He'd said her name. Her name, not Miss Corinna, not the careful formality he used in public. Just Cori, quiet and direct, the way he’d said it that stolen morning in the garden at dawn. And then he hadn’t said anything else.
Goodness. She was a ninny.
She was probably reading too much into all of it. She had, after all, been reading into things since the Plumstead ball and it had not served her particularly well.
She looked at her hands in her lap.
She wasn’t going to ask. She was going to sit there and be perfectly composed and wait to see what happened next, which was the sensible thing, the reasonable thing, the thing Cara would absolutely advise her to do.
Cori managed to hold her tongue for approximately four minutes, until she couldn’t do so any longer. "Is she all right?"
Hannah had stopped trembling and was pointing at something in the sky, her earlier fright forgotten. James looked up and his eyes found Cori's.
Something moved in his face. There and gone before she could name it.
"She’s perfectly well," he said quietly. "She’s decided thunder is interesting rather than terrifying, which is an improvement."
“I’m glad,” Cori said.
“As am I.”
The rain was soft against the windows, and the breakfast carried on around them as though nothing of importance had happened.
"Cori," he said, then stopped again, the same way he’d stopped before.
She went very still because she was almost certain that whatever he was about to say mattered more than anything else that had been said all day.
Hannah tugged on his sleeve. “Lightning, Papa.”
James glanced down at his daughter.
Cori let go of the breath she’d been holding. The moment between them was gone, as though it had never happened at all.
James quietly rose, brushed a hand across Hannah's head, and walked from the hall without looking back. Not quickly, but deliberately. Cori watched him go, her heart twisting as she wondered if it was possible for her heart to actually break in two.
She sat there, dumfounded, completely uncertain what had even transpired. He’d come to her. He’d said her name. Twice.
Twice he’d started to say something and then stopped. Twice the world had intervened before he could tell her…something. Something that seemed of great importance.
But was it?
Or was it all just her imagination? She wanted him to tell her something important. She wanted to be important to him, but wanting those things would not make them true.
Chapter 9
James cursed himself for a fool as the sound of his boots clicking against the stone corridor echoed in his ears.
Damn.
Damn.
Damn.
What the devil was wrong with him? He rounded a corner but neither hastened his pace nor slowed his stride. Yet his inner turmoil continued. He was a fool and a goddamned coward.
That was the ugly truth of it.
She'd been just a few feet away, her eyes beckoning him to say whatever it was he'd meant to say, silently begging him to say something...
