She gathered her nerve. And asked it.
“Why me?”
He froze. Something akin to panic flashed across his features. He looked caught out.
She felt a slightly unworthy little surge of satisfaction that catching him out was at all possible.
The breeze flipped the ends of his coat and ruffled his hair in the long silence that followed.
Perhaps he was deciding what answers to give her. Or whether to answer at all.
“Because...” He exhaled, and then she saw something like resolve settle over him. “Because I thought I had never in my life seen anything so lovely as you. It made me feel”—he made a short, pained sound, almost but not quite a laugh—“it made me feel unfamiliar to myself. Entirely new.”
She stared at him.
Spellbound by the gift of this information.
By what he was saying and what he wasn’t saying. By his subdued, thick voice, and the tension in his features, and by how his words had been traced faintly with resentment and uneasiness at the necessity to reveal any vulnerability at all to her.
For all these reasons, she was certain this was truth.
It didn’t mean any of it wasstilltrue.
For a shining moment in time, he’d basked in the glow of his illusions about her.
And then she’d shattered them.
She could not for the life of her think of what to say.
“And I wanted you in my bed more than I wanted my next breath,” he concluded simply.
And as she sucked in a short, sharp breath, he touched his hat to her and firmly closed the carriage door.
The driver snapped the ribbons and the carriage lurched away.
For the rest of the afternoon, every breath Alexandra drew felt just a little hotter than usual. As ifI wanted you in my bed more than I wanted my next breathhad permanently raised her temperature.
She had asked the question, and had somehow failed to anticipate that she might not know what to do with the answer once she heard it.
One part of his answer nearly cracked her heart with its painful beauty, because in it she heard echoes of that battered, unwanted, tender boy who had still dared to admire, to aspire to, something lovely. Who had been laughed at when he’d dared to reveal his feelings.
The other scared her and thrilled her in a way that made her feel, as he’d said, unfamiliar to herself.
Both infuriated her.
As if she’d been handed the pieces of something impossibly beautiful that had been broken long ago.
But he’d asked her:Do you still love him?
She found she hadn’t the nerve yet to examine why he wanted to know that, in particular.
As promised, Mr. Lawler had sent over documents: copies of the deed of transfer, a detailed description of the property, documents outlining theirfinancial arrangement—he was indeed settling a significant sum upon her—and helpful lists of names of persons and businesses: the bank and banker upon whom she could call, local merchants and craftsman and neighbors and the like, along with letters of introduction from the colonel, now the Earl of Montcroix.
He’d been absolutely thorough and efficient when he set out to banish her.
She breathed shallowly, and tipped her forehead in her hands for a moment and imagined Magnus silentlyburningfor her during that house party, and disguising it so well with his intimidatingly controlled, dignified facade. He had simply made his plans.He thinks you have developed a rapport, and that you will be a credit to him, was what her father had told her, when he’d informed her of Brightwall’s extraordinary offer of marriage.And I want you to accept him. They both knew she would.
But perhaps shehadsensed the intensity of Brightwall’s regard. She simply hadn’t known what to call it. If she’d known the whole truth of how he’d felt, would she have shied away from it, and from him?
