He put the letter in his tailcoat pocket. He made his voice as natural as he could.
“She’s jilting me, is that it?”
Lady Lutton’s tone was sympathetic but firm. “I am party to the contents of the letter. You will see the lady wishes to have no further intercourse with you and is, in fact, under the impression there is no understanding between the two of you and therefore, there is no jilting one way or another. And if there is, I do not wish to hear of it, Lord Burchester. I have already strained my sense of duty by not informing her brother of this and by giving you the letter. But Lady Caroline needs a friend, and I have to be that for her right now.”
Phineas blinked several times.I could be her friend.
“Yes, Lady Lutton. I’ll go tell my coachman to get the carriage ready.”
He arranged for the carriage as quickly as he could and put Lady Lutton into it, bidding her goodnight and thanking her for coming to the dinner and delivering the letter. It was on the tip of his tongue to thank her also for being a friend to his Caro, but he stopped himself.
She wasn’thisCaro. She had never been his. He had tricked himself into thinking she was because he had wanted it to be so.
He went to his dressing room and read the cold, impersonal letter from the woman he had hoped to make his wife.
After he had read the letter five times, he folded it carefully and put it in the cedar box which held a silk nightdress trimmed in Brussels lace.
Yes, he could have been her friend. He could have been, if he hadn’t been chasing his cock. He could have been, if he hadn’t been begging for kisses in her brother’s drawing room, grabbing her around her waist at Hatchards.
He could have gone slowly, accustomed her to the idea of his visiting the town house, dropping in to see her brother, staying for tea and a chat, coming to dinners, joining her and her brother in her brother’s box at the theater. He could have played with her dog. He could have shown her another side of himself, not just the one that lay under the fall of his breeches. He could have gotten her to talk to him. Instead, he had been thrilled to fuck her in a public place.
She had wanted him to be bad because that’s all he was good for.
He held still. When Dashwood came in, Phineas sent him away, saying he would see him in the morning.
He had a lot of feelings standing in his dressing room. Feelings he had no name for, feelings he wasn’t used to.
Yes, there was a bruised vanity. But he was used to that. Wasn’t that why he was a clown at times? So he could make fun of himself before someone else did?
It was more than a simple rejection. Far more wounding and grim than that.
It was emptiness and yearning. It was pain and loss. How could he feel loss when she had never really been his? But in his head, all those months, she had been.
He had put the cart before the horse, his cock before his heart, and he had only himself to blame.
Sixteen
Phineas paced the floor of the library of the Sudbury town house as he waited for Edmund to come home. Over the last week, Lady Starling had pestered Phineas multiple times to arrange for Edmund to come back to the theater without his presumed mistress. The plan was to go to Antonio’s for some fencing, take Edmund to the club afterwards, and then persuade him to go to the theater.
Lady Starling must be scheming to prance her uninvited way into the Sudbury box and seduce the marquess as a play unfolded. Knowing Horatia, that wouldn’t be all that would unfold in the Sudbury box tonight.
Phineas sat down heavily in a wing chair. He was still bowing to Lady Starling’s extortion even though Caro had roundly rejected him with her letter only days after their passion in the bookshop. It was just like when he had approached her in her bedchamber at Sudbury Manor all over again. To have such an impulsive and heated physical interaction and then to turn him away with a chilling frost.
But he still couldn’t allow her brother to know what he had done with her. He couldn’t lose Edmund along with Caro. The hole in his life would become a vast, gaping abyss.
And Edmund was his thread of connection to the woman he still wanted. And someday, somehow, Phineas might tug on that thread and pull her towards him without snapping the filament.
He had no idea how he could do it. But he couldn’t help but be hopeful. The alternative—the darkness that had consumed him for so many days after his dinner party—was too bleak to consider.
Damn the man. Edmund was never late. And why had Phineas agreed to meet him here? They could have met at the club instead. That would have been preferable.
Because Phineas was acutely aware that somewhere above his head on an upper floor, Lady Caroline Haskett was breathing. Thinking. Perhaps undressing. Removing her stays, running her own hands over her chemise-covered breasts—hell, if he was going to fantasize, why make them chemise-covered? Make them bare, with her small, sweetly-sensitive nipples exposed, just as they had been when she had gotten into his bed months ago.
This was maddening. He must occupy himself and quash any thoughts of Caro and her bosom. He stood up and pulled his breeches away from his mild engorgement.
He was in a library, he would look at a book. He would have preferred a newspaper as books had never really held his attention, but he was desperate for a distraction right now.
He went to the shelves and took down the first book his hand touched. A smallish one. Those tended to be novels, didn’t they? Or verse. Now, where were—?
