“Harper, don’t react like this.”
“I’ll be back in a moment.”
He was not back in a moment, and instead he tracked down Temperance instead.
“I need a word,” he said quietly.
“Of course. The Caldwell dinner is Thursday, I haven’t forgotten. What more needs to be said?”
“Not about the dinner.” He looked at her steadily. “A word in private. Five minutes, please.”
Temperance stood with her back to the wall and her arms at her sides and looked at him with the expression he had been trying to get behind for three days.
He had prepared for this.
He had known, for at least two days, that the conversation needed to happen, and he had thought about what he intended to say with the same methodical care he brought to everything that needed to be done properly. He knew where he had been wrong. He knew what he owed her.
And then he looked at her and all of the prepared sentences became temporarily unavailable.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
She said nothing. But something very slight shifted in her face.
“Alford,” he said. “I should not have put you in that position without knowing more about him. I was more interested in the outcome than in the process, and that was wrong. You deserve better than to be handed to the first willing man and expected to make the best of it. I’m sorry.”
“What did he say?” Temperance asked. “To you? After.”
Harper was quiet for a moment.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He looked at her. She looked back, and there was something in her expression now that was not the pleasant closed door, something more direct, more real, the face she used when she had decided that honesty was worth the exposure.
“He said you weren’t what he expected,” Harper said carefully. “That you were too… well, that you were not worth his time.”
Something moved through her expression and was gone.
“And you heard this?”
“On my way across the room to speak to you, and I turned around and told him not to approach you again.’
“You didn’t come and tell me,” she said.
“No, you were laughing with your friends. And I thought it could wait,” he said, which was not the full truth but was the part of it he could offer. “And I am telling you now.”
Temperance looked at him for a long moment.
“All right,” she said.
“All right,” he repeated.
“I accept the apology.” She said it simply. “And I will tell you, in future, when someone says something that merits your knowing. Rather than assuming you wouldn’t believe me, as I did before.”
“I would have believed you,” he said.
“You didn’t believe my mother,” she said, mildly.
