Katherine put her face to her knees and wept harder. This desperate sound, it always came with a death. Maybe all the lies and secrets had finally been crucified.
Moving to her, I dropped to the ground. A night like this seven years ago, Katherine came home from her great adventure changed. We sat at this river, I put my arms about her. I repeated what I said then. “You’re good. Kitty, you’re good. A lady should try to leap for the moon and be allowed to fall and fail. But we are Wilcox women. We’re proud on this side of the Thames, as proud as the fashionable people on the other side.”
“I was a good wife. He saved me when I felt low and worthless.”
“And you loved Tavis? You loved him always?”
She didn’t answer. I guessed some secrets would never die.
“Well, you were proud he made you his viscountess, but you never forgot you’re a Wilcox. A proud Wilcox. You ran the business when Papa got sickly. If we hadn’t let Tavis run it, it would still be thriving.”
“But I did. I ruined us again.”
“We helped. When Papa died, you felt it right to defer to Tavis. No one objected. In two years, Tavis ran a hundred-thousand-pound empire into the ground.”
A boat moaned somewhere close. It stirred the waters like flowing tears.
Katherine sobbed and so did I.
We’d lost so much. A new scandal could take away our last bit of dignity. This time it would be the death of Wilcox Coal. “No one will do business with laughingstocks or a company run by Blackamoor women if they feel their sons are endangered of being ensnared by a Wilcox sister.”
Her arms tightened about me. “Don’t cry, Georgina. The duke is right. Everything will work. You’ll see.”
She swiped at her face. This version of Katherine, her being open, telling me what she thought, couldn’t go away until I asked the question that had burned until the day Tavis died. “Why did you let your husband control Wilcox Coal? You said he’d be good for business. You talked us into it. Why take such risks for a man you didn’t love?”
My sister pulled away. “How dare you? I loved Tavis. It might not have been the things you read in novels or the fantasies that made you kiss a stranger, but it was love. It wasn’t loud or crazy. It was calm. It was what I needed.”
“Needed after what? What happened on your grand adventure? You came back pregnant. What—”
“To the grave, Georgie. I can’t speak of it.” She started to breathe heavily.
I wrapped my arms about her again. “Keep your secrets, Katherine. I’m sorry that I’ve almost ruined us or that I reminded you of the worst time in your life. If Lord Mark Sebastian was another type of man, he could’ve hurt me. I realize how foolish I was.”
“You need to think. A gentleman won’t keep you safe because of a kiss.”
Honestly, safe wasn’t my first thought.
Shocking my sister was all I’d had in my head, but the second kiss with him was different. The way his hands felt on my back, the way he touched my hips wasn’t safe at all.
“You’re impulsive, Georgina. And your folly will affect Scarlett. She’s twenty. She might want to marry. No one will want a Wilcox if we are a scandalized family.”
“I was impulsive. But, Katherine, we have to see the duke’s plan through.”
She nodded. “I’ll sell the business if I must. I need to give you and Scarlett your inheritance. If I can get the business very profitable, I’ll be able to pay Tavis’s debts—”
“He’s gone. He can’t keep making us poor.”
Katherine gulped air, that sulphury smell of industry. “I must get dowries and husbands for you and Scarlett. I’ll not let the Duke of Torrance spend his money on us, not anymore.”
To tell Katherine that she didn’t know what I or our sister wanted would make this woman weep again. She’d cried too much. “Let’s focus on my faux engagement.”
“If no one writes about us, Georgie, we might be all right. No scandal. Then we won’t need the duke.”
“Well, Lydia has set her hopes on marrying him. In twenty years, if he’s still single, I doubt he’ll require a dowry.”
I said this as a joke. The man clearly loved Lydia, all of us, like sisters, but the flicker in Katherine’s eyes spoke of hate, like an angry bear wanting to tear at someone taunting her cub.
Then her jaw eased. “I know the Duke of Torrance waits for no one.”
