hidden from others’ prying eyes.Her gaze drifted to the scattered pamphlets and sketches—old plates she’d carved months ago, earlier drafts, discarded drawings.Her hands brushed over them lightly, almost tenderly.
Every one of them had been a blow.To a cause.To a man.Tohim.
Whenever she had sketched Nicholas as a bumbling aristocrat, she’d told herself she was doing her duty.She was skewering a system, a party, a position.
But she’d also been skeweringhim.
Now she remembered, with startling clarity, the look on his face in her sitting room tonight.It hadn’t been anger.Nor outrage.
It had been hurt.
Real, honest hurt.
Not only because she’d lied.But because she’d believed—truly believed—that he might turn on her.
She pressed her hands to her eyes.“You fool,” she whispered to herself.“You utter, absolute fool.”
Slowly, painfully, the truth formed inside her like dawn breaking over the horizon.She had always prided herself on seeing the world clearly.Seeing hypocrisy, arrogance, cruelty, and cutting it down with a single stroke of her quill.
But when it came to Nicholas…
She had been blind.
Blind to his compassion.Blind to his restraint.Blind to his decency.Blind to the way he looked at her—really looked at her—as if she were something rare and extraordinary.
She had been so busy protecting her heart from men who wouldn’t value her that she had locked it against the one man who would.
A sob rose in her throat, but she swallowed it down.
No more tears.
What was needed now—what Nicholas had always been brave enough to show and she had always hidden behind ink—was courage.
